The Big Screen (79 page)

No one could charge Clint Eastwood with not changing, and he is another filmmaker compelled to work as if Hollywood still existed and were waiting patiently to enact his wishes. It is an extraordinary journey, worthy of Dreiser, and possibly more interesting than Eastwood's films. Eastwood was born in San Francisco in 1930 and grew up middling poor, rather wild as the son of an itinerant father, but enjoying the good old movies. He did a spell of military service as a lifeguard, and it was his physique and his looks that got him into the Universal talent school.

He made a few movies in small parts and then won a regular role in the TV series
Rawhide
(1959–66), where he began to appreciate underplaying, and the prospect of directing. He went to Spain (for $15,000 and coach airfare) for the Italian director Sergio Leone and made the
Dollars
trilogy of films as the Man with No Name, iconic and superior to the point of camp, raffishly dressed and hysterically tight-lipped, but eventually these films gave him authority and stardom in America. (They now seem an early sign of the Esperanto of action films: very noisy, but like silent films in that so little of interest was said. And yet, that cheerful din gave us the two
Terminator
films, the best things James Cameron has done, and the divided soul of Arnold Schwarzenegger, a presenter of self in everyday life.)

By 1971, Eastwood had directed his first film,
Play Misty for Me
, an efficient suspense story that flirted with mocking his macho image. In the same year, for director Don Siegel (an important mentor), he made
Dirty Harry
, which helped introduce the loner or rogue cop with a taste for lengthy one-liners, though Harry owed something to
Bullitt
(1968) and Steve McQueen—two San Francisco cops and two actors born just weeks apart.

In the 1970s he made a franchise out of
Dirty Harry
, he did a couple of films with an orangutan, and a good Western with a lot of unexpected humor,
The Outlaw Josey Wales
(1976), after he had fired Philip Kaufman as his director when Kaufman seemed not to share Eastwood's preference for first-take shooting. There was growing interest in Eastwood and the journey he had made, but I'm not sure the public at large, or the critical community, yet rated him as too different from Sylvester Stallone (and
Rocky
was acclaimed years before Eastwood got prizes). So the flash-forward can be made very dramatically.

Eastwood has won Best Director and Best Picture Oscars for
Unforgiven
(1992) and
Million Dollar Baby
(2004). He has received the Irving Thalberg Award and the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award, and he is a member of the Légion d'Honneur. He was mayor of Carmel in California (without party affiliation), and he is probably among the most highly esteemed Americans alive now. President Obama, in giving him an arts and humanities award, said his films were “essays in individuality, hard truths and the essence of what it means to be American.” Not even Eastwood would deny the care with which from the early 1980s he went about cultivating or rehabilitating his image (which does include having seven children by five different women). There is no crime in that, but the campaign for respect helps us understand the nature and determination of the man, and seldom fits with the outsider roles he played before the age of fifty.

So what is to be said about Eastwood the filmmaker? He is somewhere between a modest and a reluctant actor who understood Gary Cooper's treasured economy, though he has rivaled it very seldom and never had access to Cooper's inner anguish. As a director, he is at best efficient, economical, and quick. As an icon, he is often confused:
Unforgiven
is still talked about as an anti-Western, where men are mortal, flawed, and inept—until his character, Will Munny, reverts to being the angel of death (as if recalling Leone) at the end of the film and shoots down every enemy in sight. Eastwood has played heroic too many times, and entered into that aura so completely, that he lacks an edge of intelligent doubt that marks so many of the best directors. Still, as a director, he has made one outstanding film,
Mystic River
(2003, derived from a Dennis Lehane novel), where the quality of life penetrates recesses that the regular Eastwood hardly knows exist. The distance between
Play Misty for Me
and
Mystic River
is large enough to remind us how hard Eastwood studies. He can be earnest and dogged; there is even a hint in his recent years of Stanley Kramer in his appetite for important subjects. So, moving on from the orangutan, he has made films about Iwo Jima, Nelson Mandela, and J. Edgar Hoover under an increasing cloak of respectability.

But as a producer, he is without equal—and not just in his own time. He has worked independently a great deal. Even when he helped sustain Warner Bros. fiscally, he lived close to Carmel and had his own small world, Malpaso Productions, at the studio, along with his team, some of whom ended up being fired if they incurred his wrath. He made a fortune for himself and for his studios—his films are said to have grossed $1.68 billion domestically, and he is reported to have a net worth of $85 million. He has enabled several documentaries on jazz and popular music, and he has shown private generosity to people close to him. He is tough, limited yet aware of his limits, ambitious and cautious, practical and decision-oriented, and able to dress his essential conservatism in liberal language and gestures. He might have had a chance of running an old studio, or being president of the United States. But he has done something more than presidents can manage: he has continued to exist in that past where a movie star (or a leader) can be rich, honored, and beloved—trusted, even. It is not sensible to rate him as an artist, but his is exactly the type of career that old Hollywood wanted. There will never be anyone like him again.

