Clint Eastwood (77 page)

So it was done—handshakes all around—and then immediately undone. It turned out that Edwards had been using Locke to get to Clint. He announced that he had actually—well, er—promised the part to his daughter. This precipitated a small Eastwoodian explosion. There was also talk at some point of using Edwards’s wife, Julie Andrews, in the role of Murphy’s secretary. This brought outraged yelps from Reynolds. He had just worked with her, under Edwards’s direction, in
The Man Who Loved Women
, and was not eager to repeat the experience. Clint, predictably dismayed by these shenanigans, threatened to withdraw.

A project-saving compromise was reached when all parties agreed not to employ any loved ones in the picture, but, needless to say, Clint remained wary. This was to be a back-lot picture—as thirties crime stories had always been—and now Edwards was insisting that a house be rented for him in Bel-Air so he did not have to make the long daily commute from his house in Malibu to the Warners and Universal lots where he would be working. The need for a car and driver was also mentioned. What was not being mentioned were certain rewrites that Edwards had promised Clint, who was aware, as well, that Reynolds was growing increasingly skittish with the situation. Of Edwards, Clint said to a studio executive, “This guy is just on a different planet.”

Actually he was just on Planet Hollywood. Edwards had been around town since the forties, when he began his career as an actor, had gone on to large success in television
(Peter Gunn)
and features
(Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Pink Panther
and its sequels,
10)
and obviously knew all its ropes. Indeed, he had recently made a vicious, hilarious satire on Hollywood,
S.O.B
. He should have known better. Certainly he should have known his leading man’s reputation better.

Clint had had enough. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, “why don’t we do this some other time, on some other script down the line that we both like?”

Warner Bros., however, decided to persist. The studio liked this attractive star pairing in a picture they were confident could be a hot Christmas release. So they fired Edwards. And turned the project over to Clint, though both Malpaso and Reynolds’s company, Deliverance, would eventually share production credit. That and Clint’s billing ahead of him were all right with Reynolds—“He’s taller than I am,” he wisecracked.

The stars decided to talk to Richard Benjamin about taking over as director. Well known as an actor
(Goodbye, Columbus)
, Benjamin had recently
directed two period pieces,
My Favorite Year
and
Racing with the Moon
, doing particularly good work on the former. He was sent Edwards’s script to read before his preliminary meeting with Clint and Reynolds and remembers thinking it was long, a little “
diffuse,” but with some interesting undertones. At the meeting, however, Clint told him he thought it contained too many “long, complicated psychological speeches which were not in his movie style,” and that he had engaged his
Sudden Impact
writer, Joe Stinson, to do a rewrite. This—or some portion of it—he now pressed on Benjamin, telling him, however, that if there was anything that had been excised from Edwards’s script that he particularly liked they would certainly consider reintroducing it.

In the event, Benjamin found Clint not particularly receptive to the few such changes he proposed. But since time had been wasted in the wrangling with Edwards, pressure to begin shooting was mounting, and the director thought Stinson’s revision quite serviceable. So they forged ahead, using most of the actors Edwards had cast. The one new hire was Madeline Kahn, for the role that had briefly been Locke’s.

Kahn was excellent. So was Jane Alexander as Murphy’s plain, sensible secretary, not so hopelessly in love (as it turns out) with Speer. So were Rip Torn and Tony Lo Bianco as over-the-top gang bosses. The inherent problem with the movie was an incoherently complex plot, involving, of all things, underworld financial records that Murphy has stolen and …

Oh, forget it. No one was supposed to pay much attention to that. All eyes were supposed to be focused on the stars and their banter. They had some good moments. Clint, for example, got to use upscale words like “chagrin” and “ilk” in his dialogue, as if Speer were taking a night-school course to improve his vocabulary. He also got to send up his image with improbably cool competence in the killing arts. Reynolds had his fair share of impudent dialogue (“You’re supposed to flush that, not smoke it,” he says, eyeing a hood’s El Ropo cigar). And there is a merry moment when both stars draw huge, wildly phallic pistols and competitively evaluate each other’s equipment. But the heat promised by the movie’s title rarely climbs higher than lukewarm, and that’s mostly Reynolds’s fault.

