by Marc Eliot
The film had another problem as well, one the critics danced around but that the public could not help but notice. For the first time, Clint simply looked too old for the part.
Clint celebrated his sixty-seventh birthday making two more films. The first was yet another bestseller adaptation, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. John Berendt’s novelistic, antebellum tale of murder and intrigue in Savannah was based on a true story involving art dealer Jim Williams and hustler Danny Hansford (called Billy Hanson in the movie). The book had been optioned early on by Arnold Stiefel, an agent-manager who in turn sold the rights to Warner Bros., where it eventually came to Clint and Malpaso from Semel and Daley. The script was by John Lee Hancock, who had also written A Perfect World. Hancock turned the book’s author into one of the on-screen characters and eliminated many of Berendt’s enjoyable meanderings.
One gothic element of the story that lent itself particularly well to film was its main setting, the Mercer House, built by Johnny Mercer’s grandfather. Johnny Mercer was one of Savannah’s most celebrated songwriters—and one of Clint’s longtime favorites. He is remembered for, among others, the lyrics to “Laura,” the theme song to Otto Preminger’s 1941 film noir about a ghostly woman at the center of a murder mystery. When Clint read the script, he knew immediately he wanted to direct but not star, preferring to promote his daughter’s stalled career. Alison was cast in the role of Mandy, the on-screen author’s flirty girlfriend, a part greatly expanded from the novel.
Despite Clint’s aging visage, Warner wasn’t especially happy about his decision not to appear in the film—the last two he had directed without also starring in, Breezy and Bird, had not done nearly as well as the ones he had been in. When asked why he wanted to make the film at all, Clint said:
The characters, who are interesting just because they’re so diverse, and then Savannah, a very unusual city, which we wanted to make into a character in its own right. This isn’t the South the way it’s portrayed most of the time, with an overabundance of clichés. [We wanted to show a South that is] sophisticated, cultured, intelligent, very much in the public view, people no one would ever think could be interested in sorcery.
The all-star cast included Kevin Spacey—red-hot after his upset 1996 Best Supporting Actor win for his performance in Bryan Singer’s sleeper hit The Usual Suspects—John Cusack, Jude Law, and veteran actress Kim Hunter. An outsize publicity campaign led up to its big Thanksgiving-weekend release: Clint agreed to a first-time appearance on 60 Minutes but dodged some unexpectedly pointed questions by Steve Kroft about how many children Clint had by how many different women, and (by implication) why, and a far less intense double appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Even after all these years, Clint had difficulty appearing relaxed on any stage that required spontaneous responses.
Despite all the buildup, the film did not even earn back its $30 million negative cost* in the States; it brought in only about $25 million in its initial theatrical release, making it one of the biggest flops of Clint’s career. It did nothing for Alison’s career and it resurrected the ever-louder whispers that Clint Eastwood’s career as a Hollywood director was finished.
Almost immediately, as if on cue, rumors began to circulate that Clint was going to make another Dirty Harry movie, the sixth in the series. After all, Malpaso had optioned bestselling West Coast detective novelist Michael Connelly’s Blood Work.* Word was, Clint was thinking about bringing Harry out of retirement to solve one last crime, putting his own life at stake. But instead Clint announced that his next starring role and directing assignment would be True Crime, from the Andrew Klavan bestseller about a reporter who tries to stop an execution. Steve Everett (Clint) has to race against time to find the real killers before the wrong man is put to death. Nothing about the film really worked, and most people in Hollywood found its real mystery in its casting: Clint gave Frances Fisher the relatively small role of District Attorney Cecilia Nussbaum.
True Crime, released in the spring of 1999, did very poorly at the box office, barely grossing $7 million. Shortly after its disastrous release, Bob Daley and Terry Semel resigned from Warner Bros., ending their long association with the studio and with Clint. Controversy swirled around the double resignation, but both executives steadfastly maintained that they simply felt it was time to move on and that their decision had nothing to do with the success or failure of Clint Eastwood’s latest movies.
