Clint Eastwood (69 page)

This, of course, was a trait not unknown to mature actor-filmmakers. Once again, Clint fell into disagreement with his director, Jim Fargo. Mainly this was because Fargo, as Alain Silver, one of his assistants, puts it, “
had the notion that he was directing the movie.” He perhaps overstates the case slightly, but the point needs stressing: For all the amiability
between them, authority on Clint’s sets resides in only one place. It can be reasoned with, but it cannot be ignored without predictable consequences. It is, as we have seen from the outset, the first principle in dealing with a man who must assert what control he can over the uncontrollable world.

Director and star fell out in particular over a sequence in which the biker gang menaces Locke’s character. Fargo set up its crucial shot, in which a shotgun is suddenly stuck out the window of her truck to drive the Black Widows away, in such a way as to disguise the fact that she is with another man. Clint thought this revelation should be made, and that the gun should not be wielded by Lynn. “It was very clear,” says Silver, “that he didn’t want any violence attached to her.” Unfortunately, he did not discover what Fargo had done until the bikers—whose last day on the production this was—had been released and sent home. They had to be called back, amid a certain amount of producerly fuming. And, ultimately, with a predictable consequence. As Silver says, “Once you’re on Clint’s bad list, you don’t come back.” Fargo never did.

This despite the fact that he was the director of record of what is, dollars in, dollars out, the most profitable movie Clint Eastwood ever made, returning more than $51 million—about ten times its cost—in domestic theatrical rentals alone. This was an astonishing figure, especially considering that when it was first screened for the studio’s executives one of them firmly pronounced the film unreleasable and that when it was first screened for critics it was considered unspeakable. “Alarming,” “blundering,” “lumpy,” “a junk heap,” “a disgrace”—these are a fair representation of the descriptions applied to it. Rona Barrett told her readers that Clint’s fans deserved an apology.

But Barry Reardon, newly installed as Warner’s head of distribution, had from the start thought otherwise. At that first executive screening he remembers saying, “
That picture’s going to make us a fortune.” Terry Semel, who had just moved up from Reardon’s job to become the studio’s chief operating officer, agreed. Together they decided to open
Every Which Way but Loose
simultaneously in both small towns and in the big cities. This was then a novel release pattern, as was the size of the national television-ad campaign they mounted for the film. Clint, who had been afraid his movie would be shunted aside in favor of the much more expensive and risky
Superman
, which was opening almost simultaneously, was delighted. “That’s where it played, out in mid-America. People would go back. And it would play for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks.”

By the time
Every Which Way but Loose
was ready for release, Clint had completed principal photography on the last of his five collaborations with Don Siegel and the first of two collaborations with screenwriter Richard Tuggle, which would have a significant impact on his career.

Escape from Alcatraz
was the first script Tuggle ever attempted, and for once the movie gods looked down from their heavenly screening room and decided to reward innocence. Working as an editor for a health magazine in San Francisco in the seventies, Tuggle one day took the tour of abandoned Alcatraz, where he heard the story of a hard-case armed robber, Frank Morris, who in 1962 had masterminded the only escape from the Rock on which the file was not closed; the authorities had neither recaptured Morris and his confederates nor recovered their bodies from the icy waters of San Francisco Bay. It was just barely possible that they had accomplished the impossible.

Intrigued, Tuggle went looking for an out-of-print book about Alcatraz escape attempts by J. Campbell Bruce that recounted the story in more detail. Suddenly fired from his job, Tuggle, a lifelong film buff, decided to use his free time to write a screenplay about the incident. When it was done, he secured movie rights to the book from Bruce (who lived nearby in Berkeley), moved to Los Angeles and endured a succession of rejections from studios and TV networks until Bruce told him that when it was first published he had sent his book to Don Siegel and had received a mildly encouraging response from him. Tuggle, who admired
Riot in Cell Block 11
, ascertained that the director was represented by Lenny Hirshan and sent his work to the agent. He glanced at it and judged it worth passing on to his client, who for the first time in his career invested money of his own—$100,000—to secure the property. Naturally, Siegel showed the script to Clint, who agreed to play Morris—subject to his approval of some rewrites.

At which point what had been a straightforward success story veers into murky territory. Something went wrong between Clint and Siegel. The former says that the problem centered mainly around the rewrite. The latter, in his memoir, hints that his reluctance to set up the project at Warner Bros. was the issue. The director was angry about its failure to mount an Academy Award campaign for
Dirty Harry
and, moreover, had been flatteringly pursued by Paramount.

Lenny Hirshan: “I called up Mike Eisner [then in his early days as Paramount’s head of production]. I say, ‘Mike, Don found a script and it’s terrific and I’d like to send it to you this afternoon and hopefully we can do it.’ And he said, ‘What’s the name of it?’ and I said,
‘Escape from Alcatraz,’
and he said to me, ‘You got a deal.’ I said, ‘Mike, you’ve got to read the script first.’ He said, ‘Don Siegel directing a picture entitled
Escape
from Alcatraz
, you got a deal.’ I said, ‘Please, Mike, take a read. I’m sending you the script.’ He called me the next morning. He says, ‘I told you, you got a deal.’ ”

What they very soon did not have was a star, and there is implicit agreement among those close to the scene that what Clint and Siegel were really arguing about, albeit indirectly, was control of the production. To oversimplify the matter,
Dirty Harry
had made Clint a superstar, and it had made Siegel an A-list director. “
Their relationship, in the beginning, had been more father-son,” says Tuggle, “but as Clint had gotten more successful, as had Don, there got to be a competitive feel. And so, basically, Clint felt to some extent he probably didn’t need Don to do this movie, and Don felt to some extent he didn’t need Clint.” Eisner agrees with this observation, at least as it applies to Siegel. He appreciated Clint’s growth as “
an artist and director,” but “may have been more interested in getting the performer, not the artist.”