He’s smooth and competent, not at all self-referential, and many reviewers would ultimately compliment him on a return to lost form. But in its making he threw the picture off stride. It was shot more or less in order, and the first—perhaps best—scene went wonderfully. It is set at a lunch counter, where the estranged Speer and Murphy meet by chance. They are seated at the farthest ends of the counter, snarling at one another,
when some yeggs enter and proceed to beat up Murphy, while his sometime friend looks on blandly, refusing to help him until, in the course of the fracas, his coffee gets spilled.

Unfortunately, Reynolds’s jaw was broken in the melee, and he developed temporomandibular joint disorder, a disease that disturbs one’s sense of balance. As a result, he took a fall in his trailer and thereafter became “distracted” in Benjamin’s word, nervous and cautious about subsequent action scenes. He found loud gunshots, of which there were many in this movie, particularly unsettling. As production wore on he seemed to become more and more withdrawn, and Clint suspected what Reynolds later admitted in his autobiography, that he had become temporarily addicted to the painkiller Percodan. In short, he made everybody anxious, and in a role that was supposed to energize the film, he often had the opposite effect.

Clint, according to Benjamin, did everything possible to compensate for his costar’s derelictions. The director said he had never worked on a film where the star was so frugal, so selfless in relation to the camera or so helpful to a director confronting serious, unexpected problems. He describes, for example, going to Clint a few days before starting to see if he had attended to his wardrobe, and being informed that it was taken care of.

“When did you get it?” the director asked.

“I got it yesterday. I think it cost about four hundred dollars. Come and look at it. I got it at Brooks Brothers. They had it on sale.” He grinned happily. “The clothes are the same. Those coats in the thirties and these coats are all the same—the hats are all the same.”

In a world where tens of thousands can be spent on a star’s wardrobe, which tends to go home with him or her after the production finishes, this was a revelation to Benjamin. Then when it was time to change a setup, he was startled to see Clint grab a cable and start dragging it to the next position before any of the crew members moved. Time being money, the star was not above setting an example for them.

On another occasion the only take Benjamin had made of a Clint close-up came back from the lab scratched and, rather shamefacedly, the director told him they’d have to do it over. Clint, however, looked at it in the projection room and told him not to worry. It was a short night shot that they would print dark anyway; nobody would ever see the scratch.

Clint’s lack of selfishness, his predilection for throwing scenes to other actors—partly out of generosity, partly out of a serene confidence in the force of his own presence—had by this time been much commented upon by coworkers, as was his preference for seeing himself underlit,
but it came as a surprise to Benjamin. One time he set up a shot in which the camera moved in a half circle around him, to which the star made no objection until the midpoint of the camera rehearsal when he muttered, “Oh, God.” “What?” Benjamin inquired. “Well, you’re gonna end up on the moth side of me.” “The moth side?” “The light side,” said Clint, where such illumination as the shot contained would be fully perceived by the lens, where, if there were any flying insects present, they would congregate. He had wanted—as he generally does, when it is at all feasible—backlight.

His genial spirit was put to its largest test by a gun battle in a warehouse between the two leads and the massed forces of gangsterdom. It was going to be noisy and complicated, and Benjamin had meticulously preplanned every shot for a schedule consuming four nights. Reynolds, however, went to Clint and told him he did not think he was physically up to the sequence. They were now on location in downtown Los Angeles, and Clint took an hour-long walk with his old friend through the deserted streets, trying to reassure him.

Afterward, Clint told Benjamin, “You’ve got one night. This guy’s falling apart.” Benjamin had perhaps a hundred setups in mind, with the eye lines of the actors’ exchanging shots all carefully matched. Clint proposed radical simplification. First of all, he said, don’t waste a lot of time lighting—just keep it low and simple. It used to drive Don Siegel crazy, he recalls, when people would start hanging extra scrims on the lights at the last moment: “Half the time they just fall off anyway.” Next, concentrate on Burt; “We can do my shit later.” Finally, in Clint’s recounting, he told Benjamin, “All you have to do is get the general geography of the scene right, and then fire off a lot of rounds.” He thinks he may also have quoted another Siegelism to the director: “You don’t want to get paralysis from analysis.”