Shortly thereafter, in January 2000, Time-Warner merged with AOL, a move that shook up the company and the film industry as it appeared to signal a major shift in the delivery of entertainment. The studio was turning away from the business of making motion pictures. Whether Semel and Daley had been forced out, were gently pushed, or chose to leave on their own accord, their departure underscored the fact that Clint Eastwood would no longer be as powerful as he once was. If ever there was a good time for Clint to be able to step down gracefully, this would have been it.
But Clint refused to believe that turning seventy—and looking every day of it, down to his well-worn face heavily wrinkled from a lifetime of living and acting outdoors and a bit of a turkey neck developing under his chin—meant his professional time was up. He still had something to prove, and he intended to do it with style, grace, big box office, and perhaps most of all, a Best Actor Oscar in his fist.
*Costner also co-produced (with Jim Wilson) and directed Dances with Wolves. He took home Oscars both for Best Director and Best Picture. The film won seven out of the twelve Oscars for which it was nominated.
*The film was a Warner-Malpaso-Amblin co-production, produced by Clint and distributed by Warner, whose book division had published the original novel and the paperback tie-in and was thrilled to have its biggest star, still hot from his double Oscar win, to helm the picture. Warner also released the film’s sound track, which included several standard jazz compositions and the original theme song “Doe Eyes,” aka the love theme from The Bridges of Madison County. The album remained at the top of the jazz charts for months and hovered near the top for years. During this time Clint formed Malpaso Records, which, like the film’s sound-track album, would prove very profitable for both him and Warner. “Doe Eyes” was Clint’s nickname for Ruiz.
*Negative cost is the cost of completing the film; it refers to the finished negative from which all the prints are struck.
*Connelly was a William Morris client, published by Warner Books. (Little, Brown was then a subsidiary of the conglomerate.)
TWENTY-TWO
Clint and Dina at the 12th Annual Critics Choice Awards, Santa Monica, California, 2007. AP Images.
Dina keeps me on my toes, let’s put it that way. We both enjoy family a lot, we both enjoy pets and we love to play golf. To me, as I said, life is like the back nine in golf. Sometimes you play better on the back nine. You may not be stronger, but hopefully you’re wiser.
—Clint Eastwood
As the last night of the old century dissolved into the first day of the new one, Clint Eastwood was living the life of a man half his biological age. He was slim, trim, healthy, and handsome, married to a thirty-four-year-old woman, and the proud father of a three-year-old toddler he could happily bounce on his bony knee.
He was also the head of a business empire and one of the most enduring actors of his generation, still making mainstream commercial movies long after his contemporaries had either died, or retired, or like his friend Jack Nicholson turned to self-parody in the face of diminishing box-office returns. Clint had wealth beyond all expectation and lasting world fame. He had made or appeared in fifty-six features and directed twenty-one of them; he had been acknowledged by the Academy of Motion Pictures with two competitive and one honorary Oscar for his efforts; and he had been feted by the most prestigious museums and grandest film festivals around the world. And yet the need to keep working still stirred within him, as if he still had something that needed to be said, or some accomplishment still to be won. Only months into the new century, he h
ad finished the twenty-second feature that he had directed, the fifty-sixth role he had played on the big screen.
It wasn’t the Dirty Harry film everyone thought they were still waiting for. It was, instead, Space Cowboys, a space adventure comedy, starring what one producer referred to as the “geezer squad”—Clint, Tommy Lee Jones (the baby of the set), Donald Sutherland (whom Clint had last worked with in Kelly’s Heroes), and James Garner (whom Clint had known since his Rawhide years, when Garner was starring next door in Maverick). The film was Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (1983) meets Ron Howard’s Cocoon (1985)—Geritol laced with Viagra, with a can’t-miss live monkey thrown in for good measure.
