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It was a peculiar turn of Fortune’s wheel when, on Oct 23rd, 1955, Clint Eastwood’s Hollywood career was officially ended by Universal Studios. 11 U.S. Presidencies later it’s been 68 films as actor, of which he has directed 31. Eastwood (born May 31st 1930) had been unceremoniously dropped at the age of 25 from the Acting School of Hollywood’s limping Universal Studios. This was at a time when moviegoers were condemning the Hollywood Studio system to a fast and furious decline by watching their new televisions in the relative comfort and safety of their new suburban strongholds.
Eastwood returned to digging Los Angeles swimming pools while his more successful contemporaries- the likes of Russ Tamblyn, Ricky Nelson, James Dean, and Jeffrey Hunter - were making their rapid moves up the Hollywood feeding chain. Hollywood was quickly turning pop. Or so it seemed. The dubious lucky strike that was ‘Rawhide’ eventually came for a desperate Eastwood and his first wife Maggie in 1958/1959. The TV remake of Howard Hawks’ classic ‘Red River’ of 1948 was one of several indicators that quickly redefined Hollywood as the centre not of film but of video-based TV production. The second lucky roll of the dice was the inevitable decline of ‘Rawhide’ seven years later at a time when the TV Western was fast becoming colorized and domesticated (The Big Valley and Bonanza), or civilized (Gunsmoke). Dusty cowpokes in black and white were never to get to the end of their trail. Desperate times called for desperate measures: Eastwood’s requests to direct even cutaways were turned down and his strained forays into teenage pop can now be detected on YouTube. After long years rollin’ on ‘Rawhide’ he was eager therefore for any kind of break. But the awkward transition from the 1950s to the 1960s was a painful one for Hollywood and, especially after November 22nd 1963, the United States in general. Dean and Monroe were gone. Tamblyn and Nelson were fading. Hunter himself was killed in an aircraft accident. It could be argued that Eastwood’s eventual longevity in such a frail industry is an ironic result of having missed those early breaks in film for which he tried so hard and failed and yet which on the glossy surface he seemed so ideally suited. Because by 1967, Fortune had revealed her true hand. Eastwood had taken the career risk to Europe and had already completed the Leone Dollar trilogy which had made him the highest paid film actor in the world. The European escapade that began in 1964 with ‘Fistful of Dollars’ (his fee was $25,000) knowingly upturned several mainstream orthodoxies: the familiar codes and conventions of the Hollywood western genre were forever redefined, film financing & production became more complex (Japanese story sources, German finance, Italian direction, Spanish locations) and - more importantly - the blend of grim urgent violence and cool self-reflexive irony became the stylistically given. As for Eastwood himself: the classic Hollywood acting style for which he had been groomed and that drew upon the mold set by Gary Cooper now grimaced through facial hair growth, was cloaked in a floppy poncho, and graced Leone’s Widescreen format in Levi 501s. Coming as if from nowhere, the clean-cut 1950s Eastwood had coolly insinuated himself without a word into the rebellious counter culture of the 1960s and the producer’s gift of a sleek red Ferrari was already in his new Carmel garage as a result. However, while ‘Rawhide’ had bitten the dust, it was Eastwood’s plan to establish himself fully as a Hollywood fixture. But the Studios were still shaking, heading as they were towards the corporate takeovers of the 1970s and 1980s. Eastwood went the (apparent) independent route. His first U.S. film in which he played lead was ‘Hang em High’ in 1967, was produced by his own company Malpaso (‘wrong move’) and with Universal as distributer, the same studio that had fired him as a young trainee actor more than ten years earlier. Foreshadowing later creative moves, the Eastwood character advances from innocent working cowpoke to an efficient murderous vigilante. The continuity bridge from ‘Rawhide’ to big screen was thus a conscious strategy (to be soon ramified with ‘Coogan’s Bluff’). Ted Post, a former director on ‘Rawhide’, was hired by Eastwood to direct ‘Hang em High’ (he would later helm the first ‘Dirty Harry’ sequel ‘Magnum Force’). Other Malpaso regulars over the decades would include the casting agent Phyllis Huffman (from ‘Play Misty for Me’ to ‘Million Dollar Baby’); musician Lalo Schifrin (‘Coogan’s Bluff’, ‘The Beguiled’, ‘Dirty Harry’); editors Bruce Surtees and Joel Cox (‘The Enforcer' of 1976 to ‘Invictus’ of 2009); cinematographers