It’s very simple, really. Once the audience knows where everyone’s starting point in the sequence is, knows where they stand in relationship to one another, they can thereafter move almost randomly without confusing the viewers. So Benjamin grabbed shots of all the actors ducking, loading, firing, looking and shooting left, right and straight ahead, then moving in various directions from their starting positions. Mixed and matched in the cutting room with cutaways to shattering glass, squibs exploding in the walls—all the familiar whatnots of a big gunfight—it was impossible for anyone to tell for certain if a shot and the reaction to it were perfectly matched or not. Indeed, Benjamin thinks the sequence has more energy than his original plan might have delivered.

Benjamin soon returned Clint’s support in kind. Since Kansas City at the time in which the picture was set was a famous jazz center, Lennie
Niehaus was engaged to write a score in that idiom. One night when Benjamin was working late in his office at Malpaso, Clint happened by. “You want to hear something?” he asked, and took him into his office where he played a nice boogie-woogie riff of Niehaus’s. “I don’t know if he was asking me something or telling me something,” Benjamin says, but he inquired if Clint wanted to play in the movie. “I don’t know, I don’t know if I’m good enough,” he replied. “Well, it sounds great to me,” the director said, and thus encouraged, Clint played on camera and later joined the professional musicians at their scoring session.

There, though, Clint had trouble with one or two passages and always mindful of cost, perhaps embarrassed to look amateurish in the presence of people like Joe Williams, the great jazz singer who was there to lay down the title song, was ready to quit: “We’re wasting time here; I’ll never get it.” To which Benjamin replied, “Yes, you will. You’ll get this.” And he did, much to his pleasure. “That seemed so important to him, to play on the album,” the director adds.

Clint had one last surprise for him. When the picture was finally pulled together, he and Benjamin ran it in a screening room. At the end, Clint asked the director, “Do you like it?”

“I like it” came the reply.

“I like it, too.” Pause. “Let’s ship it.”

Benjamin could not believe his ears. In his experience, the director’s cut was more a beginning than an end, the basis for many test screenings and arguments.

Of course, this is a perquisite available to Clint Eastwood and to very few others, though in this case discretion was distinctly the better part of valor. Both Clint and Benjamin implicitly understood that there was nothing more to be done with
City Heat
, no retakes, no stroke of postproduction brilliance, that might transform it into something more than it was, a largely agreeable, entirely forgettable movie that did not deliver the sizzle, buzz and blockbuster grosses the studio had expected from Clint and Burt. Audiences treated it as a sort of second-choice movie, something to see if the hit police comedy of the 1984 Christmas season, Eddie Murphy’s
Beverly Hills Cop
, was sold out. “Disappointment”—studiospeak not for a failure to make money, but for a failure to live up to inflated expectations—was expressed by a Warners spokesman.

Clint kept his feelings about the film to himself. He went off and made another movie—
Pale Rider
—as
City Heat
was being prepared for release and later did little to publicize it. He was much more interested in “
The
Clint Eastwood Magical Respectability and European Accolade and Adulation Tour” as John Vinocur dubbed it in the cover story—“Clint Eastwood, Seriously”—he wrote about it for
The New York Times Magazine
. With one of the Warner Gulf Streams at his disposal, with Terry Semel and Lenny Hirshan at his side some of the time, this consumed two weeks in January 1985, including a visit to Paris where the Cinémathèque had been running a retrospective of his work since mid-December and where he received his chevalier of arts and letters medal (“I’m sorry I don’t speak French,” he said at the ceremony, “but I have enough trouble with English”), a stop at the Film Museum in Munich for another retrospective and then the first of his
Guardian
lectures in London, where the sponsoring newspaper’s coincident critical essay was headed “A Die-Hard Liberal behind the Magnum Image.”