The new regime at Warner had no faith in the film and released—or dumped—it in August 2000, hoping it wouldn’t do too much damage to its bottom line. It didn’t. Space Cowboys went on to be one of the biggest hits of the year, grossing more than $100 million in its initial domestic theatrical release and almost twice that in foreign and ancillary sales (including rental and purchase DVDs and pay-per-view, which had by now added significant profits to virtually all films, past and present).
Clint especially enjoyed the success of this film, literally laughing at the corporate towheads who scratched their scalps as he drove his pickup to the bank. But he had never been anyone’s fool. He had to know that this movie really was a step backward, if not straight down. It put him on the same page with Garner, who had long ago stopped making anything like “big” films, and for whom Space Cowboys was a late-in-the-day bonus.
Without taking so much as a deep breath, he went straight into production on Blood Work. As FBI profiler Terry McCaleb (in whom one might see the vestiges of good old Dirty Harry), Clint suffers the onset of mortality (or acknowledges it) when a massive heart attack nearly kills him, even as he is hot on the trail of a dirty killer. As he told one interviewer, “At this particular stage in my maturity, I felt it was time to take on characters that have different obstacles to face than they would if I were playing a younger man of 30 or 40.”
Despite the star power of Anjelica Huston and Jeff Daniels, the film failed to catch fire and grossed only $27 million during its initial domestic theatrical run, reaching no higher than tenth place with a paltry $3 million gross on its all-important opening weekend in 2002. Even Al Pacino was able to outdraw Clint at the box office, with S1m0ne, directed by Andrew Niccol, an unpronounceable sci-fi mishmash that nevertheless managed to come in ahead of Blood Work. No Pacino film had outgrossed an Eastwood film, when both were released at the same time, since The Godfather (1 and 2) in the early 1970s,
Clint blamed the film’s failure on the new administration at Warner Bros.: they had dumped the film into the soft third week of August. Semel and Daley were clearly no longer there to promote his work. He was especially angry that the studio had not given the film a New York red-carpet premiere, or scheduled any pre-opening screening for the critics, giving them the unmistakable sense that the studio wanted to keep them from seeing it.
After the film opened in the States and quickly disappeared, Clint strongly hinted to the studio that he was thinking of giving up acting altogether. That was big, and not good, news for Warner, as the movies Clint acted in still far outgrossed the ones he only directed. In London for the overseas opening, he sent a message to the new power elite at Warner when he told the Daily Telegraph, “I’ve wanted to phase out of acting and into directing. I’ll do it when the day comes when you look up at the screen and say, ‘That’s enough of that guy.’ And that day gets closer all the time” (emphasis added).
After the relative failure of Blood Work, Clint made good on his threat not to act anymore, at least for his next film. He found a project whose grim story, with dark, mystic overtones, defined destiny as one’s random placement in a world filled with misplaced desires, where vengeance is the only acceptable penance. Clint loved the nihilistic script that forty-two-year-old Brian Helgeland had adapted from the celebrated Dennis Lehane novel, Mystic River, which celebrated the effect and consequences of a higher-than-legal, if not traditionally religious, code of ethics.*
As he later told Charlie Rose, he wanted to do the project without acting in it, and it took a bit of haggling to get Warner interested:
I knew of Dennis Lehane, I read a synopsis of the book in a newspaper and I said to myself, “I’ve got to have this, I think I can make an interesting movie out of it” … Warner has always been very good at leaving me alone and letting me operate as a sort of independent production house. I took the script to them and they liked it, but they knew it was unrelenting. At the time, this was the studio that was doing The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter, all these films with high concepts and lots of action. Excite me some more, they said, and I knew I couldn’t excite them any less. They said they’d do it, but at a certain price [$25 million for the negative] and I agreed, and took DGA [Directors Guild] minimum to get it made. I’d done a few complex stories before, but the fact that it was the unraveling of a mystery that went back a few enerations, and when a tragedy reunites [a group of childhood friends] you see what their lives are like, what they’ve become and what effect an abduction that happened thirty years ago still had on them.
