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2000 |
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 Clint Eastwood as "Dirty" Harry Callahan |
My Son |
Eastwood's 'Harry' wasn't so dirty
on the day he met one youngster
By JOHN STANLEY
of TheColumnists.com
WHY IS IT that every time I recall a major event from my life experience, Russ, that son of mine, seems to serve as a centerpiece to the recollection? I guess it's because I decided, when he was just a fair-haired youth, to make him as much a part of my own life and expose him to as many different things as I could. Treat him as a pal as well as a son.
That's why I used to take him to movie screenings when I was a newspaper reporter, and why I'd sometimes take him on my trips to Los Angeles when I was interviewing celebrities and movie-makers. I especially remember the ill-fated trip when Russ thought he was going to meet Phil Silvers, whom he adored because at that time Channel 2 was rerunning all the "Sergeant Bilko" TV episodes, and he thought Silvers was the funniest man alive. For some reason Silvers decided not to be interviewed and I remember Russ cried that entire evening in our hotel room, my flimsy excuses for the actor serving no relief from his severe disappointment.
Anyway, I gotta tell you about Clint Eastwood and Russ. It was May 1973 and this delightful guy named Bob Yeager was working as unit publicist on "Magnum Force," the second in the "Dirty Harry" film series. A unit publicist is someone who makes sure a picture gets plenty of media coverage while it's being made, and Yeager was an old-timer who knew how to milk every bit of publicity out of a picture while it was on location. He'd come around to the San Francisco Chronicle in person one afternoon to introduce himself, and we became immediate friends.
There have been only a handful of publicists, out of all those I've met, that I developed a lasting friendship with. Bob was different from other publicists, and my all-time favorite. He had a sense of humor that matched my own and an easy-going style that made you feel like he was your uncle. I liked him so much after I had finished writing my story on Eastwood ("as they say in the margarine business," he told me, "that was quite a spread") that I had invited him to come over to the house for dinner. After regaling us with some great behind-the-scenes stories of his many years as a Hollywood movie publicist, Yeager had invited me to spend the upcoming Saturday on location with Eastwood--and Russ, drag yourself along too.
So there we were, standing on this street corner in a part of lower Nob Hill, with Yeager introducing Russ to Clint Eastwood. That alone must have traumatized the kid, who had seen Clint in the first "Dirty Harry" movie and was already a solid movie buff. But it was the next moment I'll never forget. Clint shook hands with Russ, who was all of 8 that day. With those glinty eyes of his, Clint looked down at the boy as if he was one of the Dead End Kids, or maybe Dennis the Menace, or some impish troublemaker who was about to get the comeuppance that he deserved.
Slowly and deliberately, Clint unbuttoned the coat of his dark-blue suit, flipped back the lapel with disdain and slid a shiny new .44 Magnum revolver from its holster. Brandishing the weapon with the barrel pointed skyward, he suddenly handed it butt first to my son.
"Hey, Russ, take care of this for a while, will ya?" Clint said.
Russ was barely able to keep from dropping the powerhouse weapon as it thudded into his wriggling fingers. Once he had control of it, though, he looked up into Clint's face with this determined, I'm-in-control look. Clint kept giving him the steely-eyed stare right back, then broke into a broad smile and both of them laughed their heads off.
There was another surprise "Eastwood moment" for me and Russ. It was 1976 and a new park called Great America was opening in Santa Clara, Ca. Russ and I were standing in a crowd of thousands on opening night, waiting for a parade to pass by, when I felt a towering presence next to me. I turned and froze. Standing at our side, just by sheer chance, was Clint Eastwood. I guess he'd been invited to attend the event like the rest of us. He even remembered Russ' name and shook his hand for the second time, giving him that same steely-eyed look that comes second nature to Clint. Life is really strange sometimes.
There were some other images about Clint, and his visit to the Bay Area in the summer of 1973, that I still remember vividly. And some of them also have to do with that wicked looking .44 Magnum, the handgun he would brandish not only in "Magnum Force" but in "The Enforcer," "Sudden Impact" and "The Dead Pool," sequels he made in the years to come in San Francisco.
Here's one image: Clint standing on a hilltop on the Tiburon side of the Bay, holding the revolver in both hands and sighting along the barrel onto the skyline of San Francisco. The "Magnum Force" crew was on the hilltop with him, and for a brief moment the $4 million production had come to a standstill while Clint took aim and dry fired. Click. Aim. Click.
Eastwood walked over to a man standing behind the camera and handed the weapon to him. "Here, Ted," he said with some put-on enthusiasm. "Get the feel of it. She's got a real kick when you fire her."
Ted shook his head, wanting to have nothing to do with the Magnum.
"Jesus," he said, "I get nervous around guns, Clint. You know that. You know these things make me cringe. You do the shooting, I'll just direct."
It was a commonly known fact around the set that Ted Post was gunshy. Yet, ironically, he had directed countless episodes of "Rawhide" (which was where he and Clint had first met in the late 1950s) and other TV westerns, and had also helmed the ultra-violent Eastwood feature "Hang 'em High." The irony of this was not lost on Eastwood, who appeared to be purposely, though good-naturedly, toying with the director's personal fears about firearms.
Fear and admiration . . . they were equal parts of the mystique of the .44 Magnum handgun that crossed my mind that day. From one point of view, a well-oiled, glistening, dynamic piece of weaponry that San Francisco cop Harry Callahan used in "Dirty Harry" to blast apart hold-up men and a sadistic sniper known as the Scorpio Killer. A powerful weapon protecting us from scumbags and low-life lawbreakers . . . in the hands of a man who didn't hesitate to use it and who thought the law didn't always work to the advantage of those who wanted it preserved.
