The Clint Eastwood Archive

Long awaited book on the making of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly due soon

2012-01-26T19:38:00.000Z

Last week I was contacted by Dr. Peter Hanley, author of the forthcoming book The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - A tribute to the experts behind the scenes. The Clint Eastwood Archive was proud to be asked to help contribute towards this book and of course, only too happy to help. Peter intends to keep me right up to date as the production nears completion. In the meantime, here are some of the things we can look forward to.

The aim of this book project is essentially to document this classic film in great detail. Highlights will include over 20 interviews with cast and crew, more than 140 rare behind-the-scenes stills, and detailed analysis of the historical background (including numerous historical comparison photos, sketches), documentation of the film locations, lobby cards, posters and more.

INTERVIEWS WITH CAST AND CREW

An extensive volume of information, amounting to over 40,000 words, has been gained by the generous input of cast and crew. The following were interviewed on one or more occasions: Tonino Delli Colli (director of photography), Franco Di Giacomo (camera operator), Sergio Salvati (assistant camera operator), Eros Bacciucchi (special effects), Giovanni Corridori (assistant special effects), Ennio Morricone (music), Bruno Battisti D’Amario (guitar), Carlo Leva (assistant art director), Elisabetta Simi (wife of Carlo Simi, art dir.), Carla Leone (wife of Sergio Leone), Giancarlo Santi (assistant director), Fabrizio Gianni (assistant director), Eugenio Alabiso (editor), Luciano Vincenzoni (story/script), Eli Wallach (the Ugly), Silvana Bacci (actress in deleted scene), Chelo Alonso (actress), Ricardo Palacios (actor in deleted scene), Alberto Lardani (son of Iginio Lardani, titles), and more . . .

EXTENSIVE COLLECTION OF STILLS

The book will be lavished with numerous stills, including over 140 behind-the-scenes stills, most of which have been scanned from original negatives or stills and not previously published. The format of the hard-covered book will be about 28 x 26 cm, which will allow much space for large glossy photos (on high-quality glossy paper). Each still will be accompanied by a detailed legend.

LOBBY CARDS & POSTERS

An extensive collection of mostly Italian, as well as Spanish, French and German lobby cards and posters will be dispersed throughout the book.

FILM LOCATIONS

The shooting locations will be presented in the form of “comparison” photos, taken using a small aperture and a tripod-mounted camera. All location photos will be accompanied by 3D GPS coordinates, as well as a vivid description of the terrain and comments from Spanish locals.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The vast majority of the American Civil War (1861- 1865) was fought in the East, in states such as Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, whereas Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was, by definition of a western, set in the West. In 1862, though, there was a Civil War battle lasting one day on the Rio Grande, led on the Confederate side by the drunken General Sibley. This battle was followed by several days of fighting in Glorieta Pass. These relatively small engagements did not escape the meticulous preproduction research of Sergio Leone and colleagues, who made numerous references to Sibley's 1862 New Mexico campaign. A brief outline of this campaign and its “appearances” in the The Good, the Bad and the Ugly are highlighted in the book.

DELETED SCENES

In collaboration with expert Ulrich Angersbach, a detailed description of cut scenes will be provided in the book. The legendary cut “Socorro” scene will be reconstructed with the help of stills and interviews with actors involved in this sequence. In addition, a synopsis of the original script for the complete film will be provided and differences between the script and film will be elucidated.

ATTENTION TO DETAILS

One of the characteristics of a Sergio Leone film, especially The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is attention to detail. Historical details of the Civil War period were closely studied and reproduced on the wide screen, albeit with embellishments. Numerous examples of this attention to detail will be presented throughout the book.

Conversations with Clint: Paul Nelson's Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood 1979-1983

2012-01-26T18:14:00.004Z

A belated happy new year to everyone. Sorry I did not post my usual christmas wishes last year, but it has been a very busy time for me. However, I can start the new year here with a very special book that we started promoting way back in 2011.

Long considered lost, these extensive interviews between legendary Rolling Stone journalist Paul Nelson and Clint Eastwood were discovered after Nelson's death in 2006.

Clint Eastwood has forged a remarkable career as a movie star, director, producer and composer. These newly discovered conversations with legendary journalist Paul Nelson return us to a point when, still acting in other people’s films, Eastwood was honing his directorial craft on a series of inexpensive films that he brought in under budget and ahead of schedule. Operating largely beneath the critical radar, he made his movies swiftly and inexpensively. Few of his critics then could have predicted that Eastwood the actor and director would ever be taken as seriously as he is today. But Paul Nelson did.

The interviews were conducted from 1979 through 1983. Eastwood talks openly and without illusions about his early career as an actor, old Hollywood, and his formative years as a director, his influence and what he learned along the way as an actor—lessons that helped him become the director he is today. Conversations with Clint provide a fresh and vivid perspective on the life and work of this most American of movie icons.

I spent most of the latter half of 2011 excitedly waiting for the arrival of this book. After several conversations with Editor Kevin Avery, my expectations were certainly running high. So when Conversations with Clint Paul Nelson's Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood, 1979-1983 arrived, I wasted little time in uncovering some new stories from this interesting period of Eastwood’s career. I have to admit, once I had started reading, I struggled to put the book down. Yes, I realise that any other long-time Eastwood fan might endure the same problem, but it had been a very long time since I had been so engrossed. Perhaps it was because the interviews were retrospective and from my era? The book wastes little time or space for photos, its pages are comprehensive and packed (from cover to cover) with solid one-to-one interviews. Eastwood seems incredibly at ease throughout, an iconic figure that is both interesting and intellectual, but above all, he remains a realist. This fascinating compilation of interviews cover a five year period, perhaps not his must fruitful in terms of box office receipts, but certainly a period which covered more personal films such as Bronco Billy and Honkytonk Man. Nelson naturally unravels the transformation and maturity in the actor/director as his career and life progress into more challenging areas. Nelson also allows Eastwood to answer in his own relaxed style and pace which, as a result, brings out witty, sensitive and philosophical responses. The conversations between Eastwood and Nelson are so relaxed and informal; you almost feel the urge to engage in the wonderful exchanges. Paul Nelson's Conversations with Clint is an exemplary read, and a praiseworthy piece of work on the part of Editor Kevin Avery who has collated it in such wonderful fashion. A 5 star read that I would recommend to all readers, regardless of whether you are an Eastwood fan or share an interest of film in general. Superb!

ISBN: 9781441165862

288 Pages, paperback

Please contact Continuum to order your copy NOW!

Reviews

Kevin Avery has performed a great service to film lovers by bringing to light Paul Nelson’s remarkable interviews with Clint Eastwood. Nelson was an appreciator of Eastwood in the seventies, before he had won wide critical recognition. In these fascinating and wide-ranging conversations, the actor-director discusses with complete candor both the art of his films and the realities of filmmaking in Hollywood.

- Andrew Sarris, Author of "Notes on the Auteur Theory" (1962)

"Paul Nelson was the first serious film aficionado who, way back in the early '70s, turned me on to the importance of Clint Eastwood as an actor, filmmaker and American icon. He showed me the S&W Magnum .44 he kept under a pile of sweaters in his closet. ‘Same as Dirty Harry,’ he said, explaining that if he was going to write about men with guns he had to know how it felt in his hand. We were both devoted to F. Scott Fitzgerald and hoping that Clint Eastwood would play Gatsby in the upcoming film, which, of course, he didn't." “The repartee between these two straight shooters is more revealing of the inner workings of Hollywood and the creative process of Clint Eastwood than anything I've ever read before.”

-Elliott Murphy, singer-songwriter

"At a time when most critics didn’t take Clint Eastwood seriously, he had no admirer more prescient or loving than the late Paul Nelson. And Nelson—still insufficiently appreciated for his stubborn indifference to fashionability, but a smoke-wreathed legend to his 1970s colleagues—will never have a posthumous rescuer more devoted and scrupulous than Kevin Avery. Unguarded, searching, and occasionally very funny, the uniquely intimate interviews collected in Conversations With Clint morph as we read into the ideal script for a lost Eastwood movie on the nature of friendship. I’m sure Paul would be pleased that the alternate title that kept springing to mind was that of a John Ford Western: Two Rode Together.”

-Tom Carson, critic for GQ and author of Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter

“This is what happens when an artist interviews an artist: Nelson’s acute critical engagement with Eastwood’s films yields more insight from the moviemaker than any reader could have hoped for. Can a collection of interviews be called poignantly brilliant? This one is.”

-Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly

“I found that Conversations with Clint is invaluable reading, not just because it’s a uniquely in-depth series of interviews with someone who always had a sense of himself as an enduring figure. It also takes us inside the head of Paul Nelson—the interviewer himself—whose states of mind complete the story. The best interviews have always been two-sided—a conversation—and Conversations is just that: a compelling look at an extended eyeball-to-eyeball encounter, complete with blinks and flinches.”

-Elvis Mitchell, host of KCRW’s The Treatment

“An amazing find! Hip journalist Paul Nelson's lengthy, detailed, casual yet riveting, long-believed lost conversations with the iconic director-producer-star Clint Eastwood, who has had one of the most extraordinary careers in the history of the American screen. A must for any true film lover.”

-Peter Bogdanovich, director, writer, actor, critic

“Paul Nelson’s resurrected ‘lost’ interviews represent deep-dish Clint. Nelson recognized the magnitude of the actor-director’s talents earlier than most—Eastwood had only made it up to Sudden Impact in 1983 by the time of the final interview—and they clearly had an easy rapport. The result sees the star opening up on his early struggles, how he learned from observing on Rawhide, his close collaborations with Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, money, politics, celebrity, and why he prefers early Bergman and Kurosawa to their later films. Clint has given many interviews, but this is one of his best, definitely of great interest to anyone who takes his work seriously.”

-Todd McCarthy, critic for The Hollywood Reporter

Eastwood consistently provides subtle insight into the life of an actor and his decision making process speaking frankly about what he saw in roles or projects, and what he thought of the results.
-Offbeat (New Orleans)

Nelson failed to finish or publish any features based on these lengthy interviews, which are valuable for their insights into Eastwood's mind and developing art during a crucial transitional period. Highly recommended for any reader interested in Eastwood's films.

LJ Express (online)

Amazing... One of the great things about the book is Eastwood's detailed discussion of the nature of the influences that led [Eastwood] to direct, and the allusions that come to mind for him while making films.

-The New Yorker’s “Front Row” blog

Eastwood sounds less like the monosyllabic Dirty Harry character he was most famous for playing at the time than like a brilliant, thoughtful, articulate- talkative, even- director and actor.

-Men’s Journal

Out of nowhere comes a great book on the Clint Eastwood of 30 years ago, when, more than just a big star, he was a divisive symbol of American populist justice. Their fluid, far-reaching conversation should have been put in a time capsule. Happily it was.

-Sight & Sound

The interviews- more like conversations, not mere question-and-answer sessions- show us an Eastwood who is (in marked contrast to many of his iconic characters) articulate, thoughtful, friendly, and outspoken. Reading his thoughts on a wide variety of subjects- religion, the genesis of his own directing style, Dirty Harry, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, and much more- we feel, for pretty much the first time, as though we've seen Eastwood the man and not just Eastwood the movie star or acclaimed director...this treasure trove of new material brings altogether fresh insight into the man and his career.

-Booklist

One of the best film books of the year is also one of the most unusual.
The Wall Street Journal online

A fascinating selection of writings.
-BAFTA Online

Reading these interviews almost makes you feel sorry for Nelson, who never had the chance to be the first to herald Eastwood as the auteur he would eventually become. Fortunately, Conversations with Clint shows that he was, at least, the first to recognize it.

-The Independent Week

This is a quick read and a fine portrait of a megastar halfway through an iconic career.
-Griffintainment

Clint and Family to star in reality TV show?

2011-12-16T21:27:00.000Z

Thanks to my friend Kevin Wilkinson who just sent me these two stories. I never thought I would ever see Clint being involved in such a show, but after consideration, I can't help thinking what a fascinating insight this may prove to be...

Anyway, here are the 2 reports:
Clint Eastwood joins the good, bad and ugly of reality TV
The Guardian, Friday 16 December 2011
Hollywood actor and director to make guest appearances on show focusing on daily lives of his wife and daughters

Dirty Harry star Clint Eastwood is set to appear in a reality TV show that will explore what it's like to live in a family of "Hollywood royalty". The show, which is being developed by the producers of reality shows about the Kardashian sisters and MTV's The Real World, will air on the E! Entertainment channel in the US. The makers intend to focus on the daily life of the 81-year-old actor and director's wife Dina Eastwood, a former news anchor and actor, their 15-year-old daughter Morgan, and Francesca Fisher-Eastwood, the 18-year-old daughter Eastwood had with former partner Frances Fisher.

Eastwood – who has acted in a string of Hollywood hits including A Fistful of Dollars, Play Misty For Me and Million Dollar Baby, as well as directing films such as Unforgiven, Mystic River and Letters From Iwo Jima – will make guest appearances in the as-yet-unnamed show which is scheduled to air in 2012.

The show aims to explore what its like to live in a family of "Hollywood royalty", according to a report on TMZ.com. The Eastwoods will join a burgeoning number of celebrity families who have let the cameras film their private lives including the Osbournes and the Spellings.

Oscar-winning actor Eastwood to star in a reality show with his family
Mailonline, 15th December 2011
Legendary actor Clint Eastwood already has more than just a Fistful of Dollars.

But he will no doubt be making a Few Dollars More when he features in a new reality show alongside his wife and daughters. The 81-year-old actor and director is set to tackle the new frontier as a guest star in an E! programme that will feature his wife Dina, 46, and their 15-year-old daughter Morgan. It will also focus on his 18-year-old child Francesca, who he had from a previous relationship with Unforgiven star Frances Fisher, and is an aspiring actress.

No doubt fans will be shocked to discover the film icon, who has won two best director academy awards, is open to appearing in a reality show. However they may also be intrigued enough to tune into the programme which according to TMZ will will explore what it's like to live in a family of Hollywood royalty. The show is being produced by top reality television specialists Bunim/Murray, who make the Kardashian family reality shows. In addition they also produce The Real World and Bad Girls Club.Sources tell us producers are hoping to get the show on the air in the next few months.

Clint is also active politically, though the libertarian prefers to stay away from party politics. He served as a term as mayor of his home town Carmel-by-the-Sea, and served on the California State Park & Recreation Commission, and the California Film Commission.

The Any Which Way You Can star is also noted for his personal life, fathering seven children by five different women.

J.Edgar News and Reviews

2011-10-28T23:41:00.003Z

What a transformation: Leonardo DiCaprio is unrecognisable
as an elderly J. Edgar Hoover
October 28th 2011, Sarah Fitzmaurice, Mail Online

With a receding hair line thinning fast, deep lines etched across his weathered face and a stoop that comes with old age Leonardo DiCaprio looks unrecognisable in new stills from his latest film.

The actor, 36, has been transformed to look twice his age as part of his portrayal of J. Edgar Hoover. Leonardo takes on the role of the controversial FBI director in the film J, Edgar, which is set for release in the U.S. at the start of November.

Gone is the floppy blonde fringe Leonardo fans know and love, replaced by liver spots, excess weight around the middle and heavy bags under his eyes as Leonardo portrays the iconic man throughout his life. Hoover is credited with founding the FBI and remained director right up until his death in 1972. In one shot the actor is seen with co-star Armie Hammer, who has also been propelled into old age. In another the actor is playing the law enforcer as an ambitious young man, while a third shows a different side to Hoover as he leaves his dinner guests captivated with conversation at a glamorous meal. The story follows his life as he moulds the Federal Bureau of Investigation into an efficient crime-fighting agency, introducing modern technologies including fingerprinting and forensic laboratories.

Above: Clint directing on the set of J.Edgar

Apart from the physical transformation, which with the help of make-up sees the actor age from his thirties into his seventies, another hurdle DiCaprio has to overcome is alluding to being gay. While Hoover, who served in office between 1924 until 1935, denied he was homosexual, rumours circulated that he had an affair with Clyde Tolson, an associate director of the FBI who was his heir.