Jack Green, Tom Sterne and not to mention props master Glenn Wright (from ‘Rawhide’ through to ‘Unforgiven’). By the mid-1970s the reliance by a staunch individualist on such a tight unit of willing collaborators became a wry motif that distinguished the languorous ‘The Outlaw Josey Wales’ - the 1976 film that Eastwood helmed after ousting Philip Kaufman from the director’s chair. Resultant bumps with the Director’s Guild aside, the band of trusted collaborations has allowed Eastwood to build on the hand-shake deal with Warner Bros that, since 1971, has made him the studio’s premiere triple A-list item. It is a relationship that belies the maverick persona that is ‘Eastwood’ and which no corporate marketing savvy could invent. It has allowed him the scope to widen the creative palette by balancing commercial ‘Harry’ sure-hits with the ‘personal’ projects such as ‘Bird’ (1988), ‘Honkytonk Man’ (1982) and his own very favorite, 'Bronco Billy' of 1980. In the meantime Eastwood the limited actor has been canny enough to allow Eastwood the versatile producer to side-step audience and critic expectations with unusually novel project choices but which remain within industry limitations: hence across the decades Malpaso would stroll its way through the gamut of Hollywood genres - Westerns ('High Plains Drifter', Pale Rider'), gangster ('City Heat'), Screwball Comedies ('Every Which Way But Loose'), war ('Kelly’s Heroes', 'Heartbreak Ridge', 'Letters Iwo Jima', 'Firefox'), crime caper ('Thunderbolt and Lightfoot'), thrillers ('In the Line of Fire', 'Absolute Power'), space adventure ('Space Cowboys'), detective thriller ('Tightrope'), spy thriller ('The Eiger Sanction'), prison drama ('Escape from Alcatraz'), romantic melodrama ('Bridges Madison County') and, following predecessors Hawks, Huston and Ford, the great African Adventure that was ‘White Hunter, Black Heart’ of 1990. Meanwhile the comfort zone that Eastwood built in 1971 with his first directorial debut ‘Play Misty for Me’ at the age of 41 has only been breached twice - Michael Cimino’s ‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’ and Wolfgang Peterson’s ‘In the Line of Fire’ have been the only two instances where Eastwood the actor has been directed by anyone other than his trusted insiders. The productive output - and creative control - is equaled only by fellow actor/director Woody Allen, an irony that neither Jazz aficionado would miss. All in all a truly unique career path that meets both the ambitions of the baby-boom megastar and the urgent needs of a rapidly changing industry that - using Warners as an example - depends on reifying its claim on Hollywood history for each subsequent generation of filmgoers. The lineage that Eastwood literally embodies - from Eisenhower’s 1950s to Obama’s 21st century - has provided just such continuity. It will explain the world-wide recognitions that will mark the occasion of his 80th birthday. At moments of reflection and never wishing to admit to failure, Eastwood would often acknowledge how ‘Rawhide’s’ 217 episodes over eight consecutive seasons provided the training ground that allowed for experimentation and risk-taking as an actor. However, the factory work ethic on the TV series may also have ingrained that trend for speedy if unimaginative efficiency as film producer and director that industry captains would come to admire. Eastwood’s trumpeted respect for the bottom line and his ‘laid-back’ effectiveness on set, for example, would helpfully generate contrast with the infamous monetary and creative excesses of Spielberg’s ‘1941’, Coppola’s ‘The Cotton Club’, and Cimino’s ‘Heavens’ Gate’. In this respect, Eastwood the Conservative Republican of the 1980s was the kind of in-house maverick that the studios could nod to with approval when it came to harnessing the pushy and expensive assumptions of the upstart (Liberal) Movie Brats. In subsequent years, therefore, it became an industry necessity that the producer-director-actor hyphenate was to become Hollywood champion and Oscar winner ‘Clint Eastwood’. Figuring Eastwood as America’s First Man of Film was part of Warner’s 1990s corporate agenda, particularly up to and following the ‘Unforgiven’ Oscar success of 1991. Richard Schickel’s 1996 biography would open the Eastwood persona to greater if limited public scrutiny - taking peeks on the man’s layered Byzantine private lives that, new to most people, extended back to the early 1960s. Not a difficult or as challenging an expose as it might look, though, considering how the Warner Bros studio was by now subsumed within the Time/Life/HBO/CNN conglomerate and Schickel has been Time Magazine’s own leading Film Critic since 1972. Since 1996 then, Mr. Eastwood, could do no wrong.'
