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57 Cop on a Hot Tightrope David Thomson / 1984 Published in Film Comment 20, no. 5 (September/October 1984): 64–73. Reprinted by permission of the author. Clint Eastwood keeps the same old bungalow at Warners, with subdued light and brown décor, where he can stretch out on a sofa in a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, yarning away for a couple of hours about doing his movies. It’s all kept at an amiable, easy-going, unpretentious, and unalarming level—hey, come on in, let’s talk. Yet Eastwood is more likely to extend that invitation to Norman Mailer than to Time or Newsweek. In the last two years, Clint was covered by Mailer for Parade, and he was the subject of a lengthy article in the New York Review of Books. Something in the long, lean loner hankers after respectability. You don’t have to look too far ahead to see him getting an Oscar for overall career excellence, or even the AFI’s Life Achievement Award. Meanwhile he has to get along with being the most famous and successful movie star of the last twenty years. There is word at Warners, coaxed out of the discreet woodwork by Joe Hyams, an executive “with special responsibility for keeping Clint happy,” that $800 million in rentals have come in on Clint’s name since The Outlaw Josey Wales. Eastwood is too cool to be counting, though there are stories of him putting on his spectacles at the end of every day to go through the books (“Make my day—show me an error”). And if counting counts, then you’d have to add in the Universal period (with Dirty Harry, High Plains Drifter, Play Misty for Me, and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot) plus the spaghetti Westerns (and Clint had ten percent of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), not to mention the durability of his films on TV reruns and his newfound supremacy on video-cassette. Nearly all of his work has been done for his company, Malpaso, meaning “bad step—like if it looks like you’re going to trip over something.” 58 clint eastwood: inter views Eastwood has always explained Malpaso as a way of making his own mistakes . But it has been the knife to cut out a fat share of the rentals. What is he like? Let Norman Mailer answer that, in the talking-to-himself format of his Parade article: “Do you like him? “You have to. On first meeting, he’s one of the nicest people you ever met. But I can’t say I know him well. We talked a couple of times and had a meal together. I liked him. I think you’d have to be around for a year before you saw his ugly side, assuming he has one. “It would take that long? “Well, he’s very laid-back. If you don’t bother him, he will never bother you. In that sense, he is like the characters he plays in his films.” Mailer needs heroes. I think disillusion might come a little quicker, like 364 days quicker. You have to like Eastwood: he has Magnum charm, he is very impressive physically—as he nears fifty-five, the beauty hardens ; it is edged with frost now, instead of suntan. He is very natural, very strong; his mind is very made up. You don’t have to be too imaginative to see the rock against which some of your questions break. It is startling and intimidating when an actor has so little need of your love, and not much softened if he still wants your respect. Eastwood runs a small, tight unit at Malpaso, and I doubt if there are too many screw-ups or too much Latin tolerance for them. Over the years, there have been reports of his regular gang, headed by producers Bob Daley and Fritz Manes, looking at new young directors as if to say “Prove yourself.” It is equally legendary that Eastwood does not rehearse and favors first takes—all of which contribute toward the economy of his operation (Honkytonk Man was shot in five weeks for $2 million in belowthe -line costs). The most evident streak of Eastwood’s hardness, and his greatest limitation as a screen presence, is his unwillingness to push beyond his own gut reactions. If it felt right to Clint, a director might have a tough time going for more takes. Moreover, his briskness onscreen sometimes imparts a...

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