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53 Eastwood: An Auteur to Reckon With Charles Champlin / 1981 Published in Los Angeles Times, January 18, 1981. Copyright © 1981. Los Angeles Times. Reprinted with Permission. Success begets power, but power does not necessarily beget more success in turn, or corporate life would be very dull. The question of what the successful will do with their powers is somehow more suspenseful in the movies than anywhere else because the answers are so visible—ponderous failures or daring and imaginative leaps to further success. Clint Eastwood, in his deceptively low-keyed and laid-back way, has used the star power generated initially in other people’s pictures to build an independent production company with a success record that is probably second to none in its return on investment. By electing to do what he wants to do, Eastwood has, it turns out, done exactly what his public wants him to do, sometimes confounding his critics, the local man included. Having been a laconic man of action, he became a good-hearted slapstick man of action, feeding second-banana lines to an orangutan in Every Which Way but Loose, a loose-jointed farce the public clasped to its bosom in a frenzy of pleasure. In last year’s Bronco Billy, he took the comedy a long step further and played a sweet-hearted and gentle idealist , a man so in love with the heroic myth of the West and a man of such goodness that he would not even seek revenge on the corrupt and nasty sheriff who had humiliated him. By an irony that did not escape Eastwood for a minute, it was the critics , who had previously been as eager to scoff as to praise, who now embraced Bronco Billy in a frenzy of admiration. It was the customers who initially weren’t so sure (possibly put off by an artful but ambiguous ad campaign). But virtue triumphed in the end and Bronco Billy has done 54 clint eastwood: inter views nice, steady business ($15 million gross domestically so far) and is, Eastwood calculates, safely into profit. Any Which Way You Can, the sequel to Every Which Way but Loose, is one of a handful of runaway box-office successes of year-end. At last count it had taken in something more than $50 million at the box office. It is the same Eastwood, but a new and younger orangutan. “Two years in the life of an orangutan is a lot,” Eastwood said the other day. The original had grown as if aspiring to be King Kong, no longer pal-sized. The script of Every Which Way but Loose had been around for a long time, rejected by everyone, Eastwood says. The script itself was dog-eared and food-stained. “Most sane men were skeptical about it; there were conflicts about it in my own group. They said it was dangerous. They said it’s not you. I said, it is me. Nothing on the screen yet has been me. It’s a left-handed compliment when people say, ‘That’s him.’ If you make people think that, you’ve done a lot.” Bronco Billy came in over the transom on a friend’s recommendation, not from an agent. Eastwood was going to send it back to writer Dennis Hackin but was caught by the title, glanced at a couple of pages and couldn’t put it down. “My first thought was that Frank Capra or Preston Sturges might have done it in their heyday. It had some values that were interesting to explore in contrast to the sixties, Vietnam and Watergate and so on. “Here was a guy who was a loser but who wouldn’t acknowledge it and who was a holdout against cynicism. It wasn’t old-fashioned but in a way it was. “The guy was fun to play because he had to be stripped bare of all his dignity, like the character in It’s a Wonderful Life, to make the transition and end up all right.” There was nervousness, not to say dissension, within the ranks of Eastwood’s Malpaso Co. about Bronco Billy, particularly about the unavenged humiliation. “I knew it wasn’t a commercial attempt,” Eastwood says. “There were suggestions we add more action and some sex, but I stuck to the writer’s intent. If that’s what we had to do to be a slam-bang commercial success, I didn’t want to. I don’t have to prove my...

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