In the previous chapter I considered Clio Barnard and Clint Eastwood, as if they might be contemporaries and colleagues. I'm sure they'd be polite if they met, but they do not have a lot in common. The public knows one and not the other; their degrees of “success” are worlds apart. Yet Barnard's one film has a depth of intelligence and emotion that I doubt Eastwood has considered. That doesn't mean she's a “genius” while he is just a classic entertainer, or that one label is harder to earn than the other. They are both of them dedicated to their attempts to communicate. I suspect there have been moments when Clint sought artistic prestige while Clio longed for a limo. And in this chapter, I want to explore that slippery ground where directors (or even producers) wonder if or how they are noticed.

Let me suggest someone who has a case for being the most effective director of his time. He was born in 1959 and his name is Tim Van Patten. There is a fair chance you have not heard of him, a reminder that, with television, you are not always watching, even if the set is on and your gaze is more or less given to the screen. Van Patten has never made a theatrical movie, but he has directed some of the best material of our time, twenty episodes of
The Sopranos
, more than anyone else. That's about sixteen hours of film (let's say eight feature films) in the years from 1999 to 2007. There are few movie directors who worked that steadily in those years for the big screen, and Van Patten was doing other work, too, as a director for hire (episodes of
Deadwood
,
The Wire
, and
Sex and the City
, among others). Any professional would say he did a very good job: his episodes were delivered on time, fitting their on-air slot; they maintained the several narratives lines of
The Sopranos
and kept up with its many characters; they had a tough, elegant, and ironic look, as applied to sex, violence, and the domestic interiors of this family, without venturing into what might be called personal expression. It was not the point of these episodes that the audience noticed individual style, directing, or a single personality (though Van Patten did share in an Emmy for another series,
The Pacific
). If there was an arresting or unusual episode, it usually came from a concept in the writing. There were other frequent directors for
The Sopranos
: John Patterson did thirteen episodes; John Coulter made twelve. There were other recognizable names (with credentials in the movie business) who directed: Steve Buscemi did four, and there were single episodes by Lee Tamahori (
Mulholland Falls
for the big screen), Peter Bogdanovich (
The Last Picture Show
), and Mike Figgis (
Leaving Las Vegas
). David Chase directed two episodes: the pilot and the finale.

Born in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1945 (and then raised in New Jersey), Chase was the man behind
The Sopranos
, after a career that had spent years on
The Rockford Files
and
Northern Exposure
, without making him known outside the television business. But by the time he came to
The Sopranos
, he was called its “creator,” a term that is generally too sweeping for the film industry. Moreover, Chase would say later that the series emerged from his own experiences growing up and was often rooted in his life—Tony's mother, Livia (Nancy Marchand), was said to be based on Chase's own mother. But his aim was to propose that a leader in organized crime might be a very ordinary man instead of an epic figure—thus at the start of the first series, Tony has decided to see a shrink (Lorraine Bracco) because he's afraid of being dysfunctional. He's depressed, a condition that never occurs to Jimmy Cagney in the 1930s or Michael Corleone in
The Godfather
.

We think of
The Sopranos
now as a certain success, not just the winner of twenty-one Emmys or what David Remnick in
The New Yorker
would call “the richest achievement in the history of television,” but a show that did so much to establish cable television: the average audience went from over three million on the first series to as high as twelve million. Still, nothing is certain at the start.

Chase had a deal with HBO to write and direct the pilot. But when he turned in the script, HBO hesitated: formed in 1972, the cable channel had developed slowly. Chase was worried about their commitment and looking to get some extra funding to turn that pilot into a movie for theaters. Only then did the channel decide to move ahead. Chase was an intense and untiring controller, and not the easiest leader of a team—but maybe he had his own anxieties about being dysfunctional, too. You can't be a creator for six series without a symbiotic exchange between you and your chief character.

Six series (and eighty-six episodes) sounds grand in hindsight, but it was never clear-cut at the time. Any TV series waits in trepidation for its first renewal; and every TV success is then under pressure to keep going after that because the revenue is so great, especially with the bonus of syndication and boxed DVDs.
The Sopranos
has been called a great modern novel (though it had more purchasers than any novel could dream of), but that doesn't mean Chase was always confident about its dramatic arc or literary shape. There were slow stretches on-screen, resting periods, and delays in its production. You could miss a run of episodes without losing touch. And yet a key to the show was that millions of people tried to watch every episode, and this was before we had easy access to storing television shows and watching them on demand at our convenience. Just as Hollywood was giving up the ghost on narrative, David Chase had created a serial, and found an audience eager for it. It had participant suspense, that old asset of the movies.
The Sopranos
also indicated the new leverage of cable television, with language, sexuality, and violence that the movie business (and that dinosaur, network television) were fearful of matching. By today, HBO has nearly thirty million subscribers (more than the number of people who go to the movies in a week).

