American Rebel (45 page)

Now it was Spielberg’s turn to open the envelope. The tension in the room was negligible. “And the Oscar goes to
… Martin Scorsese!”
Scorsese threw his hands up in mock disbelief, like someone at a surprise party who was tipped off in advance, and then bolted toward the
stage and his rendezvous with Oscar glory. Clint joined the standing ovation, his face frozen in a runner-up smile.

The Departed
won four of the five Oscars it was nominated for that night, including Best Picture, losing only Best Supporting Actor (Mark Wahlberg). When the final award was handed out (to Graham King as producer), the long evening came to an end, as did Clint’s latest, and perhaps last, chance to enter the pantheon of Best Actor Oscar winners. As the celebrity crowd left the building on their way to the various parties, with handshakes of congratulations flying through the crowd like a flock of birds madly flapping their wings, Clint and Ruiz quietly slipped away, unnoticed and unbothered, and headed home.

The next morning, back in Carmel, after breakfast and on the way to the golf course, Clint began formulating his next film.

    
T
wo more years would pass before another Clint Eastwood movie appeared. He was fast approaching eighty, and at last and inevitably, time seemed to be slowing his crank-’em-out pace. Increasingly, he spent his days on the golf course and looking after his business interests until, finally, he found two projects he wanted to do, one as director, and one more to act in—a last-chance effort to win that elusive Best Actor award.

The next one he chose to direct was
Changeling
.
^*
It was to be a joint venture between Imagine Entertainment, Universal, and Malpaso, making it the first film in fifteen years that a Clint project had no participation from Warner. In the aftermath of his double crash-and-burn Iwo Jima set, all sides had apparently agreed on a pause, if not a clean break, in the long-standing partnership.

The story of
Changeling
involves a woman who single-handedly takes on the corrupt L.A. police department over what she believes has been the kidnapping of her child by the authorities themselves. Stories of men (or women) alone who take on the system always appealed to Clint, and this one had some fresh angles he liked, not the least of which was that the hero happened to be a woman. He had had great
fortune with a emale lead in
Million Dollar Baby
and was eager to revisit that setup.

Based on a true story, the film originated in the 1970s, in a telephone tip that had come to TV scriptwriter and former journalist J. Michael Straczynski. Someone had informed him that officials were about to dispose of several potentially incriminating documents concerning a city council welfare hearing involving Christine Collins and her son’s disappearance. Intrigued, Straczynski did some research and wrote a screenplay based on what he had found.
The Strange Case of Christine Collins
was optioned several times but never got made. Twenty years later, in 1996, after a long and successful run in TV, Straczynski took another shot at the story. He wrote a new script in only about two weeks and got it to producer Ron Howard, who read it, liked it, optioned it through his Imagine Entertainment production, and fast-tracked it, intending to produce and direct it in 2007, immediately following the release of his
The Da Vinci Code
. But Howard opted instead to direct
Frost/Nixon
, then the prequel to
The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons
, so he and his partner, Brian Grazer, pitched
Changeling
to Clint in February 2007. He agreed to direct it, citing the script’s focus on its heroine, Collins, rather than the “Freddy Krueger” story of the crimes as the reason why.

He changed not a single word of Straczynski’s script and within weeks of the first cast reading, he was ready to shoot the film. Every available over-thirty actress had put herself up for the sure-to-win-an-Oscar-nomination part. Clint cast Angelina Jolie because, he later said, he thought her face was perfect for period films (as he had Swank’s for
Million Dollar Baby)
.

Production began on October 15, 2007, and was shot on location in and around Los Angeles, and principal photography was completed in just under thirty days. The atmosphere on the set was relaxed; Clint was in total and unchallenged control and able to easily guide his actors through their most intense moments. Angelina Jolie recalls how it was to work with Clint:

Six months later, on May 20, 2008, Clint debuted the film at Cannes, where it was enthusiastically received. Its distributor, Universal, then scheduled it for its big fall 2008 release. Even before the film’s spring French preview, a recharged Clint had already begun work on his next film, one that would bring him back to the front of the camera.

