Go Ahead, Make My Career

By PAUL A. WITTEMAN LOS ANGELES

Hollywood on a Saturday morning. The world's biggest box-office star is pulling his forest green GMC Typhoon out of a parking lot when four guys with clipboards dash toward him through the traffic. What would Dirty Harry do? Never mind. Clint Eastwood is not Dirty Harry. He stops, signs a few autographs and produces his patented tight-lipped smile as his supplicants bob their heads and murmur profuse thanks.

In real life, Eastwood knows how to play the self-deprecating good guy. Just listen to him explain why they wanted him to sign blank slips of paper rather than personalized greetings to Uncle Cappy in Port Clyde. "It's a business," he says. "They trade them." He pauses, grins, then adds, "You get one Steve McQueen for four of mine."

Not anymore, even though the inventory of McQueen autographs is not going to increase. This is Eastwood's Year of Being Taken Seriously. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences showered Eastwood and his latest film, ^ Unforgiven, with nine Oscar nominations, and the Directors Guild of America improved his odds for taking home a statue when it made him its choice for his work on Unforgiven. Whatever the results on Monday night, Eastwood had crossed the divide that separates a constellation from a star and a serious filmmaker from someone who merely makes movies.

The puzzle is, How did people miss the big transition? It's not that Eastwood has been toiling in obscurity, making little jewels about the plight of the sea otter in the Gulf of Alaska. This is a man who has been the biggest draw in movie theaters for more than 20 years. How big? The 21 movies he has made for Warner Bros. since 1971 have had box-office sales of $1.2 billion worldwide. (Harrison Ford and Arnold Schwarzenegger may one day be contenders.) The videotape sales of his movies have brought in an additional $139 million, and the sound tracks another $25 million or so. Then there are the rights fees that television networks pay every time they broadcast an Eastwood classic like Dirty Harry. "It all rolls up," says Barry Reardon, president of Warner Bros. Distributing Corp., a man who is not intimidated by big numbers. "I suppose if you added everything together, you would come up with some astronomical figure." One that is constantly growing.

Nevertheless, Eastwood almost fell into the trap successful actors sometimes set for themselves. For the better part of four decades, he created superficial, though memorable, characters. First there was Rowdy Yates, the carefree cowpoke in the television series Rawhide. Then came the Man with No Name, an avenging angel wearing spurs in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns. After that it was Dirty Harry, the police inspector who cleaned up the streets of San Francisco. Both his fans and his critics seemed to conspire to keep him in character: they continued to see him, for good or ill, as they first saw him, when it was easy to love him or despise him. They didn't want to grant him his complexities.

For a considerable time, Eastwood obliged them. "You have to do what is realistic for you," he said 15 years ago. "You can stretch your machinery, but the audience might not believe you." Baloney, argued Eastwood's friend and director Don Siegel at the time. "It surprises me that he is not more interested in a greater variety of roles. I can't understand why the greatest box-office star in the world doesn't get better material to work with. He persists in doing the same thing."

But in 1980, with the making of Bronco Billy, Eastwood began to reach for a richer cinematic legacy. In this Capraesque comedy about a New Jersey shoe salesman turned Wild West show impresario, no guns are fired in anger. Instead Eastwood began to explore the limits of his often damaged characters in a quieter, more reflective way. Nor were villains dispatched bloodily three years later in Honkytonk Man, a melancholy movie about a drunken musician in which Eastwood starred with his son Kyle. "I'd hate to look back on my portfolio someday and think, 'Well, I did 100 Magnum films and one car-wreck film," he said after Honkytonk Man was released. "I'd like to think that I had a broad career of various types of films and roles." Unfortunately, nobody out there but Eastwood was paying much attention. The film was a bomb.

Not compared to Bird, however. This dense but compelling biography of the saxophone player Charlie Parker disappeared without a ripple after its release in 1990. It was Eastwood's most ambitious and uncompromising effort as a director, shot at length in murky, natural light. If Bird established that Eastwood was willing to take chances behind the camera, White Hunter, Black Heart proved he was willing to take huge and potentially embarrassing risks as an actor. His portrayal of a film director modeled on John Huston was as removed from the characters his public had come to expect as Orson Welles is from Donald Duck. Like Bird, it was a commercial failure.

Yet each experience taught him more about his craft and prepared him for Unforgiven, a lean and provocative antiwestern in which the good guys are not so swell and the bad guys are not entirely deserving of their fate. For Eastwood it was something new, garbed in familiar cowboy clothing. Only after the final gunfight does the director allow his alter ego, the actor, to indulge in a brief valedictory to the satiric excess that characterized the Eastwood of an earlier era. "Any son of a bitch who takes a shot at me," gunman William Munny bellows into the night, "I'm not only going to kill him, I'm going to kill his wife, all his friends and burn his damn house down." As Eastwood likes to say, "Just another one of my flawed characters." Moviegoers were impressed enough to make Unforgiven the biggest box-office success Eastwood has ever produced.