The acts of vengeance that follow were what made the film prime Clint material; in his movies, when vengeance is above the law, heroism takes on mystic (and at times mythic) proportion. It was a favorite theme that reached all the way back to the Man with No Name, through the Dirty Harrys, Tightrope, and all the way forward to Blood Work.
Mystic River is about Boston’s working-class society, which cannot withstand the social and emotional eruption that follows a violent murder and whose ultimate consequence is the moral breakdown of its social order. The breakdown can be only restored (and further broken—one of the film’s brilliant ambivalences) by an equally violent act of retribution, even when the target of that retribution is at least partially innocent. That act, rather than any moral force that may be behind it, delivers a measure of relief for the characters involved, as well as the audience. But the relief that defines and drives this dark and vicious movie is incomplete and ultimately unsatisfying.
Darkness and death pervade Mystic River as they do in no other Clint Eastwood movie. Here death is the ultimate force that drives both good and evil, searching around corners and seeping into souls, like water seeking its own level. The river, one of the first geographical boundaries we discover from Clint’s signature skyview opening, also serves throughout as the metaphorical river of life—the flowing lifeblood of the people who live by it. As critic Dennis Rothermel points out, it “absorbs the past, without forgiving and without healing.”
Clint cast an offbeat, eclectic, and intense cast of actors and actresses who would help make the film mesh as an ensemble presentation. He felt they were the best ensemble he had ever put together, even though his leads had never attracted the kind of box office that he had drawn for most of his career; none had ever been in a true blockbuster. The peripatetic Sean Penn, whom Clint cast first—“for his edge,” he said—set the tone for the rest; he was a hardened, muscled-and-tattooed ex-con to whom fate deals a horrifying blow, driven to respond by dealing life an equally horrifying one. Penn was backed up by Tim Robbins, whose life was ruined by a childhood abduction that comes back to haunt him as an adult; by Kevin Bacon as a tough, clever, but ultimately ineffective detective; by Laurence Fishburne, as his no-nonsense partner; by newcomer Emmy Rossum as Penn’s young, beautiful, but ill-fated daughter; by Laura Linney as Penn’s wretched wife; and by Marcia Gay Harden as Robbins’s wife.
The $30 million film was shot quickly and efficiently in Clint’s familiar one-or-two-take method—catching the normally slow, methodical, and Method-intense Penn a little off guard:
I think the most takes I ever did on Clint’s movie was three, and that was rare. A lot of one-takes … In the script it was written that six guys are stopping me. I thought maybe two of them could take me. But if it’s only
six of them, someone might get hurt if I really let myself go, so I don’t know what to do. I don’t want a really fake fight, and I don’t want to hurt anybody. Clint said, “I’ll figure it out,” and that’s all he said. When I came back to the set, he had about 15 guys jump on me, and I was locked down—I was literally able to try to head-butt people, I was able to try to bite people, I was able to try to kick them. I didn’t have to hold back at all, and it fixed me to do anything. This is Clint thinking.
Mystic River opened on October 15, 2003, and took the normally Clint-cool critics totally by surprise—it looked, sounded, and felt like no other Clint Eastwood movie. The reviews were universally terrific—easily the best that Clint had ever received as a director. Newsweek called it “a masterpiece.” Dana Stevens, writing in the New York Times, declared that “Mystic River is the rare American movie that aspires to—and achieves—the full weight and darkness of tragedy.” Rolling Stone, where Clint, with his anti-rock, pro-jazz preferences, was rarely at the top of the editorial favorites, raved about the film. Said Peter Travers: “Clint Eastwood pours everything he knows about directing into Mystic River. His film sneaks up, messes with your head, and then floors you. You can’t shake it. It’s that haunting, that hypnotic.” David Denby, one of Pauline Kael’s successors at The New Yorker (after her 2001 passing), gave Clint one of the magazine’s best reviews of him ever, saying the movie was “as close as we are likely to come on the screen to the spirit of Greek tragedy (and closer, I think, than Arthur Miller has come on the stage). The crime of child abuse becomes a curse that determines the pattern of events in the next generation.”