However, such praise for business acuity from industry cannot disguise a lurking disquiet on a superlative creative career that has successfully spanned no less than six decades. A flinty-eyed critique might point out that as Mr. Eastwood started his professional life in television so, in a sense that is where he - like the film industry itself - has remained. Like it or not, since the 1950s, ‘Hollywood’ has been TV. On a critical note, therefore, Eastwood’s stature as a classic film actor of international status has been brilliantly employed to advance ‘films’ of the kind that nervous Hollywood studio heads can readily green-light as if they were standard genre-based risk-free television products. Having Eastwood the movie icon on the poster gives the standard product the necessary artistic élan and international prestige. One can legitimately ask, for example, if ‘Every Which Way But Loose’ or ‘Tightrope’, ‘Honkytonk Man’ or even the ‘Shane’ update ‘Pale Rider’ would pass the green light even as TV films if the iconic presence of Eastwood the ‘element’ and his TV-trained Malpaso outfit was not so profitably attached to them from the outset. Regarding the critically and commercially acclaimed ‘Million Dollar Baby’ of 2004 without Eastwood, for example, might very well reveal a fairly standard if challenging TV film bursting to get into the ring. The stylistic conundrum becomes evident in this Oscar winner when at times the 6 foot 4 inch iconic presence is at odds with the limitations of the small-scale feature. In this respect he exemplifies how ‘Hollywood’ has worked for all its stakeholding elements since the 1970s to reify its fading heritage. Let’s remind ourselves, even Widescreen ‘Chinatown’ was framed for TV. Hence the rhetorical claims for artistic credibility that supportive critics like Schickel would thump for as Eastwood entered his mature years and as the Warners opening logo turned to Classic black and white to the refrain of Casablanca’s ‘As Time Goes By’. So, short cuts in the lighting budget on an Eastwood set would somehow justify the director’s auteurial dark touch - the mystery in the darkness is something the French might appreciate; the noted slow dramatic pace and heavy cutting became stately and applauded for not being MTV; similarly, ‘restrained’ acting (that didn’t rely on too many costly takes) was deemed minimalist; the avoidance of make-up was realist; and regular conventional shooting practice that would otherwise pass as standard TV fare was trumpeted as classically “Hawksian”. Eastwood, in other words, was and is the last man standing - Hollywood’s very own Rushmore staring down every passing fad, every stylistic deviance, and every new pesky punk on the busy Burbank block. Moreover, what sustained the show through the era of postmodern knowingness and growing critical acclaim was the light irony in the stately performance that, beginning with Leone, acknowledged that this was, after all, just a movie. While busily appeasing West Coast industry requirements behind the camera and making out as a wary anti-hero in front of it has therefore been one key to his longevity in a notoriously fickle industry. However, the squinty eye on the production budget has resulted in an obvious trade off. It could be argued that the director and producer in Eastwood weren’t tough enough on the actor to deliver those projects or ‘moments’ that would carry Oscar glory of the kind that was customarily monopolized by East Coast Method School stylists such as De Niro, Pacino, Hoffmann, and Day-Lewis. He came close in ‘Tightrope’ (Cannes entry) and the disappointment was great with both the failed Oscar nomination on ‘Million Dollar Baby’ and the recent Academy pass on ‘Gran Torino’. But going for (yet) another take to capture the passionate gold was never on the tidy day’s shooting schedule at Malpaso that was destined to finish smoothly with a gentle round of golf. The franchise was just too precious to risk. The Oscar glories, instead, would ironically go to others in his tutelage: Freeman, Swank, and Penn. So, last words on the occasion of an 80th birthday and on an astonishingly successful career as film director, producer, actor and, yes, musician, and which is destined never to be repeated? If continuity is the name of the game both on set and in the Studio boardroom, then Clint Eastwood stands tall as the last vestige of that Classic Studio era which could find no place for him when it did exist yet which can now celebrate him as its stellar Crown Prince as if it still did. In that respect Hollywood is Eastwood and Eastwood is Hollywood. Punk! Alan Taylor Film Lecturer, EU & Africa |
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