Other actors were approached, but all of them turned down the project, and the agreed-upon start date, in October 1978, was fast approaching. So Eisner reminded Siegel that whatever their current differences, he and Clint were really still friends and that it was time to make peace. According to Tuggle, Siegel replied that he couldn’t, that “it’ll look like I’m crawling on my hands and knees.” “Don,” said Eisner, “in my job I do that every day.”

Shrewd Michael Eisner has the engaging habit of cloaking the voice of power in disarming man-to-man vernacular. So Siegel made an appointment to join Clint for a sandwich and a beer in his office—where he was made to wait in the anteroom for forty-five minutes (according to Tuggle). But he emerged from their meeting with a deal, and, more important, a reconciliation.

The film was as physically arduous as any either of them had ever worked on, for the chill is perpetual on Alcatraz, and they were working in the late fall, usually at night in order to avoid the tours that constantly interrupted their day shoots. The cold and the dampness seemed almost to seep into Bruce Surtees’s film stock.

As Siegel has said, he made a black-and-white film that happened to be photographed in color. He also made a coolly objective film, with the camera backed off as much as possible, away from the characters, so we are always aware of the walls and bars that confine them. Morris is very often seen in low angles suggesting that this is a man who will not easily be overmastered by this massive construct of stone and steel.

The film’s perfectly matched visual and emotional tones are established in a great opening sequence, virtually without dialogue, during which a handcuffed Frank Morris is escorted from a police car to the Alcatraz
launch, then into the prison building, where the rough initiatory formalities are conducted. They conclude with him stripped completely naked and being conducted down “Broadway,” the wide corridor running between tiered cells in which most of the inmates are housed.

It is a chilling study of dehumanization. The late Don Simpson, working for Eisner before beginning his famous action-movie partnership with Jerry Bruckheimer, called Clint and told him that they could excise his nude scene if he wanted them to. Clint, nearing his fiftieth birthday, replied, “Nah, this may be the last time I’ll be able to work bare-assed.” (Around this time rumors that Clint had had a face-lift began circulating, to which he responded, “
If I lost my squint, I think my whole career would go down the tubes.”)

Realism, in short, continued to be something more than an aesthetic with him, even as he approached an age when it is in short supply among actors, even when it was becoming an increasingly scarce commodity, especially in action releases. It is hard to think of a major American film of its moment, intended for a broad audience, that was more austere in design or development than
Escape from Alcatraz
.

Its incidents are archetypal: Morris fending off first a sexual attack in a shower, then a vengeful one in the yard from a brute named Wolf (Bruce M. Fischer); a terrible stay in solitary; a prisoner (Roberts Blossom) cutting off his finger when the sadistic warden (Patrick McGoohan, relishing every mean bone in his body) takes away his painting privileges; another prisoner (Frank Ronzio) tormented by the warden, running amok and succumbing to a heart attack. Frank’s developing friendships are based mainly on tersely whispered, emotionally unrevealing exchanges with these men along with Charley Butts (Larry Hankin) and the Anglin brothers (Fred Ward and Jack Thibeau), with whom he will make his escape attempt, and, most notably, English (Paul Benjamin), a black man who runs the prison library and whom he goes out of the way to ally himself with by deliberately invading black “territory” in the prison yard.

This may be, as critic James Bernardoni suggests, the most Hawksian of Eastwood films, but it is at pains to mute the camaraderie that develops, as it does in a Hawks film, as men pursue a large and dangerous enterprise. Bonding here is a thing not spoken of, not even suggested by ribbing and shared jokes as it usually is in Hawks’s work. Nor is there much in the way of back story or motivation. Don Simpson had argued for more of both, but all he got was a single word. One day in the prison yard English asks Morris what kind of childhood he had, and receives an unimprovable reply: “Short.”

Indeed, what sets this movie apart from most everything else in its genre is its reluctance to curry audience favor for Morris and his coconspirators. Ultimately, we don’t care whether they are good guys or bad guys, or what their hard-luck stories may be. It is what they do, not who they are, that we are involved with. Over many months they are required to excavate escape routes from their cells using homemade tools. Tuggle and Siegel understand that the audacity, cunning and patience required by this huge, inching effort is in itself redemptive, that it renders anything else these men have done in life unimportant, that without cuing we will inevitably come to see their accomplishment as inspiring.

Clint had never much liked prison movies—“not enough sprawl to them”—but Morris was a highly intelligent man (Clint was shown prison records reporting an IQ over 140) with very little formal education, and he could identify with someone employing native wit to master an intricate task. Alcatraz also represented authority at its most crushing, the escape from it the ultimate act of rebellion against it, and he could certainly relate to that.

Clint was to the film what his character was to the escape attempt—the man who kept it together. Siegel reported him eagerly clambering over, into and through every nook and cranny of the disused prison on their first scouting trip, relishing every dank possibility they discovered. Once they started work, it was to him that Siegel looked to shush the tourists when they interrupted shooting, buying their silence with the promise of autographs. It was Clint, controlling his temper, who placated the park service rangers, always fussing over potential damage to a national monument (and San Francisco’s number one tourist attraction). For example, graffiti left over from the Indian occupation of the island and from various hippie infestations were regarded as historically precious, and the moviemakers were not allowed to paint it out permanently. He could not understand by what leap of the bureaucratic imagination acts of desecration were converted into memorials.