Like everything else in Hollywood, schedules are subject to a million different factors, any one of which can cause delays, sometimes interminable ones. Before
Changeling
had come his way, Clint had actually begun preproduction on another film,
The Human Factor
, a biography of Nelson Mandela, which, for one reason or another, had to be postponed for a year. After flying through production of
Changeling
, and with
The Human Factor
still delayed, Clint looked around for another project.
Gran Torino
came his way, and he decided that that was the one he would make to bring himself back as an actor.

The original script had been written by Nick Schenk, a popular TV actor (Butch the Janitor, on
Let’s Bowl)
, writer, and producer;
Gran Torino
was his first try at a screenplay. Schenk had actually written the script years earlier based on his experiences working at a Minnesota Ford assembly plant side by side with several Korean War veterans, who had returned from active duty loaded with prejudice and anger toward all Asians. While working and living in Minnesota, Schenk had discovered the Hmong, a mountain-based, migratory sect of Chinese, many of whom eventually relocated to Laos and fought on the American side during the so-called secret incursion against the Pathet Lao during the Vietnam War. After the Americans left in 1974, many Hmong wound up in Communist prison camps, while others came to America and set up communities in various cities.

Schenk (and his brother’s roommate, Dave Johannson) developed the screenplay, which set a Korean War widower against the Hmong, who have taken over his neighborhood. He is at first bitter and prejudiced toward the Hmong, seeing in them the reflection of the North Koreans and Chinese he battled during the war, but gradually he begins to learn about their culture, helps rescue the daughter of the
family next door from a violent street gang, and helps her brother resist being recruited by the same gang. In the end, the grizzled old vet makes the ultimate sacrifice to save the boy, in a top-heavy Christians-save-“savages” plot twist. The final scene is replete with crucifixion images that were affecting, important, and dramatic. But as Schenk found out prior to Clint’s involvement, the studios considered it completely unmarketable.

The main objection had been the age of the lead character, Polish-American Korean War veteran Walt Kowalski. The youth-dominated film industry—not just the makers but the audiences for whom they made their films—felt that such a story would have no audience; the Chinese were not a huge factor in ticket-buying demographics, and the elderly rarely went to the movies.

After receiving turn-down after turn-down, Schenk sent his screenplay to Warner producer Bill Gerber, who gave it to Clint, knowing he was actively searching for a project to replace
The Human Factor
. In Walt Kowalski (with the name’s distinctive echoes of Tennessee Williams’s celebrated bear-man in
A Streetcar Named Desire)
Clint found yet another reluctant, one-last-time character who is not afraid to use force against those he feels are his enemies and to defend those he thinks are his friends. In many ways Kowalski was an amalgam of the Man with No Name, Dirty Harry, and William Munny, here aged and cynical but willing and able to fight on whenever the need arose.
^*

Using local Hmong on location in Michigan, where Warner, after green-lighting the film, had suggested moving the shoot to take advantage of tax incentives, Clint blew through the shoot in his standard thirty days, and
Gran Torino
made it into theaters by December 12, only two months after
Changeling
had opened. It had been rushed into limited release to qualify for the 2008 Oscar race, and went into wide release in January 2009. This step-by-step release pattern, known as “platforming,” is used to build word of mouth for films that don’t have an immediate and apparent appeal to a large audience; it was augmented here by a statement that was “leaked” to the press and that flooded the Internet, in which Clint was supposed to have said that this
was his farewell performance as an actor.
^*
Whether he said it or not—and later he claimed he idn’t say it
exactly
that way—the reason was not hard to see; even if this film wasn’t his last, it was almost certainly his last chance to win a Best Actor Oscar, and to do it in highly dramatic fashion.
^†