I daresay Chase had fluctuating ideas about how to end his story, or whether any ending would satisfy his wish to deal with an “ordinary” man. After eighty-six episodes, life gets heightened or stressed. So many television series get crazier as they dig deeper into themselves but respond to the pressure to be different. Trails were laid for several ways of closing, but when it came to it, Chase directed the finale himself with an enigmatic fadeaway (one of the most stylistically self-conscious moments in all the seasons) that left us uncertain. Death might be coming, or another cup of coffee: it is the vagary of life itself, even if
The Sopranos
never gave a hint of being documentary, and rarely looked like anything except a movie from the 1970s. Said Chase:

How good was it? The answer hardly mattered if enough people had decided with David Remnick that it had vindicated and transformed television. I would say that Tony never became as commanding or as disturbing as Michael Corleone. But we should recall that the second part of
The Godfather
was itself an afterthought and an attempt to offset some of the reactions to the first film. (Both
The Godfather
and
The Sopranos
raised fears that anyone might think they represented all Italian Americans.) No question that David Chase was in charge—of writing, casting, and production of anything a controller noticed—but I don't think I know anything more about him than that. He's like that other Creator: he did an astonishing job, and did it quickly, and there it was, from “Let there be light” to De Niro's matching mauve shirts and ties in
Casino
. But you don't know the kind of person the creator was, and more or less he left the game for us to play with.

As a team effort,
The Sopranos
was beyond dispute, and it reminded us that, throughout its history, television has worked fuller and more cost-conscious days than the movies, with standing crews as ever-present as Chase himself. By the end of the show, Chase was reportedly on a salary of $15 million a season. He has talked about making a movie—is that like Tony seeking a shrink? Equally, by 2011, HBO was generating $1 billion a year from the international market alone.

In the same era, HBO has had many other series to proclaim:
Oz
and
Sex and the City
(which actually started before
The Soprano
s),
The Wire
,
Curb Your Enthusiasm
,
Entourage
,
Deadwood
,
Six Feet Under
,
Big Love
,
Boardwalk Empire
, and
True Blood
. To say nothing of a lively documentary enterprise and movies, many of which had a historical or biographical slant: I've mentioned
Conspiracy
already, but then there's
Introducing Dorothy Dandridge
(with Halle Berry);
Wit
(directed by Mike Nichols and starring Emma Thompson as a cancer patient);
John Adams
, a seven-part miniseries with Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney (directed by Tom Hooper);
Longford
(another Hooper film, written by Peter Morgan), with Samantha Morton and Andy Serkis as the Moors murderers, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, and Jim Broadbent as Lord Longford;
Citizen Cohn
, with James Woods as Roy Cohn; and
Barbarians at the Gate
, a pioneering account of modern business fraud, a trend that leads to
Too Big to Fail
(directed by Curtis Hanson), with William Hurt playing Hank Paulson.

It is probable that if you are reading this book, you subscribe to HBO, and to other “premium” channels: Showtime has created
Weeds
,
Dexter
, and
Homeland
; AMC made
Rubicon
, though that was so dense and enigmatic it failed to be renewed. David Chase is not the only creator—David Milch originated
Deadwood
, cocreated
NYPD Blue
with Steven Bochco, and introduced
Luck
with Michael Mann; David Simon created
Homicide: Life on the Street
(that was NBC) and
The Wire
;
Boardwalk Empire
comes from Terence Winter, who wrote twenty episodes of
The Sopranos
; Alan Ball devised
Six Feet Under
and
True Blood
(he also wrote the movie
American Beauty
);
Sex and the City
was originated by Darren Star.

Downton Abbey
was created by Julian Fellowes (who scripted Altman's
Gosford Park
). That show is an exception in that it played on PBS, but it reminds us how far the creative and business models for premium cable series are British. In fact,
Downton Abbey
feels like a BBC show, though actually it was made for Britain's commercial television network. But the old tradition of British drama or plays that were really films and of the serialization of classic literature is vital to the HBO model and what PBS in America called “Masterpiece Theatre.” Another landmark was
Brideshead Revisited
(1981), 659 minutes in 11 episodes, adapted from Evelyn Waugh by John Mortimer, and directed by Charles Sturridge and Michael Lindsay-Hogg. (It, too, was made by a commercial channel, Granada.) Maybe the best of all the BBC movies was
The Singing Detective
(1986), written by Dennis Potter, the finest playwright for British television, directed by Jon Amiel, and with Michael Gambon as Philip Marlow, a hospital-imprisoned writer of private-eye fiction unable to escape memories of his past. I'm not sure there has ever been anything more searching or troubling on being caught up in the movies than this six-part drama.

Now, it's hard to conceive of Alistair Cooke introducing
The Sopranos
in a Masterpiece format, but it is a mark of cultural failure that PBS has originated so few important or dangerous series, let alone things that smack of the actual, dysfunctional America, such as
The Sopranos
,
The Wire,
or
Big Love
. (By contrast,
The Singing Detective
dwells with such hurt, such mixed feelings, on the influence America has exerted on the world in its dreams.)