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Cover
THE BOXOFFICE
INTERVIEW
wnm
POWER
'
At the Height of His Career as Both Director and Star,
CLINT EASTWOOD IVIaices His Bid For "Absoiute Power"
fastest surface route between Los Angeles in Southern Califor-
and Carmel in the north takes approximately six hours of
Thenia drive
time, although "it's been done in four" according to Clint
Eastwood, Carmel 's most famous citizen. While not the most scenic trip
available to the northward traveller (the coastal roads, which can add
four hours to the trip, offer spectacular vistas at the edge of nearly every
harrowing, hairpin turn), the direct route is not without its points of
interest. Among these is a site smack in the middle of the most lonesome
and nondescript part of the trek: the place on Highway 46 where James
Dean cut short his too-brief career and sealed his legend by slamming
his Porsche into an oncoming FcMd on September 30,
instandy at the age of 24.
1955 and dying
There's a small marker on the roadside to indicate the exact spot of
Dean's crash if you know where to look for it, although most people pass
right by it without noticing. This is fitting in a way, since Dean's legacy
isn't really rooted in the exact circumstances of his death, nor is it based
entirely on his screen career (which, after all, spanned just three roles).
It could be argued that Dean's legend is predominandy the byproduct of
his embodiment of a certain negative perception of celebrity—the
too-much-too-soon, live-fast-die-young credo
which the pubUc finds so compelling as a defmition
of the fruits of fame.
counterbalance to that particular brand of
Thescreen immortality hves further north in
Carmel—a picturesque village where
tourists and townies vie for parking spaces on
naiTOw roads, and ecological conservation is taken
so seriously that every tree is reportedly registered
individually with the local authorities. Clint
Eastwood has called Carmel his home for close to
four decades, and it is surely no coincidence that
this particular screen icon—whose disaffection
with the film industry's standard operating procedures
is demonstrated by the almost total
autonomy he has maintained since ascending to
superstar status in the late 1960s—has made his
primary residence .so far from the company town
where his professional interests continue to thrive.
Eastwood's star bums as brightly as any in Hollywood history—so
brightly, in fact, that its sheen for many years obscured what may be his
most enduring accomplishments as a filmmaker, especially in America
a country his best films, as both actor and director, have had so much to
say about.
He has been world-famous for over 30 years—a superstar, remarkably
By Ray Greene
10 BOXOFFICE
resistant to the trends
that elevate and bury
screen careers with tidal
regularity. "At this point.
audiences have seen me a lot," he says, in his typically self-deprecating
way, "and they've seen me for as long as maybe anybody. Maybe too
long," he adds, laughing. "Who knows?"
But what makes Eastwood unique, and what has resulted in his
relatively recent second ascension into the acknowledged front ranks of
contemporary American filmmakers, isn't the stardom he has worn so
lightly for so long but the accrued accomplishments of a career that in
retrospect managed to resist most ofthe customary temptations in pursuit
of a more complicated agenda The flame-out of an unftilfiUed talent like
Dean's offers high tabloid drama but Eastwood's steady accumulation
of achievements—many pulled off in spite of, rather than because of,
his long reign as a bankable star—has made for a creative legacy that is
that much more likely to endure.
Thanks to "Unforgiven," the darkly revisionist western masterpiece
that brought him Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director of 1992, it's
today a foregone conclusion that Eastwood is a serious and accomplished
filmmaker But it wasn't always that way. Back in 1 970, when Eastwood
first decided to try his hand on the other side of the camera with a
"I never appeared to
have any anxieties,
but you do [when
you're first starting
out]. The challenge is
not accompanied
with any great
anxieties now."
psychological thriller about a DJ and an obsessed fan entitled "Play Misty
For Me," his request was met with a combination
of wariness and bemused tolerance at the
executive level—treated as an act of
benevolent indulgence offered to a rapidly
rising star.
be encouraged to look kindly on this.'"
"I had signed a deal with Universal,"
Eastwood remembers. "So I went to the head
of the studio. Lew Wasserman, and said 'I've
got this little story about a discjockey in a small
town who gets in a sort ofpsychotic love affair.
And he said, 'Well, that's fine'—but some of
the execs didn't feel that way, some of them
felt that it was out of the genre that I was
playing. And I said, 'And also, I'd like todirect
it.' And he said, 'That's fine.' Then he called
my agent to one side, and he said, "Yeah, we
want him to direct it, but we won't pay him
anything.' I .said, 'I'll pay them for the opportunity.
I realize it's a risk, but after I show 'em
what I think I can show "em, hopefully they'll
"Play Misty For Me" was correctly recognized as a departure for its ,
star, who in 1971 wasjust coming off a career-defining first pcrtbmiiuicc
as Dirty Harry and who already had all three of his equally legendiiry
Sergio Leone-directed "spaghetti westerns" behind him. But most commentators
of the day focused on Eiastwotxl's visible desire to stretch as
an actor (as did most opinion on "The Beguiled," the eerie, darkly
brilliant Civil War-era melodrama Eastwood starred in for "Dirty Harry"
director Don Siegel that same year). As with many of the risks Eastwood
took in the early pha.ses of his superstardom, the full implications of what