During one scene in the back of a taxi, the camera zooms in to see DiCaprio holding hands with Tolson, played by The Social Network star Armie Hammer. Hammer, 25, is a rising US actor who starred as both twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss in the social networking biopic centred on Mark Zuckerberg.

The trailer focuses on Hoover's rise to notoriety, with flashback scenes of when he was a young boy, and fast-forwarding to his glory years with the tagline, 'Even great men can be corrupted'.

He later became the face of law enforcement in America for almost 50 years, and was equally feared as he was admired. But behind closed doors, he held secrets that would have destroyed his powerful image, including psychological issues and bending the rules to discover the truth. The star-studded cast also boasts home grown talents Naomi Watts and Judi Dench, who plays DiCaprio's mother.

Million Dollar Baby director Clint Eastwood continues his filmmaking genius behind the lens, while Dustin Lance Black, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Milk, penned the script. J. Edgar will premiere at the AFI film festival on November 3, and will be released in cinemas in the US a week later. It will be in UK cinemas on January 20.

The Man in Charge
“J. Edgar.”by David Denby
The New Yorker, November 14, 2011

Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” is, of all things, a portrait of a soul. The movie is a nuanced account of J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) as a sympathetic monster, a compound of intelligence, repression, and misery—a man whose inner turmoil, tamed and sharpened, irrupts in authoritarian fervor. Eastwood and the screenwriter Dustin Lance Black have re-created that period in the nineteen-twenties and thirties when a righteous young man with a stentorian style could electrify a nation. Outraged by scattered bomb plots and shifting values—what seems to him the moral chaos of modern life—Hoover senses that Americans need safety, or, at least, the illusion of safety, and he becomes the vessel of their protection, exercising and justifying, with ironclad rhetoric, his own dominance.

The movie has the structure of a conventional bio-pic. It begins in 1919, when the twenty-four-year-old Hoover, employed by the Justice Department to track “alien subversives,” shows up on his bicycle at the Washington house of his boss, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, after it has been bombed by anarchists. The film traces Hoover’s rise from that shocking moment: his creation of the F.B.I., within the Justice Department; his corrupt and intimidating hold on the directorship; his successes, failures, and phobias; and his shaky last days. Yet “J. Edgar” is saved from the usual stiffness of the bio-pic form by the emotionally unsettled nature of its hero, a man vamped and controlled by his mother (Judi Dench), and afraid of his own sexuality, yet desperate for companionship. For decades, Hoover works at the Bureau with Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) and carries on a chaste love affair with him. The two natty gents go to clubs and the races together, and spend weekends chaffing, quarrelling, and pledging their affections. This Hoover is a tyrant, a liar, and a prig, but he is also, in his impacted way, capable of love.

“J. Edgar”—a collaboration with the activist gay screenwriter of “Milk”—represents another remarkable turn in Clint Eastwood’s career. Remarkable, but not altogether surprising. Eastwood long ago gave up celebrating men of violence: the mysterious, annihilating Westerners and the vigilantes who think that they alone know how to mete out justice. But Clean Edgar, working with an efficient state apparatus behind him, is a lot more dangerous than Dirty Harry. As the filmmakers tell it, the roots of Hoover’s manias lie in his nature. The movie bears a thematic resemblance to Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Conformist” (1970), in which a repressed homosexual (Jean-Louis Trintignant) in the nineteen-thirties, longing for “normality,” joins the Italian Fascist Party and operates as an amoral bullyboy. “J. Edgar” is the story of how a similarly repressed personality might operate in a democracy. The answer is privately, by accumulating secrets and blackmailing anyone who is even remotely a threat to his standing; and publicly, by making himself and his outfit pop-culture icons and then bending the government to his whim. The frame for the movie is the Director, in old age, dictating the story of his career to a series of young men from the Bureau. Black and Eastwood use this plot device ironically: Hoover is an exceptionally unreliable narrator, and the way Eastwood stages the actual events suggests that Hoover is pumping up his own role and stretching the truth.

The dark-toned cinematography, by Tom Stern, is as redolent of the past as old leather and walnut. The images are heavily shadowed, with faces often seen half in darkness, a visual hint that these people do not know themselves very well. Hoover’s ethics and his style are traditionalist in tone but radical in application. He flourishes at a time when powerful men are perfectly groomed and dressed—and cloaked in secrecy. Fanatically dedicated to appearances, they are fooling themselves, perhaps, as much as others. In the movie’s portrait of pre-electronic America, Hoover pierces those appearances with wiretaps, bugs, and the lowly file card, an early database that, aided by his longtime secretary, Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), he wields to devastating effect. Nonetheless, Hoover is fixated on his own image and on that of the Bureau. Outraged that the public is enjoying the panache of Jimmy Cagney as a gangster, in such early-thirties pictures as “The Public Enemy,” Hoover lends his name and his support to Hollywood films, and, by the middle of the decade, Cagney is firing a gun on behalf of the government.

Hoover may be treated semi-satirically, but neither Black nor Eastwood suggests that the dangers and the national weaknesses he combatted early in his career were illusory. In 1920, crime detection was primitive. Hoover insists that the country needs an armed national police force and modern forensic methods—a fingerprint bank, up-to-date labs, and the like. Bursting into rooms at the Justice Department, and shouting down objections, he orders equipment, space, and training, and holds everyone to account. His new scientific methods lead, in 1934, to the capture of Bruno Hauptmann, the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby. The complicated story of the Bureau is dramatized in flashes, as an emanation of Hoover’s will. This technique is inadequate as history but almost inevitable in a movie. What interests Black and Eastwood more than institutional lore is what Hoover did with the power he accumulated.

Again and again, he goes too far, treating Communist rhetorical bluster as the first stages of revolution, assembling lists of people whose opinions he considers suspect, fabricating documents, planting stories in the newspapers, bludgeoning potential enemies with his file drawers of sexual gossip. A single scene with Robert F. Kennedy (Jeffrey Donovan)—in the early sixties, when, as Attorney General, he was Hoover’s boss—stands in for Hoover’s relations with the various Presidents who longed to be rid of him but didn’t dare show him the door. Hoover tells Kennedy that he has evidence of his brother’s sexual escapades with dubious women, and his job remains intact. His smarmy prurience becomes a factor in national policy. He and Tolson giggle over an intercepted letter to Eleanor Roosevelt from Lorena Hickok, the reporter who became Roosevelt’s close friend and, possibly, her lover. As an old man, he holes up in a room to listen to tape recordings of Martin Luther King, Jr., having sex with a woman in a hotel. Eastwood stages the sexual scene as shadows on a wall. Hoover’s immobile, fascinated face is the obscene element in the episode.

The film moves fast, but Eastwood’s touch is light and sure, his judgment sound, the moments of pathos held just long enough. And he cast the right star as his equivocal hero-fool. In the past, such beetle-browed heavyweights as Broderick Crawford, Ernest Borgnine, and Bob Hoskins have played Hoover. By using DiCaprio, and then aging him with prosthetic makeup, Eastwood lets us see how a slender, good-looking young man might thicken and coarsen with years and power. DiCaprio, extending his vowels into a Washington drawl (Hoover was a local boy), focusses energy in his bulldog forehead; the body, increasingly sausage-packed into tight-fitting suits as Hoover gets older, is immobile, unused, mere weight. DiCaprio never burlesques Hoover, but when he meets Armie Hammer’s Tolson in his office for the first time he breaks into a sweat. Hammer—tall, handsome, suave yet gentle, with a sweet smile—gives a charming, soft-shoe performance that, in a memorable scene, explodes into jealous rage.

Hoover was in power for almost fifty years, and the filmmakers leave out many particulars of his reign. Despite frequent references to Hoover’s loathing of Communism (which he convinces himself is poisoning the civil-rights movement), Eastwood and Black omit his active role in the rise of the Red-baiting pols Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. The filmmakers concentrate on the Bureau’s successes in capturing or killing the tommy-gun bank robbers of the thirties but overlook Hoover’s odd, and possibly corrupt, unwillingness to take organized crime seriously, even as, in the forties and fifties, the Mafia was draining millions from the economy. Liberals will find much in the movie that condemns Hoover’s trampling of civil liberties, but may be dismayed by the insistence that an emerging national power needed a secret police force. Gay activists may be disappointed by the filmmakers’ restrained assumptions about Hoover’s sexuality, though the destructive effects of self-denial have rarely been dramatized in such withering detail. Hoover, we realize, is obsessed with keeping America safe because he feels unsafe himself. Internal subversion is a personal, not just a political, threat to him. No stranger man—not even Nixon—has ever been at the center of an American epic.

J. Edgar By Peter Travers, Rolling Stone.

November 10, 2011

Say this for Leonardo DiCaprio: He doesn't scare off easy from acting challenges. At 37, he's already played billionaire Howard Hughes (The Aviator), junkie Jim Carroll (The Basketball Diaries), great imposter Frank Abagnale Jr. (Catch Me If You Can) and Shakespeare's Romeo. In J. Edgar, DiCaprio ages from his twenties to his seventies to play America's feared and loathed top cop. And despite being buried in layers of (often too obvious) prosthetic latex, DiCaprio is a roaring wonder in the role. He needs to be. Until his death in 1972, J. Edgar Hoover ruled the Federal Bureau of Investigation like a bulldog no one would dare leash. That includes eight presidents, Martin Luther King Jr. and even Marilyn Monroe. For half a century Hoover nosed into private lives to control his enemies, and some friends. But Hoover had secrets too, and now acclaimed director Clint Eastwood, 81, and Oscar-winning Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, 37, are doing the nosing around.

The result is a movie exhilarated by biting off more than it can chew, a great boon especially when the pacing goes from rushed to dramatically inert. The tabloid version of Hoover as a cross-dressing closet queen is addressed, but not exploited. Black's script isn't linear; it jumps back and forth in time with impressionistic glee, hoping to get a fix on an unknowable public figure.

The film focuses on those closest to J. Edgar: his autocratic mother, Annie Hoover (a splendid Judi Dench); his protective secretary, Helen Gandy (a sutured Naomi Watts); and FBI associate director Clyde Tolson (a live-wire Armie Hammer), the lawyer who became J. Edgar's constant companion.

Of course, Hoover's greatest obsession was America and his need to protect it from commies and radicals. In dark and weighted images, Eastwood charts Hoover's rise and all-consuming myth-building. Though Hoover did popularize fingerprinting and the collection of forensic evidence (the CSI TV franchise is in his debt), he liked giving himself credit where it wasn't due, for killing gangster John Dillinger, solving the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's baby, and being the ultimate G-man, making arrests and capturing bad guys. Eastwood busts that myth with the same fury with which he undercut the codes of the Old West in Unforgiven.

To its credit, Black's admittedly speculative script keeps nudging into J. Edgar's secret heart. Did sublimated sexuality drive Hoover into megalomania? Annie registers what's going on between her son and Clyde. In a wrenching scene, she derides any hint of effeminate behavior ("I'd rather have a dead son than a daffodil"). And DiCaprio and Hammer do wonders with mere suggestion, that is, when melodrama and old-age makeup allow for nuance. Even when the film trips on its tall ambitions, you can't shake it off.

'J. Edgar': Hoover's Life, in a Dramatic Vacuum By JOE MORGENSTERN
The Wall Street Journal

As the peerlessly powerful and widely feared director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation over the course of almost five decades, J. Edgar Hoover saw himself in a constant state of war—against radicals, gangsters, Communists and any politicians, including presidents, who tried to get in his way. "J. Edgar," with Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, is at war with itself, and everyone loses. Clint Eastwood's investigation of Hoover's life and tumultuous times seeks the cold facts behind the crime-fighter myths, the flesh-and-blood man behind the dour demeanor and the rumors of homosexuality. Yet Mr. Eastwood's ponderous direction, a clumsy script by Dustin Lance Black and ghastly slatherings of old-age makeup all conspire to put the story at an emotional and historical distance. It's a partially animated waxworks.

The production's internal conflict goes beyond style. "J. Edgar" is unsparing in its portrait of Hoover as a ruthless, self-dramatizing and sometimes delusional zealot—his loathing of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy, among others, is given special prominence—as well as a patriot, by his own lights, and a proponent of modern criminal science. Mr. DiCaprio's approach is equally unsparing; the actor declines to spare himself. His Hoover is more to be censured than pitied, an obsessive-compulsive creep with the vocal rhythms of a ball-peen hammer and a gimlet-eyed gift for blackmail.

At the very same time, the movie offers a love story in which the hero struggles with his sexuality, and with his supposedly closeted love—if there was a closet it stayed tightly shut, so most of the script's sexual content is conjecture—for Clyde Tolson, the FBI agent who came to be known as Hoover's constant companion. He's played by Armie Hammer, who, exempt from the cartoonish constraints of Mr. DiCaprio's role, manages to make Tolson appealing and fitfully interesting.

In principle, biography should do what "J. Edgar" tries to do—reveal an inner life, whether or not the subject is outwardly appealing. There's a certain logic to Mr. Black's having done the screenplay; he won an Oscar for writing "Milk," in which Sean Penn portrayed the gay activist Harvey Milk. This time, though, his script, along with stodgy staging and Tom Stern's cheerless cinematography, yields scenes that cross the line from awkward to embarrassing—not because the lovers are gay, or getting to be long in the tooth, but because they're written and observed as mawkish relics, rather than passionate individuals who speak and behave in the idioms of their day. (In a scene that may be the movie's nadir, Clyde's face falls, while his lips literally quiver, when Edgar reveals that he's been to dinner several times with Dorothy Lamour, that they've "become physical," and that it may finally be time for a Mrs. Hoover.)

Although "J. Edgar" spares us the spectacle of a make-believe Lamour, it's studded with other vignettes and dubious representations of historical figures: a charm-free Ginger Rogers, a blank-slate Charles Lindbergh, a cloddish Robert F. Kennedy and an appallingly crude approximation of Richard Nixon. Perhaps the saddest spectacle, representing the worst waste of talent, is Naomi Watts as Helen Gandy, Hoover's endlessly loyal private secretary. Ms. Watts is stuck with an opaque character, dreadful dialogue and, during the many sequences set in the twilight of Hoover's career, the sort of age makeup that should never deface as lovely a face as hers. Judi Dench fares slightly better as Annie Hoover, Edgar's mother. Annie may be a fire-breathing religious nut job, but at least the actress gets some fire to breathe.

Legendary power and its abuse always hold the potential for powerful drama; the trick is in the telling. This latest attempt to tell Hoover's story doesn't lack for ambition, only for expertise. Even if the personal side had been sharper and livelier, the historical side—partly satirical and partly objective—would have been ill-conceived. (Much of Hoover's career is explicated, tediously, through the device of him dictating salient details to an FBI biographer, and shown, confusingly, through the cracked prism of his self-inventions.) The script abounds in casual anachronisms—phrases like "fashion forward" and "a P.R. disaster"—and jumps back and forth in time without getting the feel of any period quite right. Fingerprints figured significantly in the bureau's evolution; at first Hoover called them finger patterns, or finger imprints. Whatever you want to call the ones that besmudge "J. Edgar," they're evidence of heavy hands.

‘J. Edgar’s’ Expert Actors Can’t Save Flawed Film

By Sheila Marikar, Nov 2011

Here’s the thing: It’s hard to follow a story when the people telling it look like Mr. Potato Head.

Petty as it may seem, that’s one of “J. Edgar’s” major problems. In an attempt to make the incredibly attractive actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Armie Hammer (“The Social Network”) look like the not-so-incredibly-attractive and much-older J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson (Hoover’s closest colleague and ambiguously gay life partner), director Clint Eastwood went heavy on the face putty and created a couple of bobble-headed characters that look like they belong in a JibJab cartoon, not an Oscar hopeful.

It’s a pity, because the story is compelling. Little is known about the personal life of Hoover, that unsung hero of American history who created the F.B.I. His ruthless quest to promote the agency (and his own public image) while eschewing a spouse, children and pretty much any kind of social life is Shakespearean.

As the younger Hoover, DiCaprio’s a wily charmer. Hammer brilliantly bats his eyelashes (and at one point, flies into a thrilling rage) as Hoover’s doe-eyed sidekick. It should come as a surprise to no one that these two are as endowed in the talent department as they are in the aesthetic arena.