His willingness and ability to transcend his image helps answer some of the questions about the trajectory of his career, among them: How come he isn't Doug McClure, one of those TV-series hunks of the '60s who faded into anonymity? Or merely a Sylvester Stallone, one of those action heroes who have achieved nothing like the longevity Eastwood has? Neither could have, or would have, made a movie like Unforgiven. With the intelligent shyness that empowers many great actors, Eastwood embraced the entire craft of filmmaking, wandering the sets and picking up insights even as he was churning out B movies in his early days. Even now, he keeps a VCR on location to study movies new and old. "My involvement goes deeper than acting or directing," he once said. "I love every aspect of the creation of motion pictures, and I guess I'm committed to it for life."

He takes the work seriously, but not himself. During the Unforgiven shoot, he regaled the crew with his wicked John Wayne impersonation. When Gene Hackman kicked the hell out of him in their first saloon encounter, the script called for Hackman to stride over to the bar and pour a drink. From his position on the floor, where he was miming grievous hurt, Eastwood didn't call cut. Instead he groaned, "Pour one of those for me."

He is quick to spread the credit for his success to a loyal and veteran production crew. His wardrobe man, Glenn Wright, has been with him since Rawhide in the early '60s. Cameraman Jack Green has worked on 18 Eastwood films, and production designer Henry Bumstead has been on board for two decades. "Henry Bumstead likes to say that I take the bullsout of moviemaking. It's pros like Henry who do that for me," says Eastwood. "All I'm doing is encouraging them."

Eastwood plans his productions like military campaigns and compares his role to that of an officer in combat. "Making a film takes on a life of its own," he says. "You guide that life along like a platoon leader, getting everybody kind of enthused to charge the hill." To a relative newcomer like actress Frances Fisher, who plays the prostitute Strawberry Alice in Unforgiven and is Eastwood's current companion, it all seems seamless. "He is the most confident director I have ever seen. He kind of glides through it all." Distractions are kept to a minimum and posturing discouraged. "He says very little to you," says Hackman, whom Eastwood lured to play the sheriff in Unforgiven. "I appreciate that. Most of what directors say to actors is said for the benefit of the people standing around the camera."

"I don't want to intellectualize it too much," Eastwood says of his preference for keeping rehearsals to a minimum and putting the first take in the can. As a result, Eastwood films are delivered under budget and ahead of schedule. "He gets the most out of a dollar spent," says Warner Bros. chairman Bob Daly. "Ninety-five percent of his movies are hugely profitable." Eastwood says producing appeals to his practical side. "I like to ask myself, 'What is the best way we can do this without slighting the film?' "

Eastwood developed his prudence as a child of the Depression. His family roamed Northern California and the Northwest as his father searched for work. The determination of the father shaped the son's bedrock respect for honest labor. There are no exceptions. Of the potential career of his 21-year-old daughter Alison as an actress, Eastwood says, "She has to decide if she wants to work at it."

Eastwood attended eight grammar schools in eight years, an experience that taught him self-reliance and a suspicion of the intentions of strangers. "When you're the new kid in town, you always have to punch it out with the other kids the first day or so before they accept you," he says. If they didn't, Eastwood did not let it trouble him.

Like most natives of the San Francisco area, Eastwood grew up scorning Los Angeles. Unlike other actors whose careers drew them toward the studios, Eastwood kept his distance. He created two lives, one based in his office on the Warner lot in Burbank, the other up the coast in Carmel. His friends there have included a schoolteacher, a former bar owner and an itinerant barber. Film is rarely a topic of conversation. Carmel residents protect his privacy, even those who disagreed with his policies -- such as a modest liberalization of the zoning laws -- when he was mayor in 1986-87.

No one in L.A. could figure out why the most powerful actor in the industry would want to be mayor of a village of 4,700 people. Unless, of course, Eastwood had larger ambitions. That made sense to them. The more Eastwood denied it, the more convinced became those who breathe the rarefied air in Bel Air and Beverly Hills that Eastwood was grooming himself to become the next Ronald Reagan. It was far simpler than that. Eastwood felt his town government wasn't working, and he was willing to sacrifice his privacy to try to fix it. Eastwood, like the Man with No Name or Dirty Harry, acts decisively on his convictions.

"I wasn't wild when he became mayor," Daly says. "He went from two films / to one a year." Once in office, Eastwood discovered that it is easier to build consensus when directing a film crew than in a city council. Sessions descended into fights over such topics as whether ice cream cones should be banned in public and whether fireworks would be permitted on the village beach for the Fourth of July. He says now he is happy he did not run for city council instead, where the term is four years instead of two.

At 63, Eastwood stands at another juncture. Finally, he has been embraced by those who practice his craft. He reigns as the richest and most powerful man in an industry where the two attributes are virtually synonymous. Yet his focus is on the next task. In the Line of Fire, a film about the Secret Service, is due for release this spring. He'll be taking the crew to Texas soon to get started on A Perfect World, a crime drama about a Texas sheriff chasing an escaped convict who has kidnapped a child. Neither may win any awards. "Hollywood pays too much attention to home runs," he says. "Singles and doubles can win the game when longevity is the goal. Besides, if all I ever did was hit one home run, the only thing I'd be now is a celebrity has- been."

That would be out of character.