Gran Torino
received out-and-out raves, among the best of his career. The
New York Times
said that “Clint Eastwood has slipped another film into theaters and shown everyone how it’s done.” The
Wall Street Journal
called Clint’s work in the film “the performance of a lifetime,” and the
Los Angeles Times
called it “a move audiences are wise to follow.” Andrew Sarris, in the
New York Observer
, proclaimed that “Clint makes my day as aging avenging angel … he caps his career as both a director and an actor with his portrayal of a heroically redeemed bigot of such humanity and luminosity as to exhaust my supply of superlatives … the result is a genuinely pioneering production very much worth seeing for the emotional thunderbolt that it is.” Dozens more were just as enthusiastic.

Audiences too responded to the film, and it, rather than
Changeling
, became the sleeper crowd-pleaser of the Christmas–New Year season. Its box-office take grew every week until its wide release quickly sent it over the $100 million gross.

In early January the Oscar nominees were announced, and to the surprise of many and shock of some, both Clint films were all but ignored. Angelina Jolie was nominated for Best Actress for
Changeling
and Tom Stern was nominated for Best Cinematography, but there was nothing for Clint’s direction of either film or, even more outrageously, for his performance in
Gran Torino
. The film itself, like
Changeling
, was left out of the Best Picture category, which included
Steven Daldry’s
The eader
, David Fincher’s
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
, Danny Boyle’s
Slumdog Millionaire
, Ron Howard’s
Frost/Nixon
, and Gus Van Sant’s
Milk
. None of these films held either the resonance or the grand career summation that Clint’s
Gran Torino
did.
^*
The cocktail parties and Internet debates started immediately—the Academy was too old; the Academy was too ignorant; Clint had passed his “darling” phase and returned to making movies that only the public liked; nobody went to see films about the Chinese; Clint was too old-looking; Clint was too old; the film’s mood was anti-Obama’s national sense of uplift; the film was too negative and prejudicial.

    
A
nd on it went, the low din of whispers that had followed Clint around for his entire career, like Shakespeare’s infamous sound and fury. It was all part of the game, he knew, but it never failed to prick his very tough if not always thick skin. But he couldn’t let it bother him. As Robert Frost, one of Clint’s favorite poets, expressed in his famous poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” he felt that he too had miles to go before he slept. Already he had a half-dozen new projects dancing like juggler’s balls in his head; the Nelson Mandela pic, with his buddy Morgan Freeman in the starring role; a biopic of Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, tentatively titled
First Man;
a film for DreamWorks called
Hereafter;
a jazz documentary about Dave Brubeck, another one about Tony Bennett … there was even talk of yet another Dirty Harry sequel. That had made him laugh:
“Dirty Harry VI
! Harry is retired. He’s standing in a stream, fly-fishing. He gets tired of using the pole—and BA-BOOM! Or Harry is retired, and he catches bad guys with his walker? Maybe he owns a tavern. These guys come in and they won’t pay their tab, so Harry reaches below the bar. ‘Hey guys, the next shot’s on me.’”

While his career moves remained uncertain, Clint’s personal life had settled down. Dina regularly organized huge weekend outings for all the Eastwoods. She had performed the mighty task of bringing the entire Eastwood clan together, the mothers, the sons, the daughters, even some of the ex-girlfriends, give or take an unforgiving one or
two. Even Maggie, who lives in the same area and remains Clint’s business artner, often attends. Both agree they get along much better now that they’re not married. Today the Eastwood ranch feels like a vast homestead, like the Kennedys’ Hyannis Port, or the Bushes’ Kennebunkport, or even Bick Benedict’s Texas ranch in George Stevens’s 1956 epic,
Giant
, released after James Dean, its star, was killed in a car crash. Clint had appeared in his first movie the same year Dean died. A lot of movies and movie stars had come and gone since then, but Clint was still going strong, willing and able to play the game. He was in no hurry to get to those woods, lovely, dark and deep.