Which makes it all the more disappointing when their performance gets squandered by tired movie-making techniques. They step into the elevator as old men, they emerge as young. Flash back, flash forward. Maybe it’s inevitable in a film that spans seven decades, but the back-and-forth gets old.

Naomi Watts, playing Hoover’s secretary, Helen Gandy, was spared the Age-ometer 3000. But like Hammer and DiCaprio, her best moments happen when she’s playing the younger version of her character. As Hoover’s strong-armed mom, Judi Dench inherits the Best Most Overbearing Mother of the Year award from “Black Swan’s” Barbara Hershey.

Like the limp green beans next to an overdone rib-eye, “J. Edgar’s” over-the-top accents make sense with the caked on makeup. The stand in for Robert Kennedy sounds like Bugs Bunny. Richard Nixon is similarly laughable.

Eastwood’s intentions were good. On execution, less would’ve been more.

J. Edgar, the Bad and the Good Warren Adler, Nov 26th 2011

After seeing Clint Eastwood's excellent biopic, J.Edgar, I was reminded of Mark Anthony's funeral oration in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."

With excellent reproductions of the era and the magnificent acting of Leonardo DiCaprio and a wonderful cast, Eastwood tells the story of J. Edgar Hoover, a sexually conflicted, complex, and single-minded man who was both extravagantly reviled and praised for founding, building and operating, with dictatorial efficiency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and forging it into a powerful arm of the Federal Government.

DiCaprio portrays J. Edgar from a superb script by Dustin Lance Black, which encapsulates the man's life from childhood to death. He is portrayed with pitch-perfect, warts-and-all exactitude as someone obsessed with fervent and often bigoted patriotic zeal, driven to heroic fantasies, often deliberately fictionalized to enhance his image and spur recruitment of a coterie of educated and motivated men, who walked in cult-like lock step to Hoover's institutional and personal commands.

Sometimes painful to watch as DiCaprio peels away the man's reserve and humanizes him in ways smalls and large, we see unfolding the maturing of a man who grows progressively more paranoid and powerful as he grows older. We see the influence of a dominant, much loved mother and a relationship between two men, Hoover and his longtime companion and assistant, Clyde Tolson, that is tender, loving and affectionate, long before such relationships became acceptable in the popular culture. The relationship avoids the question of sexual consummation, although it is without question a sincerely loving one, beyond even the traditional elements of strong male bonding.

Eastwood, whose right-of-center credentials and reputed total command and control over story and every other detail of movie making, does not spare Hoover in assessing his willingness to sacrifice ethics and morality to the cause of building his beloved FBI.

He does not avoid accusations of Hoover using blackmail tactics to retain his power over presidents and others in the power structure, especially in sexual matters. He illustrates Hoover's propensity to fictionalize his personal exploits, glorifying service to the FBI and projecting and often exaggerating the image of G-men, a euphemism for his band of agents, as upright, brave, courageous and heroic, fighting for God and country. Young boys were recruited to think of themselves as junior G-men and working for the FBI was portrayed as one of the great careers open to educated and dedicated young men.

He takes us through the early days of crime fighting before and during the Depression and wrecking havoc on gangsters during prohibition. He is shown obsessed by the communists and radicals who are attempting what he believes is a takeover of the United States, a very real threat during and after World War II, and does not shy away from Hoover's wariness of the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King Jr. who he believed had radical motives, a position that did not win him many friends outside of the bureau and has, to some degree, diminished his reputation.

Still, the movie goes out of its way to make clear that he was not a racial bigot by using the device of having a black agent work with him on writing his memoirs, and the script calls for him to dub Senator McCarthy an "opportunist."

I lived in Washington for many years during Hoover's heyday. Seeing him and Tolson (a familiar pair) around town, and having met and befriended numerous FBI and ex-FBI men, my view about Hoover and the FBI he created is more or less the bottom line that I believe Eastwood intended when he created this movie. Having called Hoover to account for "the bad" with eagle-eyed accuracy, he weaves into the story what can only be counted as "the good."

Hoover was a motivational genius, a brilliant organizer who inspired loyalty and dedication from his underlings who worshiped him. Talk to any ex-FBI agent who worked on his watch and you will invariably get the same opinion. He established an FBI checking system that was as foolproof as possible to keep questionable people from serving in government, a system that, with some exceptions, was as thorough as possible and is still in operation today.

He established an FBI forensic capability second to none, and a fingerprinting system that is a crime fighting wonder. Yes, he was rigid, intolerant; often thin-skinned and egocentric. In his later years, the media pounded him with regularity, inspiring not only sharp criticism but outright hatred.

Some say he overstayed his office by years largely because he had the goods on those who made the decisions to keep him there. Maybe so.

But J.Edgar, the movie, is more than just a mere contrived biopic. There is something transcendent about it, something that can enhance our understanding about America and the people who wield power over our lives. It is worth the time to see it and ponder its lessons. Eastwood and his great cast have added some special insight into how a democracy blunders ahead, often with imperfect leaders who somehow rise above their flaws for the greater good of all of us.

'J. Edgar' Odd man out? Not exactly.
Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle Movie Critic, November 9, 2011
Drama. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer and Judi Dench. Directed by Clint Eastwood. (R. 135 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

J. Edgar Hoover, the man who knew where all the bodies were buried, the man who blackmailed and terrified presidents - the man who, like Santa Claus, knew when you were sleeping (and whom with) - should have been a natural for a juicy big-screen biopic. But this latest from director Clint Eastwood is too ambiguous, too gentle and too noncommittal to get the job done.

It's watchable and reasonably entertaining, to be sure. Eastwood doesn't make movies that are hard to sit through. But something in the film's point of view is off, not at cross-purposes, not contradictory, but incomplete, irrelevant and ever-so-faintly ridiculous. This point of view might be summarized in this way: Sure, J. Edgar did some bad things, lots and lots of them ... but at least he was gay.

The screenplay, by Dustin Lance Black ("Milk"), puts Hoover's sexuality at the center of the film. This is not to say that we see Hoover having sex with his longtime friend, Clyde Tolson. In fact, the movie postulates that Hoover might have been celibate for his entire life. But it does suggest that Hoover's rigidity and paranoia, and all the actions resulting from those traits, had their origins in Hoover's repressed homosexuality.

Sorry, but that's too simple, and too boring, and it lets Hoover too much off the hook. Sure, it's mildly interesting to say that Hoover saw the world as dark and evil and teeming with hidden corruption, and that that's how he unconsciously saw himself. Thus, the theory goes, in trying to rid the world of hidden evils, he was actually trying to cure his own, when all he needed was to own his sexuality and accept himself, etc. ... But first, I don't buy it. And second, so what? Virtually every gay man of Hoover's generation was repressed, but only Hoover was wiretapping Jack Kennedy and sending crazy anonymous letters to Martin Luther King Jr..

Presenting the FBI director as essentially confused, conflicted and self-hating hinders Leonardo DiCaprio's performance as Hoover. It tempts him into playing him frozen by a lack of self-knowledge. The old man is the same as the young man, driven by fear and haunted by the memory of a stern yet all-too-close mother (a scary Judi Dench).

But do we really believe that Hoover, who achieved such magnificent functionality, was never on to himself? That he never enjoyed being vindictive or relished power? The movie lavishes time on the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, which Hoover used to expand his jurisdiction. "J. Edgar" presents him as so clueless as to believe he's exploiting this entirely for the public's own good.

Yet even with a better script, DiCaprio might still have been lost. He is not a comfortable villain, and when he screws up his eyes to appear cold and unyielding, he just seems frightened. As an old man, he looks like Orson Welles as the elderly Charles Foster Kane, all age makeup and fake stiff gestures. And his mid-Atlantic accent is all over the map, almost as bad as Jeffrey Donovan's, whose brief appearance as Bobby Kennedy is the movie's nadir.

Perhaps when Hoover and Tolson kicked back together, in private, they really did talk about the fashion faux pas of 1930s celebrities. But next to the monumental questions raised by Hoover's life and career, such moments of gay bonding become unintentionally funny - or perhaps intentionally funny, which is even worse. Yet Armie Hammer as Tolson is, curiously enough, the film's best performance. Though he is undermined somewhat by his makeup in the later scenes - he looks like Boris Karloff in "The Mummy" - his sensitivity, watchfulness and sorrow are always believable.

Still, despite that and other virtues, it's hard not to see "J. Edgar" as a grand disappointment. As a libertarian, Eastwood was ideally positioned to explain what makes terrified men and their domestic spying so dangerous. After all, Hoover is someone that even Ron Paul and Nancy Pelosi could agree on. But Eastwood let his movie get sidetracked by sex, which proved too narrow a read on things.

Sometimes it really isn't all about sex.

Finding the Humanity in the F.B.I.’s Feared Enforcer

By MANOHLA DARGIS, New York Times, Published: November 8, 2011

Even with all the surprises that have characterized Clint Eastwood’s twilight film years, with their crepuscular tales of good and evil, the tenderness of the love story in “J. Edgar” comes as a shock. Anchored by a forceful, vulnerable Leonardo DiCaprio, who lays bare J. Edgar Hoover’s humanity, despite the odds and an impasto of old-coot movie makeup, this latest jolt from Mr. Eastwood is a look back at a man divided and of the ties that bind private bodies with public politics and policies. With sympathy — for the individual, not his deeds — it portrays a 20th-century titan who, with secrets and bullets, a will to power and the self-promotional skills of a true star, built a citadel of information in which he burrowed deep.

To find the man hiding in plain sight, Mr. Eastwood, working from a smart script by Dustin Lance Black (“Milk”), takes a dynamic approach to history (even as it speaks to contemporary times), primarily by toggling between Hoover’s early and later years, his personal and public lives, while the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The film opens in the early 1960s with a shot of the Justice Department building, the original home of the bureau, establishing the location, as well as the idea that this is also the story of an institution. As Hoover croaks in the voice-over (“Communism is not a political party — it is a disease”), the scene shifts inside, where the camera scans the death mask he kept of John Dillinger, former Public Enemy No. 1, and then stops on Hoover’s pale face: a sagging facade.

Old, stooped, balding, his countenance as gray as his suit, Hoover enters while in the midst of dictating his memoirs to the first of several young agents (Ed Westwick) who appear intermittently, typing the version of history that he feeds them and that is dramatized in flashback. The earliest episode involves the 1919 bombing of the home of the attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer (Geoff Pierson), a cataclysmic event that — accompanied by terrified screams and a wide-eyed Hoover rushing to the conflagration — signals the birth of an anti-radical. Hoover, a former librarian, subsequently helps deport hundreds of real and suspected extremists; hires his lifelong secretary, Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts); and begins amassing secret files on possible and improbable enemies that, like a cancer, grow.

Without rushing — a slow hand, Mr. Eastwood likes to take his time inside a scene — the film efficiently condenses history, packing Hoover’s nearly 50 years with the bureau into 2 hours 17 minutes. By 1924, Hoover was its deputy; a few years later in real time, seemingly minutes in movie time, he meets Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer, the Winklevoss twins in “The Social Network”). Tall and impeccably groomed, Tolson is a golden boy who, here at least, physically recalls the 1920s tennis star Bill Tilden and quickly becomes Hoover’s deputy and constant, longtime companion. The men meet in a bar, introduced by a mutual acquaintance. Hoover blusters through the easygoing introductions, his eyes darting away from the friendly newcomer literally looming over him.

Later, Tolson applies for a job at the F.B.I. and is eagerly hired by Hoover, inaugurating a bond that became the subject of titters but that Mr. Eastwood conveys matter-of-factly, without either condescension or sentimentality. Before long Tolson is helping Hoover buy his suits and straightening his collar, and the two are dining, vacationing and policing in lock step. Tolson becomes the moon over Hoover’s shoulder, a source of light in the shadows. Even the ashcan colors and chiaroscuro lighting brighten. In these scenes Mr. Hammer gives Tolson a teasing smile and the naked face of a man in love. Mr. DiCaprio, by contrast, beautifully puts across the idea that the sexually inexperienced Hoover, while enlivened by the friendship, may not have initially grasped the meaning of its depth of feeling.

Mr. Eastwood does, and it’s his handling of Hoover and Tolson’s relationship that, as much as the late-act revelation of the pathological extent of Hoover’s dissembling, lifts the film from the usual biopic blahs. Mr. Eastwood doesn’t just shift between Hoover’s past and present, his intimate life and popular persona, he also puts them into dialectic play, showing repeatedly how each informed the other. In one stunning sequence he cuts between anonymous F.B.I. agents surreptitiously bugging a bedroom (that of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a resonant, haunting presence seen and heard elliptically and on TV) and Tolson and Hoover walking and then standing alone side by side in an elevator in a tight, depthless, frontally centered shot that makes it look as if they were lying together in bed.

Although Hoover and Tolson’s closeness was habitual grist for the gossip mill, the lack of concrete evidence about their relationship means that the film effectively outs them. Certainly a case for outing Hoover, especially, can be made, both because he was a public figure who, to some, was a monster and destroyer of lives, and because he was a possibly gay man who hounded homosexuals (and banned them from the F.B.I.). But this film doesn’t drag Hoover from the closet for salacious kicks or political payback: it shows the tragic personal and political fallout of the closet. And Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Black’s expansive view of human frailties means that it’s Hoover’s relationship with Tolson — and the foreboding it stirs up in Hoover’s watchful mother (Judi Dench) — that greatly humanizes him.

That humanization is at the center of the film, which, as the very title announces, is less the story of Hoover, the public institution, than of J. Edgar, the private man. It would take a mini-series to name every one of his victims and enemies, a veritable Who’s Who of 20th-century notables, and a book as fat as Curt Gentry’s biography “J. Edgar Hoover” to communicate the sweep of the man’s power and impact on history. In crucial, representative scenes, the film instead offers quick sketches of the more familiar Hoover — the top cop and hunter of men (always ready for his close-up); the presidential courtier and exploiter; the wily Washington strategist and survivor — who decade after decade fended off threats real and imagined, and foes like Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (Jeffrey Donovan).

The official take on Hoover, or rather on the F.B.I., his sepulchral home away from home, has been told before, including in Hoover-approved howlers like the studio flick “The F.B.I. Story” (1959). At once a fascinating psychological portrait and an act of Hollywood revisionism, “J. Edgar” doesn’t set out to fully right the record that Hoover distorted, at times with the help of studio executives (including those at Warner Brothers, which is also releasing this film). Instead, Mr. Eastwood explores the inner life of a lonely man whose fortress was also his stage. From there, surrounded by a few trusted souls, he played out a fiction in which he was as heroic as a James Cagney G-man (despite a life with a mother Norman Bates would recognize), but finally as weak, compromised and human as those whose lives he helped crush.

“J. Edgar” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Gun violence and language.

'J. Edgar' gets a careful, competent screen analysis via Clint Eastwood
November 07, 2011

Michael Phillips
Chicago Tribune Movie critic

In the 1959 film "The FBI Story," Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover — photographed from the rear, his face unseen — plays a younger cameo version of himself, speaking to G-men (James Stewart among them) about the newly formed agency and how its operation will remain free of all politics and the whims of any one presidential administration.

Hoover, following the Hoover-approved script, then expounds on the "love of justice." He says: "I warn you now. That is the most demanding of affections."

Make that the second-most demanding. For more than half a century, speculation regarding Hoover's private life has focused on whether this bulldog of all-American virtue knew an even more formidable affection — fraught with secrecy, given the times and Hoover's public profile, and wrapped in layers of emotional and sexual denial.

Director Clint Eastwood's "J. Edgar," featuring a valiant performance from Leonardo DiCaprio, is a demure, rather touching inquiry into this possibility. Molded by the presence, and then the absence, of a smothering mother (Judi Dench) who at one point says she'd "rather have a dead son than a daffodil for a son," Hoover ran the FBI and amassed confidential, politically explosive files on a universe of dissidents and enemies from 1935 until his death in 1972. (Hoover also ran the comparatively toothless precursor to the FBI for more than a decade.) Did this power broker's longtime working friendship with assistant Clyde Tolson constitute the one great love of his life, sexually intimate or no?

Constructed as an elaborate interweave of flashbacks, starting with the Red Scare "Palmer raids" of 1919 and 1920, the movie poses many questions. But rarely does this central question relating to Hoover, Tolson and what was between them fade entirely.