From another point of view, it was a wicked, ugly hunk of metal, firing slugs that inflicted rending wounds and jarring its user with tremendous impact . . . in the hands of a man who had almost a fascist attitude that sometimes you had to get mean and trigger-happy to enforce the law effectively, and maybe he'd gone too far.
Two ways of looking at the Magnum, and two ways of looking at the character of Harry Callahan.
When the critics started mouthing off that maybe Callahan went too far to enforce the law, Clint never had any trouble responding: "Harry is basically for good, and he's got a morality that's higher than society's morality. He hates bureacracy and he thinks the law is often wrong, or not enforced when it should be. If that's fascist . . . those critics are full of it."
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They liked to label Eastwood a "superstar," even in the Warner Bros. handouts being written for "Magnum Force," but Bob Yeager told me that of all the stars he knew, Clint was the last to act like a superstar.
"There's that easy-going air about Clint when he arrives in the mornings, but there's also a feeling that he'll broach no nonsense or unnecessary delays. He expects everyone to be ready, and so far the picture is on time, meeting its budget. Clint's never cared much for the Hollywood system of film-making, he feels there's too much waste. He fought hard to retain absolute control over his own productions through Malpaso Productions. The studio puts up the bread, but I guarantee you, they don't tell Clint or his producer, Bob Daley, how to make pictures."
Clint Eastwood: An easy-going guy, relaxed, soft-spoken, who only generates unpleasantness in his roles, usually as the laconic, cheroot-smoking, unshaven Man With No Name in the spaghetti Westerns, or as a stubborn rebel bucking one systerm or another in "Kelly's Heroes" and "Coogan's Bluff."
During the making of "Magnum Force," he always ate lunch with the cast and crew, overseeing everything through his dark glasses, speaking in that soft voice of his only when necessary. Afterward he always wandered over to his portable living van, removed the dark glasses and thumbed through newspapers as he gobbled down a handful of cashews and peanuts.
On the day I was there, he was eager to talk about the cop creation, a role that had been turned down by Frank Sinatra before Clint accepted it.
"Sure, Harry Callahan is a romantic figure, a hero despite his anti-hero overtones," he said. "Audiences identify with him because he's obsessed with the well-being of the victims of crime. If Callahan has to buck the mayor, the police commissioner and the supervisors, so be it. Audiences recognize Harry as a maverick cop who was trying to take a killer off the streets, and they saw him being thwarted and they had extra reason to be on his side. Law and order isn't the simple thing it once was, in fact, it's always getting harder for law enforcement officers to fulfill their roles. Red tape, restrictions, an attitude that everyone has equal rights. Sometimes even the criminal. Harry would argue that point--with his Magnum."
Even as it was being made, Eastwood defended "Magnum Force" as "not a sequel just for the sake of a sequel. I've waited two years to find the right story, one which would make Callahan work, and which would show some new sides to him. And this is it. You know, I consider myself lucky to have independence and still be making studio pictures. Warner Bros. is leaving us alone, as it should be. If the studio could have had its way, I'm sure we'd have ended up on the backlot street, and the film might have looked like a TV show. There's nothing like a genuine set and genuine location to generate energy and realism."
Eastwood admitted that he wanted to continue directing some of his own pictures as well as act in them. "I'm faster than hell as a director. I hate movies that take too long to make. I never did like sitting around waiting for a cinematographer to get all the lights set, and then have him change his mind. And there we all sit while the production dollars are disappearing into nowhere. I try to get it on the first take if I can. Any other way is a waste of time and energy--and talent."
There has to be an inner energy to a film, he said. "If you ponder or intellectualize, the film slows down. You've got to have a concept in mind when you walk onto the location and then you swing with it. That's how I felt with 'High Plains Drifter' and how I felt with 'Breezy.'"
Is finding good Eastwood scripts a breeze? "No, never. They have to be tailor-made, and that's not easy. The characters I play may seem simple on the surface, but they're not easy to write for. 'High Plains Drifter' is the only thing I've done that comes close to the Italian spaghetti westerns, yet it took me years to find the script. And then it required heavy rewriting."
Eastwood returned to the hilltop, sliding into an unmarked police car. A camera was mounted on the hood along with a bank of lights. Ted Post told him he was to drive the car along the roadway below, and explained the action. Clint nodded as Post rushed back to talk to his cinematographer.
"Ted's got an inner energy that I usually don't find in directors," Clint said. "Inner energy is what makes a film-maker good. When he walks in each morning, it's as if this is his first morning on a movie location. That's infectious and pays off with people who make movies."
My last memory of Eastwood was of him scowling like Harry Callahan and checking to see that his Magnum was loaded and ready. Post bent down to double check the camera angle. With his eye still glued to the viewfinder, he slapped his hand on his knee. "Jesus, Clint, what an angle. What a beautiful angle."
Oh yeah, there's one last thing about that unit publicist, Bob Yeager, that you've got to know about. About five years later his son called me up one afternoon at the Chronicle to tell me that his father was dead. Bob had just finished working as unit publicist on a picture and was returning to his house for the first time in many weeks. He walked into the bedroom and discovered it was being burglarized. One of the burglars killed him instantly, with one bullet. From a handgun.
Yeah,
life is really strange sometimes.
© 2000 by John Stanley.
The new edition of John Stanley's "Creature Features" guide is now available through most booksellers.
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