In recent interviews for the film, Eastwood has done his best to dismiss his own biopic's inferences, saying among other things that the movie's not about "two gay guys." (Which sounds like the title of a new CBS sitcom.) All the same, the film's screenplay, from Oscar-winning "Milk" scribe Lance Dustin Black, is very much interested in Hoover's intimate relationship with Tolson, an Arrow Collar ad come to life in the hands of Armie Hammer. It is very much concerned with how Hoover's various facets coexisted in the same psyche: Hoover the closeted homosexual, Hoover the rustler of radicals and pinkos, Hoover the one-time paramour of Dorothy Lamour, (the film glances briefly on this), Hoover the martinet and blackmailer and mother's son.

Imagine how Oliver Stone might've handled this material (he got his own licks in with "Nixon," in which Bob Hoskins played Hoover as a sniveling wart hog of a bureaucrat), and whatever your mind's eye sees in terms of hysteria and aggressive visual technique, you'll get the opposite in Eastwood's dispassionate approach.

"J. Edgar" suggests, convincingly, that Hoover was in love and felt he couldn't do anything about it except spend as many meals and vacations and days and weeks and years with Tolson as he could manage. Tolson, screenwriter Black infers, was more willing to speak the love that dared not speak its name. We see, briefly, a hand-clasp in the back of a limousine. And in one startling and shrewdly staged hotel-room encounter, Tolson — fed up with Hoover's inability to come clean about his desires — turns on his superior, which leads to a fight, which leads to a single, angry kiss.

For much of the film Eastwood's studiously objective stance sets the tone for the story of a man whose misdeeds and hypocrisies are perhaps too discreetly handled. In the hotel room scene, however, as in the other "talking point" moment (involving the shaky old rumor about Hoover and cross-dressing), "J. Edgar" brings out the best in both DiCaprio and his director.

This may be a closety film about a closety character, but the tensions between Eastwood's direction and the script he's directing keep us off-guard in an intriguing way. The results, whatever one thinks of them, may be square, but they're all of a piece. Eastwood's house style remains very much in the house here. Cinematographer Tom Stern's hot, flat, chalky-white lighting pours into every interior, while Eastwood's self-penned musical score (a key theme borrowing the first three notes of Duke Ellington's "Solitude") stresses the tender side of its subject, at any cost.

J. Edgar By Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post, Wednesday, Nov 09, 2011

Anyone with strong opinions about founding FBI director J. Edgar Hoover is unlikely to come away satisfied by "J. Edgar," Clint Eastwood's ambitious, ultimately deflating portrait, which somehow manages to elide his worst abuses of power while making a burlesque of his personal vulnerabilities.

Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black ("Milk") shrewdly organize "J. Edgar" around secrets - those that Hoover wielded in order to gain and keep power for an extraordinary 48 years at the bureau and those that he kept about his own intensely guarded private life. But because Hoover so adroitly avoided leaving any kind of paper trail, much of "J. Edgar" necessarily hinges on speculation and hearsay, especially regarding his intimate personal and professional relationship with Associate FBI Director Clyde Tolson.

His well-documented ruthless pursuit of civil rights leaders and other activists, on the other hand, is represented by a few billboard sequences that do little justice to the injustices he either perpetrated or ignored.

That "J. Edgar" suffers from such a structural weakness makes it all the more lamentable that the performance at its center is so strong. Leonardo DiCaprio, who despite attaining the ripe age of 36 still has trouble losing the boyish crackle in his voice, convincingly portrays the jowly bureaucrat from his days in the Justice Department during the Palmer Raids until his death in 1972. With the help of makeup, prosthetics, beady brown contact lenses and a wiry, wavy toupee, DiCaprio fully inhabits the man whose obsession with Bolshevik communism took root in 1919, when his boss at the Justice Department was almost killed by a bomb.

Urged on by his domineering mother, Annie (Judi Dench), and eventually aided in his mission by Tolson (Armie Hammer) and his lifelong secretary, Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), Hoover outmaneuvered eight presidents and countless political enemies to become the ultimate Washington insider, rooting out crime and communism, manipulating the press and masterfully burnishing his own myth as the nation's most famous G-man. (One of "J. Edgar's" most fascinating insights is how he introduced such forensic tools as centralized fingerprint files and laboratory analysis to the bureau, rationalizing the agency he would come to deploy so irrationally.)

All of it makes for a rollicking, outsize tale of overweening ambition and palace intrigue, but "J. Edgar" instead plays it safe in a turgid, back-and-forth series of tableaux that look as if they were filmed from behind a scrim soaked in weak tea. As Hoover dictates his memoirs to a series of young agents, his hectoring drawl takes us back to his early years fighting gangsters and solving the Lindbergh kidnapping, while the central narrative traces his alliance with Tolson, portrayed by Hammer as an eager pup who agrees to be Hoover's No. 2 only if they will never miss a lunch or dinner together.

The tacit premise of "J. Edgar" is that, despite liaisons with Dorothy Lamour and Lela Rogers, Hoover was a closeted homosexual, unable to come to grips with his identity because of the suffocating control of his cruel, power-hungry mother. ("I'd rather have a dead son than a daffodil for a son," she tells him.)

In one of several awkwardly staged scenes, after Annie's death, J. Edgar dons one of her dresses and a string of beads, apparently as a sop to audiences familiar with long-standing rumors of cross-dressing. But what the filmmakers clearly intend as a sympathetic portrayal of Hoover's tortured psyche instead gives him a troubling resemblance to Norman Bates. ("Yes, mother," Hoover wearily singsongs in "J. Edgar's" Oedipal leitmotif.)

There are other blips and slips: As persuasive as DiCaprio's performance is, Hammer never finds his footing as Tolson, who teeters on the verge of fey stereotype; his unsure portrayal isn't helped by the atrocious rubbery mask he wears in Tolson's later years. Supporting figures such as Robert F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon are played in wince-inducing impersonations that, in Nixon's case especially, play like crude "Saturday Night Live" outtakes; the tantalizing figure of Miss Gandy, who held all of Hoover's secrets, is never fleshed out (she's even denied the dignity of an end-credit postscript).

Eastwood's most fascinating narrative gambit comes late in the film, when Tolson boldly tells Hoover - and the audience - that the stories he's telling for the record didn't happen the way we just saw them play out. He didn't arrest the Lindbergh kidnapper or run down hoodlums with guns blazing.

But if "J. Edgar" suggests that he was his own most unreliable narrator, it still leaves viewers with a confounded sympathy, even gratitude, for the man. However alarming the comparison might be to Eastwood and his fans, the movie that "J. Edgar" brings most readily to mind may be Oliver Stone's "Nixon," which offered a similar psycho-biographical olive branch to its conflicted, controversial protagonist.

"Your child is sure and keeps this country safe," Miss Gandy tells the aging Hoover at one point. Eastwood would seem to agree, judiciously reminding viewers of Hoover's best intentions while choosing to relegate his most egregious missteps to the shadows (literally, when Hoover bugs and wiretaps a philandering Martin Luther King Jr.). The contradiction "J. Edgar" never confronts is that, for much of Hoover's tenure, untold numbers of Americans weren't safe, being routinely raped, kidnapped and lynched in a campaign of racist intimidation. Hoover chose not to investigate those crimes with his patented aggressive zeal, of course, choosing instead to ignore them in the name of fighting communism. During those years at least, he let the terrorists win.

J. Edgar

What did Hoover hide in his bureau drawers?
Release Date: 2011
By Roger Ebert, Nov 8, 2011

J. Edgar Hoover was the head of the Bureau of Investigation from 1924 until he died in 1972; he added the word "Federal" to its title in 1935. Under the administrations of Coolidge, Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, he was, many believed, the second most powerful man in government. Now he has been dead for 39 years, and what most people probably think they know about him is that he liked to dress up like a woman. This snippet of gossip, which has never been verified, is joined by the details that he never married, lived with his mother until she died, and had a close, lifelong friendship with Clyde Tolson, the tall and handsome bachelor who inherited his estate.

It is therefore flatly stated that Hoover was gay, which would have been ironic since he gathered secret files on the sex lives of everyone prominent in public life and used that leverage to hold onto his job for 47 years and increase the FBI's power during every one of them. He was outspoken against homosexuality, and refused to allow gays (or many blacks, or any women) to become FBI agents. He was sure enough of his power that he sometimes held hands with Tolson in restaurants and shared rooms with him on vacations. There wasn't a president who could touch him.

Given these matters, and the additional fact that the screenplay for Clint Eastwood's "J. Edgar" was written by Dustin Lance Black, who wrote "Milk," you would assume the film was the portrait of a gay man. It is not. That makes it more fascinating. It is the portrait of the public image that J. Edgar Hoover maintained all his life, even in private. The chilling possibility is that with Hoover, what you saw was what you got. He was an unbending moralist who surrounded himself with FBI straight arrows. Those assigned closest to him tended to be good looking. Agents wore suits and ties at all times. He inspected their shoeshines. He liked to look but not touch.

In such famous cases as the capture of John Dillinger and the manhunt for the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby, Hoover's publicity machine depicted him as acting virtually alone. He was not present when Dillinger was shot down outside the Biograph theater, but America got the impression that he was, and he never forgave the star agent, Melvin Purvis, for actually cornering the Most Wanted poster boy. Doubt persisted that Bruno Hauptmann was guilty in the Lindbergh case — but not in Hoover's mind. The fight against domestic communism in the years after World War II provided an ideal occasion for him to fan the Red Scare and work with the unsavory Joe McCarthy. Two of the reasons Hoover hated beatniks and hippies were their haircuts and shoeshines.

This man was closed down, his face a slab of petulance. He was so uncharismatic that it's possible to miss the brilliance of Leonardo DiCaprio's performance in "J. Edgar." It is a fully realized, subtle, persuasive performance, not least in his scenes with Armie Hammer as Tolson. In my reading of the film, they were both repressed homosexuals, Hoover more than Tolson, but after love at first sight and a short but heady early courtship, they veered away from sex and began their lives as Longtime Companions. The rewards for arguably not being gay were too tempting for both men, who were wined and dined by Hollywood, Broadway, Washington and Wall Street. It was Hoover's militant anti-gay position that served as their beard.

Two women figured importantly in Hoover's life. One was his domineering mother, Annie Hoover (Judi Dench), who makes clear her scorn for men who are "daffodils." The other was a young woman named Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts). In an extraordinary moment of self-image control, Hoover concludes that it would be beneficial for him to have a wife. He asks Helen, an FBI secretary, out on one of the more unusual first dates in movie history; he demonstrates the workings of a card file system with great pride. It must have been clear to her that nothing was stirring in his netherlands. Their budding relationship segued smoothly into her becoming his confidential secretary for the rest of his life — the woman entrusted with the secret files.

Eastwood's film is firm in its refusal to cheapen and tarnish by inventing salacious scenes. I don't get the impression from "J. Edgar" that Eastwood particularly respected Hoover, but I do believe he respected his unyielding public facade. It is possibly Hoover's lifelong performance that fascinated him. There's a theme running through most of his films since "Bird" (1988): the man unshakably committed to his own idea of himself.

As a period biopic, "J. Edgar" is masterful. Few films span seven decades this comfortably. The sets, the props, the clothes, and details, look effortlessly right, and note how Eastwood handles the many supporting roles (some of them depicting famous people). These minor characters are all to some degree relating to Hoover's formidable public image. As a person or as a character, he was a star of stage, screen, radio and print; he was said to have the goods on everyone. People tip-toed around him as they might have with Stalin. It's a nice touch, the way Eastwood and DiCaprio create a character who seems to be a dead zone and make him electrifying in other actors' reaction shots.

Confusing 'J. Edgar' more sketch than portrait

By Moira Macdonald, The Seattle Times

Clint Eastwood's new film "J. Edgar" tells the sprawling life story of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for almost 50 years. Told in flashbacks, the film is sometimes confusing and feels more like a rough draft than a proper sketch, according to Seattle Times film critic Moira Macdonald in this review. The film is playing at several theaters in Seattle.

Clint Eastwood's biopic "J. Edgar" wanders all over the 20th century and back again; it's a sprawling life story that seems both made for the movies and too big for them. J. Edgar Hoover was director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (and its predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation) for almost 50 years, beginning in the 1920s and continuing until his death in 1972. His career was filled with the kinds of public events that inspire their own movies — the Lindbergh baby kidnapping; the death of President John F. Kennedy — while his personal life was kept under wraps. He never married, lived with his mother until her death, employed the same personal secretary for almost his entire career and seemed to have no interests outside of his hawklike devotion to his work.

As portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio, he was an exceedingly odd fellow: stodgy even as a young man, overly formal (he called his secretary "Miss Gandy" every day of their working life; she, when no one else was present, called him "Edgar"), paranoid, mumbly, and prone to getting even with people by instructing his staff, "I want you to start a file on him!" Screenwriter Dustin Lance Black ("Milk") adds another layer, a theory long presented by some historians and disputed by others: Hoover was a closeted gay man, in love with his longtime second-in-command at the Bureau, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). The men were, unquestionably, devoted friends; no one knows if they were more than that, as Hoover and Tolson never told.

Black and Eastwood don't put the movie's emphasis on Hoover's personal life until its final act; rather, the movie is a meandering trip through his career, with a sort of greatest-hits approach. Its timeline is often confusing — Black frames it all with an older Hoover dictating his memoirs, resulting in a series of flashbacks not always in chronological order, and for which years are rarely given — and Eastwood's attention to detail isn't at its usual level. Why, for example, is DiCaprio's old-age makeup so convincing (though he does look distractingly like Jack Nicholson) and Hammer's so artificial-looking? Why are so many of the interiors almost comically dark? Why is the secretary, played by Naomi Watts, given so little screen time?

Though "J. Edgar" definitely isn't Eastwood's best, as in all of the director's films there are wonderful moments for the actors: Hammer, his voice smooth as new velvet as he advises Hoover on fashion; Josh Lucas, wonderfully relaxed as he strides through the film as Charles Lindbergh; DiCaprio, demonstrating the young Hoover's awkward eagerness on a date with Watts' character at the Library of Congress (he's thrilled by the organization of the card catalog); and standing alone, not letting himself tremble, as Tolson walks out the door after a fight. But "J. Edgar" too often feels like the rough draft of the great movie it could have been; a character sketch, not quite a portrait.

J. Edgar

By Peter Debruge, Variety, Thu., Nov. 3, 2011
J. Edgar Hoover's mystique lies in the fact that while he kept meticulous files with compromising details on some of America's most powerful figures, nobody knew the man's own secrets. Therefore, any movie in which the longtime FBI honcho features as the central character must supply some insight into what made him tick, or suffer from the reality that the Bureau's exploits were far more interesting than the bureaucrat who ran it -- a dilemma "J. Edgar" never rises above. With Leonardo DiCaprio bringing empathy to the controversial Washington power-monger, Clint Eastwood's old-school biopic should do solid midrange business.

In 1993, Anthony Summers published a tawdry expose titled "Official and Confidential, the Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover," which aired Susan Rosenstiel's claim that she had witnessed Hoover, a lifelong bachelor who was seldom seen without trusted deputy Clyde Tolson, wearing a cocktail dress at a gay orgy in New York. Though never corroborated, the claim stuck, and the legacy of this much-feared public figure -- who served as FBI director under eight presidents, across 48 years and through some of the most trying cases of the 20th century -- is now dominated by associations with cross-dressing.

If the assumptions about his sex life are true, that would make "J. Edgar" the story of the highest-ranking homosexual in American history, produced by a major Hollywood studio and directed by one of the industry's most venerable directors -- hardly insignificant in an industry that goes to great lengths to obfuscate the sexuality of its own stars. While not exactly coy, Eastwood's classically styled look at Hoover's life takes a long time to arrive at questions of the character's proclivities. When it does get there, however, this new dimension of the character so enlivens what has been a mostly dry portrayal of one man's crusade to reform law enforcement that it becomes the pic's focus.

True to Eastwood's understated nature, "J. Edgar" offers the "tasteful" treatment of such potentially salacious subject matter, though a more outre Oliver Stone-like approach might have made for a livelier film. With the exception of a few profanities (enough to land the pic an audience-limiting R rating) and a lone homoerotic wrestling scene so tame that Ken Russell's "Women in Love" feels like an X by comparison, the film could pass for something Warners would have released in an earlier era -- earlier even than many of the events depicted onscreen, as suggested by Tom Stern's cinematography, desaturated nearly to black-and-white.

Eastwood's restraint applies to not only the kid-gloves depiction of how Hoover slyly manipulated politicos and press, including a loathsome attempt to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into declining the Nobel Peace Prize, but also to his oddly nonjudgmental approach to Hoover's sexual identity, depicting him as a man too Puritanical to pursue intimacy with someone of either gender.

As he did with "Milk," screenwriter Dustin Lance Black follows the print-the-legend philosophy, building to what could have been the ultimate tragic love story between two men: Johnny and Clyde (as Truman Capote dubbed Hoover and Tolson), companions for the better part of five decades who never had the chance to express their affection -- a consequence of Hoover's insistence that FBI employees live up to the strictest code of conduct (he wouldn't even allow them to drink coffee on the job).

The opening reel establishes both the scope of the story, which ranges from Hoover's 20s to his final days overseeing the FBI at age 77, and DiCaprio's remarkable ability to play the character at any point along that timeline. Aided by a convincing combination of facial appliances, makeup and wigs, the thesp draws auds past that gimmick and into the character within a matter of a few scenes. There's an innate kindliness to DiCaprio that makes for a more likable protagonist than Hoover as the tempestuous monster so many biographers describe, which is good news for the film's commercial prospects but seemingly at odds with reality.

Surely this can't be the glory hound who collaborated with Sen. Joseph McCarthy on his anti-communist witch hunt and called King "the most notorious liar in the country," nor the same FBI chief accused of racism (the Bureau antagonized civil-rights leaders and employed few blacks), homophobia (gays were dismissed from service) and sexism (women were allowed to serve as secretaries and assistants, but never agents).

Rather than seriously engaging with any of these common accusations, Black's script skips back and forth through Hoover's CV, alternating public grandstanding with invented insights into his private life. Annie Hoover (Judi Dench) exerts enormous control over her son's personality, telling him, "I'd rather have a dead son than a daffodil for a son," in the film's most chilling scene. Tolson (Armie Hammer), whose prissiness accounts for the film's scant laughs, also surfaces early, lurking behind the frosted-glass door to an adjoining office while Hoover dictates a self-aggrandizing book.

Considering how critical any other character's perspective might be, allowing Hoover to narrate his own story comes as a generous gift from Black. Hoover's voiceover gives form to a story that starts out as an institutionally approved version of how the FBI came to be, punctuated every so often by a high-profile arrest or newfangled forensic development (an investigation into the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's son supplies the sort of procedural intrigue that comes comfortably to Eastwood). As the pic progresses, however, Hoover's words grow increasingly defensive, and the episodes drift into far more personal territory.

Since you can't put a face on the love interest in a workaholic's story, Black must manufacture romance on the margins. In the first act, Hoover briefly courts Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), an office girl who declines his marriage proposal on their third date, but agrees to become his secretary. A short time later, Hoover meets Tolson in a scene staged to suggest love at first sight.

As written, Tolson's character is clearly gay, but Eastwood seems noncommittal about Hoover. Certainly there are clues in nearly every aspect of the production, from Deborah Hopper's ever-dapper wardrobe to the meticulously appointed sets overseen by James Murakami and decorated by Gary Fettis. At one point, auds catch a glimpse of the entry stairwell to Hoover's home, where a framed portrait of his mother hangs alone. What's missing from this picture? Why, the famous nude photo of Marilyn Monroe that hung in the real-life Hoover's hallway.

Camera (Technicolor/B&W, Panavision widescreen), Tom Stern; editors, Joel Cox, Gary D. Roach; music, Eastwood; production designer, James Murakami; supervising art director, Patrick M. Sullivan; art director, Greg Berry; set decorator, Gary Fettis; costume designer, Deborah Hopper; sound (Dolby Digital/SDDS/Datasat), Jose Antonio Garcia; supervising sound editors, Alan Robert Murray; re-recording mixers, John Reitz, Gregg Rudloff; special effects supervisor, Steven Riley; visual effects supervisor, Michael Owens; visual effects, Method Studios Vancouver, Lola Visual Effects; stunt coordinator, Buddy Van Horn; assistant director, David M. Bernstein; casting, Fiona Weir. Reviewed at Warner Bros. Studios, Burbank, Nov. 2, 2011. (In AFI Film Festival -- opener.) MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 136 MIN.

Entertainment Weekly,
J. Edgar Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman
Nov 16, 2011

Leonardo DiCaprio has given many fine performances, but he has often seemed trapped in a certain preternatural matinee-idol youthfulness. Whether in a brooding period piece like Gangs of New York or a pop head-game like Inception, he inevitably comes off as lean and lithe and eager, with that movie-star-as-lion-cub face. I thought that quality really hampered him in The Aviator, where he lacked even a trace of Howard Hughes' rugged gravitas; he seemed like a boy playing a man. So I was skeptical of how well he would do in the role of that stocky, ruthless bulldog J. Edgar Hoover, the most famous director — in many ways, the inventor — of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But in Clint Eastwood's emotionally reticent yet absorbing J. Edgar, DiCaprio does more than disappear behind steely glasses and prosthetic old-age makeup. He transforms himself, in a feat of acting, from the inside out.

The first thing you notice about DiCaprio's John Edgar Hoover is that he speaks in one of those jarringly proper early-20th-century Brahmin accents. It takes a bit of getting used to, but DiCaprio makes the dialect work, and it keys us to Hoover's rather rigid interior life. Even when he's young, Edgar, as he's known to those closest to him, is starchy and furrowed, with eyebrows scrunched down low (he looks a bit like the Dick Tracy villain Flattop). DiCaprio gives him a gleam of suspicion and a stately, formal body language that will harden, over time, into a combative waddle. Written by Dustin Lance Black (Milk), the movie cuts back and forth between the '20s and '30s, when Hoover built the FBI and planted it in the popular imagination, and the early '60s, when his methods began to congeal into something paranoid and deluded. The crosscutting, frankly, is a bit much; the film never quite finds a present tense. Yet Black's script is densely detailed and fascinating. Eastwood, forsaking his deliberate rhythms for something speedier and wordier, turns J. Edgar into a dramatic essay about how the law and repression, heroism and corruption, fused in Hoover.

It's in 1919 that a 24-year-old Hoover first glimpses what he sees as the basic threat to American life: bomb-planting Communist agitators. As the film presents it, he may be right about the dangers of anarchy. But the subversives he's driven to crack down on also offend something fundamental in his nature. He's not just devoted to law and order. He craves control. From the outset, he has an epic plan: to make the methods of Sherlock Holmes bureaucratic. He collects forensic evidence (at this point, the authorities throw away the majority of crime-scene clues), hiring oddball experts like a man who knows everything about grains of wood. And he dreams of a centralized database devoted to the bold new science of fingerprinting.

He's inventing modern law enforcement, and he has triumphs, like hunting down the kidnapper of Charles Lindbergh's baby. Yet there's a hidden madness to Hoover's method. He still lives with his mother (Judi Dench), and his devotion to her has a touch of Norman Bates. On a date with the comely Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), he shows off the card-catalog system he created for the Library of Congress. Is it any wonder that she becomes not his lover but his secretary? And when Hoover interviews a strapping prospective agent named Clyde Tolson, sweat trembles on his upper lip. He may be trying to rein in more than Communism.

The closest the movie comes to having an emotional center is Hoover's relationship with Tolson (played with soft sympathy by The Social Network's Armie Hammer), who becomes his friend, right-hand man, and dinner companion. As the film presents it, the two experience a love that can't be acted upon, that can't even speak its name. That's Hoover's tragedy — but it is also, in J. Edgar, his pathology. His obsession with secrecy, with using illegal wiretaps to keep private files on politicians (like JFK) for the implicit threat of blackmailing them, emerges out of his hidden sense of shame. Over time, Hoover's enemies shift: from the lefties of the '20s to the gangsters of the '30s and, finally, to the social-protest leaders of the '60s like Martin Luther King Jr., whom he sees as an enemy of the state. Hoover never changes. Instead, he blinds himself to how America changes. Yet his angry paranoia isn't exactly something that you can identify with. I was held by J. Edgar, but it's a movie — like the man at its center — with a buried heart.

J. Edgar By Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times Film Critic

November 9, 2011
Leonardo DiCaprio's darkly fascinating performance as J. Edgar Hoover is matched by director Clint Eastwood's deft work behind the camera.

"J. Edgar" is a somber, enigmatic, darkly fascinating tale, and how could it be otherwise?

This brooding, shadow-drenched melodrama with strong political overtones examines the public and private lives of a strange, tortured man who had a phenomenal will to power. A man with the keenest instincts for manipulating the levers of government, he headed the omnipotent Federal Bureau of Investigation for 48 years. Though in theory he served eight presidents, in practice J. Edgar Hoover served only himself.

Starring an impressive Leonardo DiCaprio and crafted with Clint Eastwood's usual impeccable professionalism, "J. Edgar" gets its power from the way the director's traditional filmmaking style interacts with the revisionist thrust of Dustin Lance Black's script.

This film's J. Edgar is not the patriotic anti-Communist stalwart Hoover considered himself to be, but rather someone who only imagined he was the hero of the story, someone who went from outcast to oppressor by not hesitating to ride roughshod over and even blackmail whoever got in his way. Absolute power truly corrupted him absolutely. The overriding irony of this situation was that this man, as rigid and self-righteous as any of the Soviet commissars he feared and fought against, apparently had an unacknowledged private life that gives his story unexpected poignancy but would have made him a target of his own investigations had it been lived by someone else.

Shot in a Stygian gloom by veteran Eastwood collaborator Tom Stern, "J. Edgar" uses a news-behind-the-news structure reminiscent of "Citizen Kane" as it goes back and forth between Hoover's earliest days and the law unto himself he eventually became. Packed with information, the film does more than ask the Shakespearean question, "Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed, that he is grown so great?" It takes its two-hour, 17-minute length to show us in detail how it all came down.

In this "J. Edgar" benefits from the convincing acting of key cast members, including Naomi Watts as Helen Gandy, the great man's confidential secretary, and Armie Hammer (the Winklevoss twins in "The Social Network") as Hoover's soul mate, Clyde Tolson. Most of all it benefits from DiCaprio, who spent hours on set being aged from 24 to 77, had almost 80 costume changes, and has the presence and force to make this American gargoyle believable.

It's the graying Hoover we meet first, dictating his somewhat suspect memoir to a series of young agent-stenographers because he feels that "it's time this generation learned my side of the story."

That story begins with a rarely examined event in American history, the 1919 Palmer raids against anarchists and other supposed radicals. In response to a series of bombings, U.S. Atty. Gen. A. Mitchell Palmer in effect took the law into his own hands, collaborating with the 24-year-old Hoover and the newly formed FBI to attack people for their ideas without evidence of crimes. It's the first of several examples we see in the film of what can happen when unchecked governmental power falls into the hands of the ruthless and the self-righteous, when influential people believe, as Hoover did, that "sometimes you need to bend the rules a little to keep our country safe."

According to the film, Hoover's character was influenced as much by his part in the raids as it was by the personality of Annie Hoover (Judi Dench), his dragon-lady mother. Dominant, smothering and oddly reminiscent of Tony Perkins' mother in "Psycho," Mrs. Hoover's homophobic insistence that "I'd rather have a dead son than a daffodil" had a stifling effect on the other major relationship in J. Edgar's life, his close friendship with FBI colleague Tolson.

A smooth fashion plate with the manners and attitude of the born courtier, the handsome Tolson catches Hoover's eye and before you can say "constant companion," the two men are having lunch together every day and even taking joint vacations.

The exact nature of this relationship, as well as Hoover's sexuality — did he wear dresses, as has been claimed, or didn't he? — have been the source of near-endless speculation; at this point in time, the truth is unknowable. Black's persuasive script posits that the men definitely had strong feelings for each other but that Hoover, at least, could not even acknowledge, let alone act on them because of his mother's inflexible attitude. This was literally the love that dared not speak its name.

"J. Edgar" carefully takes us through the stages of Hoover's career, including his realizing the publicity value of going toe-to-toe with gangsters and the way he used the distinctly outré circumstances of the kidnapping of Charles Lindberg's infant son to advance the bureau's status.

We see the good things about Hoover, for instance his championing of scientific crime-scene analysis and the use of fingerprints, but we see much more of the dark pathological side, his mania for collecting incriminating evidence on people such as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., whom he considered the most dangerous man in America.

"We must never forget our history," Hoover was fond of saying. "We must never lower our guard." But "J. Edgar" is best taken as a warning that in focusing too heavily on outside subversive agitators, we run the risk of ignoring the depredations of people very much like Hoover himself.

J.Edgar Trailer, 5 TV Spots, Teaser Posters and Release Dates!

2011-09-29T13:35:00.020Z

During his lifetime, J. Edgar Hoover would rise to be the most powerful man in America. As head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for nearly 50 years, he would stop at nothing to protect his country. Through eight presidents and three wars, Hoover waged battle against threats both real and perceived, often bending the rules to keep his countrymen safe. His methods were at once ruthless and heroic, with the admiration of the world his most coveted, if ever elusive, prize.

Above: The latest two Teaser design 1 sheet posters from the U.S.

Hoover was a man who placed great value on secrets–particularly those of others–and was not afraid to use that information to exert authority over the leading figures in the nation. Understanding that knowledge is power and fear poses opportunity, he used both to gain unprecedented influence and to build a reputation that was both formidable and untouchable.

He was as guarded in his private life as he was in his public one, allowing only a small and protective inner circle into his confidence. His closest colleague, Clyde Tolson, was also his constant companion. His secretary, Helen Gandy, who was perhaps most privy to Hoover's designs, remained loyal to the end... and beyond. Only Hoover's mother, who served as his inspiration and his conscience, would leave him, her passing truly crushing to the son who forever sought her love and approval.

As seen through the eyes of Hoover himself, "J. Edgar" explores the personal and public life and relationships of a man who could distort the truth as easily as he upheld it during a life devoted to his own idea of justice, often swayed by the darker side of power.

Oscar® winner Clint Eastwood ("Gran Torino," "Million Dollar Baby," "Unforgiven") directed the film from a screenplay by Oscar® winner Dustin Lance Black ("Milk").

Academy Award® nominee Leonardo DiCaprio ("Inception," "Blood Diamond") stars in the title role. "J. Edgar" also stars Academy Award® nominee Naomi Watts ("21 Grams") as Helen Gandy, Hoover's longtime secretary; Armie Hammer ("The Social Network") as Hoover's protégé Clyde Tolson; Josh Lucas ("The Lincoln Lawyer") as the legendary aviator Charles Lindbergh, whose son's kidnapping changes the public profile of the F.B.I.; and Oscar® winner Judi Dench ("Shakespeare in Love") as Hoover's over-protective mother, Anne Marie Hoover.

"J. Edgar" was produced by Eastwood, Oscar® winner Brian Grazer ("A Beautiful Mind," "Frost/Nixon") and Oscar® nominee Robert Lorenz ("Letters from Iwo Jima," "Mystic River"), with Tim Moore and Erica Huggins serving as executive producers.

Behind the scenes, Eastwood reunited with his longtime collaborators, including director of photography Tom Stern, production designer James J. Murakami, editors Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach, and costume designer Deborah Hopper. Eastwood is composing the score for the film.

A Warner Bros. Pictures presentation, "J. Edgar" was produced under the banners of Imagine Entertainment and Malpaso. It will be released in limited markets on Wednesday, November 09, 2011 and expand to a wide release on Friday, November 11, 2011. The film will be distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.

Also featuring Judi Dench as Hoover’s mother, Naomi Watts as his trusted secretary, Helen Gandy, and Josh Lucas as aviator Charles Lindbergh (the investigation of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping is reportedly an important component of the script), J. Edgar is due for release in the US on 9 November, and in the UK on 20 January 2012.

Below: The 1 Sheet Teaser design poster

This film has been rated R for brief strong language.
Check out the official site http://jedgarmovie.warnerbros.com/

J. EDGAR TO OPEN AFI FEST 2011 presented by Audi

25th Edition of AFI FEST Kicks Off on November 3 With Opening Night Gala

The American Film Institute (AFI) announced that J. EDGAR, directed by AFI Life Achievement Award recipient and Academy Award-winning director Clint Eastwood, will have its world premiere as the Opening Night Gala of AFI FEST 2011 presented by Audi. The film stars Academy Award nominee Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, along with Academy Award nominee Naomi Watts, Armie Hammer and Oscar winner Judi Dench. It is produced by Academy Award winners Eastwood and Brian Grazer, and Oscar nominee Robert Lorenz. From an original screenplay by Oscar winner Dustin Lance Black, the film explores the public and private life of one of the most powerful, controversial and enigmatic figures of the 20th century, J. Edgar Hoover, founding director of the FBI.

"Clint Eastwood is an American icon – one whose work as a director, actor, producer and composer not only stands the test of time, but also continues to add new, rich chapters with each passing year," said Bob Gazzale, President and CEO of the American Film Institute. "What a gift it is to be going to the movies when Clint Eastwood is making them, and what an honor it is for the American Film Institute to premiere his latest contribution to America's cultural legacy."

Below: Here are Two 30 second U.S. TV Spots from Warner Brothers

Below: Here are Three more 30 second TV spots from Warner Bros
TV Spot #1

TV Spot #2

TV Spot #3

Josey Wales Blu Ray release OUT TODAY!

2011-06-06T21:42:00.025Z

Our good friends at Warner Brothers have again been in touch regarding their new Blu Ray release of Clint's western masterpiece THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES. Made in 1976, The Outlaw Josey Wales remains one of Clint's greatest films from the 1970's and one of my own personal favourites. Warner's new Special Edition treatment includes a whole host of bonus including

• Commentary by Richard Schickel
• Clint Eastwood's West (29:02 in 1080P)
• Hell Hath No Fury (30:29 in 480i)
• Eastwood in Action (7:55 in 480i)
• Theatrical Trailer (2:16 in 480i)

The Outlaw Josey Wales has a wonderful new freshness and vibrancy when viewed on its new Blu Ray format. The film's magnificent cinematography is (and always was) a real revelation. It is clear that Warner's have spent a great deal of thought and time on this ultimate home edition and comes mighty close to capturing the epic feel of its original cinema presentation.

Among the new Bonus material for this release is an excellent Richard Schickel commentary where he reflects on Clint's impressive career in the saddle and key production details.
There is a new 30 minute documentary called Clint Eastwood’s West, featuring interviews with Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Oliver Stone, and James Mangold.

Previously released bonus material includes the 30 minute Hell Hath No Fury: The Making of The Outlaw Josey Wales.
The fantastic original production featurette 'Eastwood in Action' (which I've owned on film since my school days back in the 70s!!) And the Original Theatrical. I would have really enjoyed the inclusion of the full range of TV spots and those great Radio Spots (one of which includes Clint as Josey narrating). I would of been glad to contribute them towards the set, as well as 100+ stills for a rather nice gallery collection.
Nevertheless, it's without doubt a fantastic release and all enclosed in a beautifully produced and informative book.
The Technical Spec:
Disc:
Region: Free
Runnig time: 2:15:51.184
Disc Size: 35,538,137,230 bytes
Feature Size: 29,246,097,408 bytes
Video Bitrate: 21.96 Mbps
Chapters: 35
Release date: June 7th, 2011

Video:
Aspect ratio: 2.39:1, Resolution: 1080p / 23.976 fps, Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC Video
Audio:
DTS-HD Master Audio English 3590 kbps 5.1 / 48 kHz / 3590 kbps / 24-bit (DTS Core: 5.1 / 48 kHz / 1509 kbps / 24-bit)
Dolby Digital Audio English 192 kbps 2.0 / 48 kHz / 192 kbps / DN -4dB
Dolby Digital Audio French 192 kbps 1.0 / 48 kHz / 192 kbps / DN -4dB
Dolby Digital Audio German 192 kbps 1.0 / 48 kHz / 192 kbps / DN -4dB
Dolby Digital Audio Italian 192 kbps 1.0 / 48 kHz / 192 kbps / DN -4dB
Dolby Digital Audio Japanese 192 kbps 1.0 / 48 kHz / 192 kbps / DN -4dB
Dolby Digital Audio Spanish 192 kbps 1.0 / 48 kHz / 192 kbps / DN -4dB
Subtitles:
English (SDH), Danish/Finnish/French/German/Italian/Japanese/Norwegian/Swedish and Spanish

Our sincere thanks again to Warner Brothers for your continued support.

Check out Clint at Warners here.

News on Kevin Avery's book Conversations with Clint: Paul Nelson's Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood

2011-06-05T20:26:00.023Z

I had the pleasure of another email today from Kevin. It was back in September of 2010 that Kevin first contacted me regarding this very special book. Since then, Kevin has been true to his word in keeping The Clint Eastwood Archive bang up to date with any news.
I am pleased to report that there is now an official release date of September 22nd 2011.

Kevin's book is now available for order on Amazon, with a presale discount, so please check out the links below.

Conversations with Clint: Paul Nelson's Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood, 1979-1983 AMAZON US

Conversations with Clint: Paul Nelson's Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood, 1979-1983 AMAZON UK

Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson [Hardcover] AMAZON US

Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson [Hardcover] AMAZON UK

While this is Kevin's 2nd book, his first Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson, is due out shortly after on November 1st. This will also contain a chapter devoted to his relationship with Clint Eastwood, as well as other Eastwood-related material throughout.
Again, this too is available for order with a preorder discount.

Clint Eastwood has forged a remarkable career as a movie star, director, producer, and composer. These newly discovered conversations with legendary journalist Paul Nelson return us to a point when, still acting in other people’s films, Eastwood was honing his directorial craft on a series of inexpensive films that he brought in under budget and ahead of schedule. Operating largely beneath the critical radar, he made his movies swiftly and inexpensively. Few of his critics then could have predicted that Eastwood the actor and director would ever be taken as seriously as he is today. But Paul Nelson did. The interviews were conducted from 1979 through 1983. Eastwood talks openly and without illusions about his early career as an actor, old Hollywood, and his formative years as a director, his influence and what he learned along the way as an actor—lessons that helped him become the director he is today. Conversations with Clint provides a fresh and vivid perspective on the life and work of this most American of movie icons.
Kevin Avery’s writing has appeared in publications as diverse as Mississippi Review, Penthouse, Weber Studies, and Salt Lake magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and stepdaughter. His first book, Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson, is published by Fantagraphics Books.
Jonathan Lethem is one of the most acclaimed American novelists of his generation. His books include Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, and Chronic City. His essays about James Brown and Bob Dylan have appeared in Rolling Stone. He lives in Claremont, California.

Advance Praise for Conversations With Clint

“Kevin Avery has performed a great service to film lovers by bringing to light Paul Nelson’s remarkable interviews with Clint Eastwood. Nelson was an appreciator of Eastwood in the seventies, before he had won wide critical recognition. In these fascinating and wide-ranging conversations, the actor-director discusses with complete candor both the art of his films and the realities of filmmaking in Hollywood.”
Andrew Sarris, Author of Notes on the Auteur Theory

“This book is a miracle. It reads so naturally—a testament to Kevin Avery’s editorial skill, and his own devotional attention to Paul’s voice—that you might suppose it’s an example of something. But it’s not. There aren’t books like this, because I doubt any other interviewer could ever have this sort of effect on a human being as (justifiably) well-defended as Clint Eastwood. (For comparison, see Lester Bangs, Paul’s friend, jousting with Lou Reed.) Here, you feel the seduction of good conversation, of genuine friendship, overwriting the task at hand for both participants.”
From the foreword by Jonathan Lethem

Films discussed include:
Revenge of the Creature (1955)
Tarantula (1955)
Lafayette Escadrille (1958)
A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
For a Few Dollars More (1965)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
The Witches (1967)
Hang ’Em High (1968)
Coogan’s Bluff (1968)
Where Eagles Dare (1968)
Paint Your Wagon (1969)
Kelly’s Heroes (1970)
Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970)
The Beguiled (1971)
Play Misty for Me (1971)
Dirty Harry (1971)
Joe Kidd (1972)
High Plains Drifter (1973)
Breezy (1973)
Magnum Force (1973)
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974)
The Eiger Sanction (1975)
The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
The Enforcer (1976)
The Gauntlet (1977)
Every Which Way but Loose (1978)
Escape from Alcatraz (1979)
Bronco Billy (1980)
Any Which Way You Can (1980)
Firefox (1982)
Honkytonk Man (1982)
Sudden Impact (1983)

September 2011 • 240 pages Paperback • 9781441165862 • $19.95

Music Critic Paul Nelson Finally Gets His Due.

Fantagraphics is proud to announce Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson. Author Kevin Avery spent four years researching and writing this unique anthology-biography. This book compiles Nelson’s best works and also provides a vivid account of his life. In the ’60s, Paul Nelson pioneered rock & roll criticism with a first-person style of writing later coined “New Journalism.” During a five-year detour at Mercury Records he signed the New York Dolls to their first recording contract, and then settled back down to music criticism at Rolling Stone. Through his writing, Nelson championed the early careers of artists like Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Rod Stewart, Neil Young, Warren Zevon, The Sex Pistols, and The Ramones.But in 1982, he walked away from it all. By the time Nelson died in his New York City apartment in 2006, everything he’d written had been relegated to back issues of old music magazines.

“My original idea for this book was simply to anthologize Paul Nelson’s best work so that today’s readers could discover, as I had in my youth, his elegant and brilliant writings,” explains author Kevin Avery. “But I soon realized that, in doing these pieces, Paul was ultimately telling his own story. And his story was so damn compelling it was impossible for me not to write about it." American journalist, biographer, and poet Nick Tosches wrote the foreword to this landmark work of cultural revival, which stands as a tribute to and collection of one of the unsung critical champions of popular music.

Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson By: Kevin Avery • Foreword By: Nick Tosches $29.99 • Hardcover • Black & White • 584 Pages Release: November 2011 ISBN: 978-1606994757

Happy Birthday Clint!

2011-06-02T03:28:00.007Z

A big Happy Birthday on behalf of all the friends here at TCEA. We might be a day or two late, but never claimed to be perfect, even though we're pretty close! Have a great week Big Man!

The Clint Eastwood Archive

Above: Clint and Leonardo DiCaprio currently working together on "J Edgar"

Hereafter Blu Ray / DVD combo review

2011-04-28T17:46:00.005Z

Hereafter is without doubt a solid piece of filmmaking. That said, I’d probably have to describe Eastwood’s latest release as an ‘unusual’ entry when compared to his recent directorial projects. Hereafter starts off with a devastatingly realistic (in light of the recent news footage from Japan) and superbly produced tsunami sequence. However, the film is a soft and very gently paced piece of work.

Matt Damon (Invictus) gives an excellent and perfectly measured performance as a recently retired psychic, forced to quit his practice due to the stress of living with his ‘curse.’ Damon plays this difficult ‘tortured soul’ character very well.
Cécile De France plays Marie, the French journalist, author and initial non believer. Marie survives a near death experience when caught in the middle of the tsunami. For Marie, it is an experience that propels her to investigate further in a hunt for the truth. De France gives a wonderful performance throughout.
In London, twin brothers (played by Frankie and George McLaren) are separated when one is suddenly killed in a road accident. Left alone with his mother, the twin wonders where his brother has really gone and makes various attempts to make contact with him.

Hereafter is a deliberately slow paced drama which focuses on the aftermath of death and its emotional effect on the three people who struggle to find some form of closure. Eastwood examines closely the inner pain of the three principal characters and like the narrative; the story’s conclusion has a reserved and tender quality.
Hereafter will probably never be described as Eastwood’s greatest work. It is a dramatic and highly original character piece, with an engrossing subject at the heart of its well presented story. It’s a film that should be thoroughly enjoyed, so long as you are prepared to look beyond its opening (and very impressive) tsunami sequence.

Hereafter’s Sound and picture are stunning, see full spec below.

As bonus material on the blu ray disc only, Step Into the Hereafter Focus Points (HD, 42 minutes): View Hereafter's nine engaging Focus Point featurettes individually from the special features menu or as part of an unobtrusive, fairly seamless In-Movie Experience (of the "press enter to view" variety). Segments include "Tsunami! Recreating a Disaster," "Is There Life After Death," "Clint on Casting," "Delving into the Hereafter," "Twin Bonding," "French Speaking French," "Why the White Light?" "Hereafter's Locations: Casting the Silent Characters" and "The Eastwood Experience." Thankfully, Eastwood appears in each short via interviews and behind-the-scenes footage, giving the filmmaker ample opportunity to discuss and dissect the film.
Also included on the blu ray disc only, The Eastwood Factor: Extended Version (First time available in Full HD): An exceedingly extensive look at the life and career of Clint Eastwood written and directed by film critic and biographer Richard Schickel, built around Eastwood's own words, and narrated by actor and Unforgiven co-star Morgan Freeman. Classy, candid and oh-so-captivating, be sure to set aside two hours for this comprehensive documentary.
Video
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC, Video resolution: 1080p, Aspect ratio: 2.40:1, Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Audio
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, French: Dolby Digital 5.1, English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, French: Dolby Digital 5.1 (less)
Subtitles
English SDH, French, Spanish, English SDH, French, Spanish (less)
Discs
50GB Blu-ray Disc, Two-disc set (1 BD, 1 DVD), Digital copy (on disc), DVD copy
Playback Region free
I would again like to thank Warner Brothers in the United States for sending this latest Blu Ray combo release. Your recognition and continued support of The Clint Eastwood Archive is always very much appreciated.

Firefox writer Craig Thomas dies after cancer battle

2011-04-13T23:34:00.010Z

CARDIFF-BORN thriller writer Craig Thomas has died from pneumonia, aged 68, it has been announced. The author was regarded by many as the man who invented the techno-thriller with the publication of his international bestseller Firefox, which was made into a Hollywood film starring Clint Eastwood. Mr Thomas had a successful career spanning 30 years, which featured novels such as Snow Falcon, Sea Leopard, Jade Tiger and Firefox Down. Born in the city, the former English teacher attended Cardiff High School and then went on to study at the University College Cardiff. When once asked why he was drawn in to the thriller world, he said: “Because of its evident sense of tension and danger, the deliberate structure of the plots, and perhaps the emphatic moral framework – just as many writers of detective fiction are drawn to the sense of justice their books demonstrate towards good and evil.

Above: Writer Craig Thomas died on April 4th

“There is an attraction in the thriller or adventure story, for both the writer and reader, in knowing which side one is supposed to be on. And thrillers are optimistic. “Their problems are soluble, and they are resolved by individuals. As Oscar Wilde said, ‘the good end happily, the bad unhappily – that is the meaning of fiction’.” He had recently finished a two-volume commentary on the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. He and his wife, Jill, who was also his editor, lived for many years in Staffordshire, but had recently moved to Somerset. Jill said: “Craig meant everything to me, we were soulmates and we had a fantastic life together. He was a very loving person and a very honest person. He would say what he thought and he hated political correctness. His passion for his writing remained up until the end. Even when he was in hospital under going chemotherapy he was still scribbling away until it just got too much for him.” Mr Thomas died from pneumonia on April 4, following a short but intensive battle with acute myeloid leukaemia.

Thanks to Dave Turner for bringing this story to my attention. Our thoughts are with his family.

Eastwood on Eastwood Full Review on Michael Henry Wilson’s Exquisite Book

2011-03-28T23:58:00.009Z

CAHIERS DU CINEMA produces a genuine master class

I had a feeling this book was going to be something a little bit special. Culminated from nearly 30 years of interviews, it certainly sounded like something worth holding your breath for. But Eastwood fans have been here before, and often been disappointed with the results or the inexcusable amount of general inaccuracies that have appeared in publications over the last few years. I’m pleased to report that this particular book suffers from no such problems. It is quite simply, an extraordinary piece of work which deserves to be singled out.

On first reading Wilson’s book, I was struck how easy I fell into it, almost encapsulated by it, but why? I have always approached every new book on Eastwood with an equal amount of enthusiasm, yet found myself ‘flagging’ as the same stories seemed to inherently begin to surface. It didn’t take long to establish what exactly makes this such a rewarding read; it is simply so refreshing, not only in its content, but in its delivery. What makes it particularly special of course is that it is Eastwood’s own words, from Eastwood’s own perspective. Eastwood engages in countless question and answer sessions with complete lucidity. Wilson cleverly applies a simple framework of Eastwood’s career. He allows his subject the freedom to expand upon any given subject that Wilson intelligently enquires about. The layout is fuss free, simplistic and to the point. Wilson’s questions are presented in Italic, Eastwood’s responses are not. Every page is tightly crammed, allowing only for the minimal of margin widths and header space.

For Eastwood admirers the world over, this book is certain to contain new and informative citations, and all from the man who knows best. Opening Eastwood on Eastwood is much like opening a bottle of single malt, preserved and left to mature for almost three decades. Its content is both rich and revealing. Wilson’s questions are answered with confidence and precision. Eastwood’s speaks with an undeniable ‘purity’ and honesty. His responses are intelligent and as we would come to expect from the likes of past masters such as Hitchcock or Ford. This trusted form of dialogue between Eastwood and Wilson allows Eastwood to expand on his subjects with ease. Many questions are discussed and explored.

Why did he choose to make risky projects when he could have sat back on his laurels?

How did he successfully manage to make personal pictures in a system controlled by the studios?

How did Eastwood arrive at the decision to become a director?

Everything in these pages makes for an incredibly insightful read. Each page is beautifully presented on quality stock paper (I was constantly thinking I had two pages stuck between my finger and thumb) and very well illustrated throughout. While this book does come with a rather hefty price tag (see below), I must also add that you certainly get a lot for your money. At 240 heavy pages, there is a lot of reading to be had. Consider perhaps, where else are you ever likely to find a book that contains so much of Eastwood’s own words..? And that’s really where my considerations would end. I’ve certainly been lucky enough to read most of the Eastwood books that have been published. But in my opinion; I would certainly rank this as one of the most important and most significant books on Eastwood to be published in a very long time.

Yes, seriously, it is that good…

Eastwood on Eastwood is published by Cahiers du cinema and available through Phaidon Click here for direct link.

Price £39.95, $59.95, euro 49.95, Can $65.00, Aus $95.00

A very special thank you to Kara Reaney and the good people at Phaidon Press for their support and contribution.

The Clint Eastwood Archive

Big new book on Eastwood

2011-03-13T15:33:00.004Z

Eastwood on Eastwood
From Dirty Harry to his life as one of Hollywood's most critically-acclaimed Directors, Phaidon's Eastwood on Eastwood ($60) (£40) chronicles one of cinema's living legends in his own words. The book Includes over 340 colour photographs, including previously unpublished photographs from Eastwood's personal collection, a biography, a complete filmography and a dialog with critic and documentary filmmaker, Michael Henry Wilson.

The book explores Clint Eastwood's career as an actor and director in Clint Eastwood's own words. Wilson uses his interviews with Eastwood to frame his career. This is a must have for any Eastwood fan or anyone curious about the man behind the legend. Phaidon are very kindly sending The Clint Eastwood Archive a copy of this lavish looking book, so I am looking forward to telling you much more about it.

Our thanks go to Phaidon for their kind contribution.

The Clint Eastwood Archive

A Hollywood Icon Lays Down the Law

2011-02-17T16:08:00.003Z

A Big thank you to our American friend Jerry Whittington who recently sent me this interview with Clint, which appeared in The Wall Street Journal on Jan 29th 2011. The interview was by freelance journalist, Michael Judge.

Carmel, Calif.

It's high noon at Mission Ranch, and the haze is just beginning to burn off the meadow. One couldn't ask for a better setting for a conversation with an actor who's played some of Hollywood's most iconic outlaws and lawmen, and who is today, at the age of 80, perhaps the most respected filmmaker in the industry.

Clint Eastwood pulls up in a silver Audi SUV. He extends his hand and says simply, "Nice to meet you." His voice is softer, more lilting than in his films, but his presence—he stands a full 6 feet 4 inches tall—is formidable. The Italian director Sergio Leone once said he had "an indolent way of moving," similar to a cat's. There's a calmness to him that puts one at ease.

"Where should we do this?" he asks, with a smile. "Somewhere quiet," I reply. "It's quiet everywhere here," he says, gesturing to the meadow and the towering eucalyptuses that border it. He should know—he owns the place. He bought the 150-year-old, 22-acre ranch in 1986, partly to save it from developers and partly out of nostalgia. When he was a young man in the Army, he tells me, he had his first "legal" beer here at the Mission Ranch bar and restaurant. That's where, nearly 60 years later, we settle into a small table with a view of the meadow and, beyond it, the white surf of Carmel Bay.

Mr. Eastwood is deep into his latest project, a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover, the controversial and secretive founder of the modern FBI. "If you're doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality," he says. "But you really don't know what was going on in the person's mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him."
The Hoover screenplay was written by Dustin Lance Black, the Oscar-winning writer of the 2008 film "Milk" about the life and 1978 murder of gay-rights activist and San Francisco City Councilman Harvey Milk. When I ask if the screenplay addresses reports by former FBI employees that Hoover was a cross-dresser and perhaps a closeted homosexual, Mr. Eastwood says not really. In fact, what attracted him to the screenplay was the fact that it "didn't quite go down that road."

As with all his films, Mr. Eastwood didn't rely on others to do his research. "I went back and read probably all the material that [Mr. Black] had read. . . . I went and visited with the FBI in Washington, D.C., and tried to find out as much as I could about people who had worked with Hoover."

Mr. Eastwood's main interests are the workings of a sprawling, crime-fighting bureaucracy and how a young man—Hoover was 29 when he was made director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924—survived to serve eight presidents, from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon. Hoover was, in many ways, "the most powerful guy in the country," says Mr. Eastwood, "at a time when America was by far the most powerful country" in the world.

The film spans Hoover's entire career, from the 1919-20 Palmer Raids, which saw thousands of suspected anarchists, socialists and other radicals detained or deported; to the Gangster Wars of the 1930s that resulted in the shooting deaths of such arch-criminals as John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson; to the wiretaps and secret dossiers of the 1950s and '60s on "subversives" that included leftists and Communist Party members but also political rivals, celebrities and civil-rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr.

I ask if Hoover—like Mr. Eastwood's Dirty Harry character of the '70s and '80s, or the brutal sheriff Little Bill in his Oscar-winning 1992 film, "Unforgiven"—hadn't overstepped his bounds as a lawman.
"Sometimes they do," Mr. Eastwood says. "And that's what I always loved about the 'Unforgiven' script. Little Bill is not treated as just a guy with a dark hat and a sinister villain. He was villainous only because of his excesses. He had dreams that everybody else has. He just wanted to sit on the porch of the house he was building and have a nice life and watch the sunset and smoke his pipe. And he believed in gun control in the town that he controlled. But he had also gone over into a cruel streak along the way. . . .
"You could say Hoover might be that way, too. I'm sure he had his excesses. . . . He was obviously a very detailed guy all his life, starting as a very young man. He had some great ideas—modern-day investigative techniques [like fingerprinting and forensic science]. But he also liked the glory of it all."

I ask Mr. Eastwood about the final scene in one of his earlier Dirty Harry movies, when his character throws away his badge after shooting one more "scumbag." Marshall Will Kane, played by Gary Cooper, does the same thing at the end of "High Noon" when the townspeople abandon him to face a murderous gang alone. It's a classic theme in Westerns: Does society expect too much from its lawmen, only to spurn them when they deliver?

"Society is at odds with itself," says Mr. Eastwood. "They want law and order but . . ." he pauses, perhaps thinking he sounds too much like Dirty Harry. "I was always intrigued by this guy who was frustrated by not being able to solve problems due to the obstacles put up by society itself—by the bureaucracy in society. . . . That didn't mean I was against a criminal's right to justice, to a defense, and all that sort of thing. Though a lot of people interpreted it that way because when you do those roles people go, 'Hey, that's the way the guy thinks.' That's kind of a left-handed compliment in a way, you think, 'Oh, I convinced you that much? Good!'"

Mr. Eastwood has called his 1976 Civil-War era Western "The Outlaw Josey Wales" (which tells the story of a Missouri farmer avenging the murder of his family by Union soldiers) an "antiwar" film. Does he see parallels with his more recent films, such as "Letters from Iwo Jima" (2006) that tells the story of the epic battle for that South Pacific island largely from the Japanese perspective?
When it comes to war, he says, it's hard not to think about the "poor slob" fighting for the other side. In the case of the Japanese conscripts fighting on Iwo Jima, some were as young as 14 or 15, "sent to an island and told don't plan on coming back. You're going to defend your country because of all our philosophies. . . . I mean, that's a big request, but it happens in every country. . . .
"I was drafted during the Korean War. None of us wanted to go. . . . It was only a couple of years after World War II had ended. We said, 'Wait a second? Didn't we just get through with that?' An atomic bomb, the pacification of Japan . . . and here we are back in it again. . . . But everybody went. You objected but you went. You said, OK, this is what we're supposed to do."

Mr. Eastwood says he wasn't shipped out to Korea with the rest of his outfit due to an airplane accident. He was stationed at Fort Ord, not far from Carmel, and had hopped a Navy plane to visit his folks in Seattle. On the return trip, the plane crash-landed in the ocean near Drakes Bay, just north of San Francisco. He wasn't injured—he and the pilot swam to safety—but he was ordered to stay behind and await a Navy hearing, which never came, on the cause of the crash. "Typical of the service," he says.

"As for Josey Wales, I saw the parallels to the modern day at that time. Everybody gets tired of it, but it never ends. A war is a horrible thing, but it's also a unifier of countries. . . . Man becomes his most creative during war. Look at the amount of weaponry that was made in four short years of World War II—the amount of ships and guns and tanks and inventions and planes and P-38s and P-51s, and just the urgency and the camaraderie, and the unifying. But that's kind of a sad statement on mankind, if that's what it takes."
After 9/11, I suggest, the country was unified, but that soon faded. "Yeah it did," he says. "A couple years afterwards everybody goes, 'Oh well, OK, that's over with.' And of course you can't do that. You've got to always keep that kind of memory alive, so it doesn't happen again."

But he says he wasn't one of those guys saying the U.S. should go to Iraq and "kick ass and take names," because too often we just "stick a toe in" and risk too many lives. Still, he appreciates the sacrifices made by our military personnel: "It all comes back to the grunt. The guy who's in the trenches, the guy who's walking along the roads . . . in a country where you don't speak the language, you don't know the customs that much, and you're just sort of at the mercy of what the chain of command is up along the line."

He also appreciates the dilemmas faced by democracies when dealing with Islamist terrorism. "How many rights do you want to give to people who are trying to kill you just because you're you? . . . [Y]ou may be of a different religious sect, or you may be an agnostic, or you may be anything. But you're not one of them, so you're an inferior being. . . . Do you fight on 21st-century ideas or 17th-century, like the people who are against you?"

Closer to home, what does this onetime Carmel mayor think of the return of California Gov. Jerry Brown, who has pledged to get rid of the "smoke and mirrors" in Sacramento and balance the state's $25 billion budget deficit?

"He's got an interesting opportunity now because most fantasies in this world are based around 'If I only knew then what I know now, imagine what I could have done,'" he laughs. "But I'll tell you when I liked him—and I wasn't a registered Democrat—but I liked him when he was running for president [in 1992] on the flat tax. . . . A ton of economists, both liberal and conservative, have argued for a flat tax, but nobody's ever had the nerve to do it. . . . It would simplify things, but simplification doesn't seem to be in the human psyche."
If he wasn't a Democrat back in 1992, was he an independent? "No, I was a registered Republican," he confesses happily. "I became a Republican in 1951, the first year I could vote. Eisenhower was running [for president] and we were all in the Army. He ran on the fact that he'd go to Korea [and end the war]. I don't know if that was anything more than a show, but he went there, and the Korean War did end." He then adds with a smile, like the easy-going Eisenhower Republican he is, "But I've supported Democrats along the way."

Mr. Eastwood is a product of what he calls the "Not So Great Depression." Born on May 31, 1930, in San Francisco, his father, Clinton Eastwood Sr., was a steelworker and migrant laborer; his mother, Margaret Ruth Runner, a part-time factory worker and full-time mom. "It was a tough time. My parents and my sister and I, we all travelled around the West Coast with a trailer on the back of the car. My dad would get a job that would last three months and then he'd have to go look for another one. Once in a while he'd get one that lasted six months."

His first big break came in 1958 with the role of Rowdy Yates in the Western TV series "Rawhide." In the mid-'60s, he left Hollywood to star in the Italian-made Western "A Fistful of Dollars" (1964), the film in which he originated the "Man with No Name" character—the mysterious, avenging gunslinger he later resurrected in films he directed himself, like "High Plains Drifter" (1973) and "Pale Rider" (1985).
In 1992, his revisionist Western "Unforgiven" won four Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture, sending his career to new heights at an age when most film stars typically retire. He's since directed and sometimes also starred in "Mystic River," "Million Dollar Baby," "Invictus" and "Gran Torino," to name a few that have had critical and commercial success. "My whole life has been one big improvisation," says Mr. Eastwood. He started his own production company, Malpaso Productions, in the mid-1960s, gaining the freedom to experiment and take greater risks than other Hollywood stars of his generation.

With the Hoover movie about to start filming, I ask if he's ever come in over budget. "Not that I know of," he says. "Maybe once or twice. I usually stay on schedule. And when I was mayor here of Carmel we always had a reserve and we never spent more than we took in. . . . That's the first thing you're taught when you're a kid from the Not So Great Depression—don't spend it all in one place."

The World of Poster Mock Ups

2011-01-24T16:08:00.012Z

I recently made contact with a site that specialises in retro poster mock ups Silverferox. Basically posters that never were. It's a fascinating process which provides a harmless alternative to the original official designs issued by the studios. These are designed for non-commercial use, but just for pleasure. Nevertheless, a great deal of skill goes into these designs and for that, they are very admirable.

Here are 6 designs from Dirty Harry and 1 from Magnum Force with the promise of more to come. I look forward to future posters and hope you all enjoy them too.

Happy Christmas

2010-12-24T01:01:00.016Z

Hello Friends,

I just wanted to take this opportunity to wish everybody here a great Christmas and every happiness for 2011. It has been a wonderful year here at The Clint Eastwood Archive and the statistics continue to look very healthy indeed. In the last period of 2010 the site received over 81,000 hits, so I would like to thank everybody who continues to visit here and who offer support. I would especially like to thank Mal Baker and Dave Turner, two long time Clint related friends who continue to keep the faith and are always there to help out. I would also like to thank the wonderful JERRY WHITTINGTON. Jerry has worked on a number of Clint's classics such as Paint Your Wagon, Play Misty for Me and High Plains Drifter. Jerry has not only provided the archive with some great material, but he has also become a most valued friend. My sincere thanks Jerry.

I would also like to thank Warner Brothers for their continued support, it's great to know you guys are there.

There is still tons of material to be added here (Yes, honestly), I know the site already seems to be bulging at the sides, but we have only just scratched the surface (I can see Mal beginning to break out in a sweat already).

There are still thousands of Photos and articles yet to be posted here. The biggest problem of course is time. As close friends of the site know, I always try and go the extra mile by making sure that most of the images are digitally restored before being posted. I can promise you that there are some great things to come in 2011.

Cheers to you all!

Above: Classic Clint from 1982

Eli Wallach collects Honorary Oscar

2010-12-15T11:50:00.006Z

I'm a little late in reporting this news due to being stuck in the white wastelands of Northern England for the past couple of weeks. It was great to see the wonderful Eli Wallach awarded with an honorary Oscar last month. Eli (who turned 95 on Dec 7th) collected his award from long time friend Eastwood. Eastwood told the audience (at the Governors Awards ceremony which was held at the Grand Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland Center on November 13, 2010) about their time while filming The Good, the bad and the Ugly in Spain.

Check out the following link:
http://www.oscars.org/video/watch/ga_2010_13_eastwood.html

Robert DeNiro also helped recognize 94-year-old actor Eli Wallach, who was presented with an Oscar statuette for his 60-year acting career that continues today.

"Eli, now that we’re going for the same parts, I hope we can remain friends," DeNiro joked.

Bennett, who was introduced as Wallach’s longtime friend, sang two songs in the actor’s honor.

Eastwood, who worked with Wallach on "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," called him "a great performer and a great friend" and thanked the academy for its "good taste and good sense" in presenting him with an honorary Oscar.

Wallach said he was deeply moved by the award.

"I don’t act to live, I live to act," he said, kissing his Oscar before stepping off stage.

The Wonderful Ingrid Pitt dies aged 73

2010-11-24T14:37:00.012Z

THE SCHOOL BOY'S DREAM SCREAM QUEEN

I was saddened to hear of Ingrid Pitt's passing this morning. Ingrid, who starred alongside Clint in (arguably) the greatest WWII adventure of all time, collapsed on her way to an event held by her loyal fans and just two days after her 73rd birthday. As an actress, she was a fan's dream. Ingrid was a regular on the convention and film fair circuit. Warm, courteous and utterly charming, Ingrid was always happy to involve and welcome you with that beautiful smile that left you melting. I was lucky enough to have met her on several occasions and she was always a delight.

Below: Ingrid during the filming of Where Eagles Dare

Born Ingoushka Petrov in Poland in 1937, she survived imprisonment in a concentration camp during the Second World War. On the night she planned to make her stage debut, she found herself under threat from the Communist East German authorities. After jumping into the River Spree to escape them, she was rescued by an American soldier, who became her first husband. In the early 1960s Pitt was a member of the prestigious Berliner Ensemble, under the guidance of Bertolt Brecht's widow Helene Weigel. In 1965 she made her film debut in Doctor Zhivago, playing a minor role. In 1968 she co-starred in the low budget science fiction film The Omegans and in the same year played in Where Eagles Dare opposite Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood.

Above: Ingrid as Heidi alongside Richard Burton in Where Eagles Dare.

It was her work with Hammer Film Productions that elevated her to cult figure status. She starred in The Vampire Lovers (1970), a film based on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's novella Carmilla, and Countess Dracula (1971), a film based on the legends around Countess Elizabeth Báthory. Pitt also appeared in the Amicus Horror Anthology film The House That Dripped Blood (1971) and had a small part in the cult film The Wicker Man (1973).

Below: Ingrid as Countess Dracula

Ingrid's daughter, Steffanie Pitt said: "She passed away this morning. It was heart trouble. She was a fantastic person." She added: "She had a couple of bad years, health-wise, but she had fought through. She'll be sorely missed." Steffanie said she wanted her mother to be remembered as the Countess Dracula with the "wonderful teeth and the wonderful bosom".

She relished being cast as predatory baddies, rather than innocent victims. Film historian Marcus Hearn, said: "She was partly responsible for ushering in a bold and brazen era of sexually explicit horror films in the 1970s, but that should not denigrate her abilities."

Above: Ingrid was proud to be recognised as the sexy scream queen

Robin Hardy, the director of The Wicker Man, said "She was a very attractive person in every sense. She was a perfectly good actress but a very decent person as well, not that those two things don't often go together."

Later in her life, she published many books and toured the film fair and convention scene regularly. Ingrid seemed to radiate enjoyment when it came to meeting her fans and seemingly relished sharing a joke with them. Our thoughts are naturally with her husband Tony and their family. Ingrid will be sorely missed by many.

Below: Ingrid in later years, like the countess she retained an enigmatic beauty

The Clint Eastwood Archive

Hereafter opened this week stateside

2010-10-16T11:01:00.025Z

Yes, Clint notched up another release this week with Hereafter. It's astonishing how quickly Clint's films come around and is reflective of his continued proficiency and professionalism as a film maker. I will be posting reviews here as I receive them from our US friends who still send in reviews. Incidentally, one of our friends Kevin was the US correspondent from way back in the days of the CEAS, so it is great to still have him around and so actively involved in the Eastwood scene. Thank you Kev.

Clint Squints at the Afterlife
At 80, this surprising director continues to throw us curves.
Davin Ansen October 7th 2010 Newsweek
Clint Eastwood flirted with the supernatural in his allegorical Western Pale Rider, but nothing in his career prepares us for his haunting and haunted Hereafter, a bold, strange, problematic investigation into the nature of the afterlife. At 80, he continues to throw us curves, abandoning the safety of genre for an unconventionally structured story about mortality, loneliness, and the relationship between the living and the dead.
Just to further mix things up, Eastwood opens his movie with the most spectacular action sequence he’s ever mounted—a terrifying tsunami wreaking havoc on a tropical island that would be the crowning achievement of any epic disaster movie. Here it’s more a stunning feat of misdirection, for the tale that follows is intimate and often hushed.
Caught in the tsunami is the first of the three characters whose fates Hereafter follows, a French television host (Cécile De France) who dies in the storm and then miraculously comes back to life. But her glimpse of the beyond makes it impossible for her to reenter her old life as a Parisian celebrity; instead, she becomes obsessed with writing a book about the eerily similar after-death experiences others have endured, a pursuit that costs her credibility in the eyes of her sophisticated friends. As her unhappy publisher notes, it’s a topic more suited to the American market.
The second strand in Peter Morgan’s screenplay concerns George (Matt Damon), a reclusive psychic who can communicate with the dead—a gift he’s come to regard as a curse. Though his ambitious brother (Jay Mohr) wants him to parlay this talent into a fortune, George has withdrawn into a blue-collar job and a solitary existence in San Francisco.
We are then transported to London, where a tragic accident separates young London school-boy Marcus (Frankie McLaren) from his beloved twin brother. Desperately lonely, and packed off to foster parents when his junkie mother goes into rehab, Marcus tries every quack telepathist in London, searching for a way to connect to his lost sibling.
This material couldn’t be further from the reality-inspired political dramas (Frost/Nixon, The Queen) that made Morgan’s name. Much of the movie’s tension comes from wondering how these three stories are going to connect, but Morgan’s plot mechanics—which grind all too noisily in the London section of the story, and serve up a tidy finale that seems oddly beside the point—are not the film’s real strength. What keeps us rapt are the mysterious and provocative questions Hereafter raises, questions that Eastwood and Morgan know can’t be definitively answered.
Clearly, at this point in his life, questions of mortality aren’t far from Eastwood’s mind, and you can feel his identification with these characters, whose encounters with death both separate them from the rest of the living and give them a sense of urgent purpose. Damon, with his understated but deeply felt performance, and the wonderfully versatile De France supply the movie’s aching soul. And Eastwood keeps it honest. Hereafter confronts a topic that could have descended into mawkish, mystical hokum, but not in Eastwood’s no-nonsense, uncynical hands. He looks at death, and beyond, with clear, open, inquisitive eyes.

Hereafter October 18th 2010 by David Denby The New Yorker
Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter” begins with a magnificent re-creation of the 2004 tsunami as it hits an unnamed resort town in Southeast Asia. An initially receding ocean returns as a thick, unstoppable wave that surges ashore and rushes down a street, washing away buildings, tossing cars as if they were sticks, and knocking down a French tourist, Marie (Cécile de France), who then gets clobbered by a piece of metal and appears to be sinking to her death. The sequence was brought off with a combination of actual ocean waves, watery turmoil in a film-studio tank, and digital enhancement, and it entirely overwhelms the rather pallid movie that follows. Marie survives and attempts to resume her career as a broadcast journalist in Paris, only to discover that she is haunted by a vision that she had as she came close to dying—a shimmering impression of blurry figures standing in a whitish light. Peter Morgan’s script places Marie’s story between two parallel narratives: In London, Jason, one of a pair of adorable young twin boys (who are played by the twins George and Frankie McLaren), is hit by a truck and killed, and his brother, Marcus, looks for a means of communicating with him. In San Francisco, George (Matt Damon) has exactly the kind of necromantic powers that Marcus requires. George can summon the recent dead just by grabbing the hands of someone in mourning; he sees white light and shadowy figures, too. He’s not a swindler—he wants to provide solace to the grief-stricken. Yet he’s oppressed by his skills, which link him with the dead but leave him no life of his own.
As George, Matt Damon stays all too faithfully in character. He’s puffy-looking and blockish and he doesn’t have a spark in him, not even a flicker of anger at the strange ability that is destroying George’s life. It’s the first boring performance of Damon’s career, although the bland inertia may not be his fault. The way Eastwood stages the “readings,” they hold no terror for George. After grasping a grieving person’s hands for a second, he makes his report from the netherworld—benevolent messages from the dead, who are eager to help the living with useful advice. Have none of them had any traffic with the Devil? Or even a malevolent thought? The messages are inane. Eastwood clearly wanted to avoid routine scare techniques and the banalities of “atmosphere”—he didn’t want to make a fantastic fiction like “The Sixth Sense.” But the communications with the dead went by without raising a single goose bump on this suggestible viewer’s skin.
Eastwood hasn’t worked out the movie emotionally: Marie, lapsing out of her job, just seems vague, as if she had lost her mind as well as her will to work. Eastwood does better with the twins, who are charming, and he shows a touching sympathy for the difficulties of working-class and middle-class life, giving us brief portraits of the boys’ loving but drug-addicted mother and the helpful foster parents who take Marcus in. The movie has long stretches of pleasant, low-intensity narrative, with people going in and out of buildings and climbing stairs and reading letters, and so on, but it never develops the slightest urgency. Peter Morgan, who wrote such shrewd and worldly movies as “The Queen” and “Frost/Nixon,” seems to have fallen into a trance himself. He first had the idea for the script when he lost a close friend in an accident. “We can be so close to somebody, know everything about them, share everything with them, and then they’re gone and suddenly we know nothing,” he has said. The bafflement that comes with loss is certainly a strong enough emotion to get a story moving, but, by turning to spiritualism, visions, and the afterlife, Morgan has wandered into hokum without illuminating grief. Most of the movie is not about what the dead mean to the living; it’s about having nice little chats with ghosts, and neither Eastwood nor Morgan has the taste for such flamboyant stuff. The two men have accomplished the questionable feat of domesticating the uncanny, and, in the process, they’ve lost their storytelling skills—the coincidences that bring the main characters together by the end are laughably unconvincing.
If the filmmakers’ first folly was to turn to spiritualism, the second was to prop up spiritualism with pseudoscience. Marie journeys to a French mountain clinic, from which the veteran actress Marthe Keller, playing a doctor in a white coat, emerges as some sort of Alpine guru. She tells Marie that many people have experienced visions as they approach death. Marie then writes a book and becomes a fighter, combatting prejudice against the visionary. “Hereafter” begins with a mighty wave but ends in a trickle of self-righteousness.

He Sees Dead People: Clint Eastwood’s Still Got It With Hereafter
By Rex Reed
October 12, 2010 The New York Observer
Shifting gears to a softer, gauzier mood, Clint Eastwood's Hereafter finds the masterful icon charting new terrain. Slavish fans of his rugged westerns, left-wing war canvases and kidney-punch gangster epics may be appalled to find him in a reflective frame of mind about life after death and the supernatural. Romantic confections with soft marshmallow centers are not his strong suit (remember the godawful Bridges of Madison County?), but not to worry. The grizzled director does not appear in it, and there is nothing awkward or mawkish about it. Hereafter might be tender, but in no way is it the work of a tenderfoot. It's a change of pace, but it exemplifies every carefully honed aspect of the treasured director's craft. Besides, Mr. Eastwood has earned the right to make any kind of movie he wants (at unthinkable expense), and when a man reaches his midnight years, it's perfectly understandable that he starts contemplating the afterlife.

With an intriguing screenplay by Peter Morgan that is worlds away from his political, character-driven biopics like The Queen and Frost/Nixon, the surprising and often insightful Hereafter follows three separate but parallel narratives set in Paris, San Francisco and London, connected by a thin metaphysical thread involving a reluctant psychic (Matt Damon); it remains compelling and artfully constructed throughout. Losing none of his grip at 80, the director opens with a spectacular, jaw-dropping scene in a peaceful Indian Ocean beach resort suddenly overwhelmed and wiped away by the disaster and destruction of the 2004 tsunami. Marie (Cecile de France), a vacationing French television reporter, is shopping for souvenirs when she is swept away by the mighty waves and knocked unconscious. While two strangers try to save her, she drifts into an otherworldly vision of "the other side." Even after she is revived, she returns to Paris transformed by her near-death experience.
Cut to San Francisco, where George (Damon), a nervous factory worker, tries vainly to escape his past as a psychic by working as a hard hat. Having developed his ability to communicate with the dead after almost dying from a brain operation as a child, he now regards this talent as more of a curse than a gift. Avoiding people for fear of reading their minds, he searches for a new, pleasurable chapter in his life by enrolling in a 10-week night-school course in Italian cooking. (Picture Matt Damon, clumsily chopping garlic for arrabiata sauce.) Unavoidably, he takes a shine to another student trying to jump-start her life (Bryce Dallas Howard), but when she finds out about his secret talent and insists on a reading, he sees things in her life and tells her truths that drive her away.
Meanwhile, in England, twin brothers Marcus and Jason (remarkably well played by Frankie and George McLaren) try to cover for their junkie mother while social workers threaten to turn them over to government child-protection services. Ambushed by bullies and chased into the street, Jason is hit and killed by a truck, leaving Marcus grieving and haunted by the loss. Marie, George and little Marcus have all been touched by death in different ways, and Mr. Eastwood does a fascinating job of cutting between stories while the characters seek peace and solace from their painful memories. In Paris, Marie takes a leave of absence from her job as a TV reporter after going blank on the air, blacking out after recurring visions of the moments when she was pronounced drowned, and writes a book about psychic phenomena. In England, Marcus makes the rounds of spiritual hacks in a desperate need to communicate with his dead brother, disillusioned until he reads about George on an old Web site. The three stories finally meld in London, where George goes to get away from his brother, who's nagging him to form a business capitalizing on his powers; Marie is appearing there on a book tour. Marcus follows George back to his hotel from a book fair. The denouement seems contrived and not entirely comfortable, and I hoped for a more convincing finale from the astute Peter Morgan than the creaky and fractured ending pictured here. Still, Mr. Eastwood covers his bases; there is even a healthy dose of skepticism throughout, and I admire the way the film is in no hurry to move things along briskly. We get to know and like the characters before we rush to judgment. The actors do well enough by the material, although Mr. Damon's pleasant but meaningless voice, unsupported by the kind of depth he showed in his best film, The Talented Mr. Ripley, deprives him of any human dimensions. Yet he still makes you believe him, working from sheer impulse.
People expecting clever, arty editing or tricky camera movements will be almost as disappointed as those anticipating a smash ending with special effects. (The big effects are all in the tsunami sequence.) Still, there is plenty of excitement and pulse in Hereafter, as well as a reluctance to provide easy answers to life's great mysteries. I'm happy to see a great director take on the challenge of new and different material with his customary grace and impressive two-fisted technique intact. In the cinema, like the Cordon Bleu, cooking up elegance without fluff is always welcome, and Mr. Eastwood is a master chef.

Above: Clint, left, with Peter Morgan who wrote the screenplay for Hereafter
The Other Side of Clint
Hereafter, speaking through dead people, says a lot about Eastwood the director.
By David Edelstein Published Oct 8, 2010 New York Magazine
Clint Eastwood’s supernatural drama Hereafter starts big and ends small, its hold gradually slackening, its thread dissolving. To be honest, it never had much of a thread. The film introduces three main characters in three different countries, cutting among them more or less at random, laying the groundwork for what we hope will be a killer last act in which they all come together and … what? Cross over to the “other side”? Welcome the dead in a Close Encounters mother ship? No, it’s not that kind of movie. Hereafter occupies some muzzy twilight zone, too woo-woo sentimental to be real, too limp to make for even a halfway decent ghost story.
The picture has one indisputably boffo scene, and it comes at the start: A tsunami smashes into a Southeast Asian beach resort, sweeping through the town and carrying off (among many others) a French TV reporter, Marie (Cécile de France), who gets conked on the head and appears to die. It’s an amazing piece of filmmaking, and not just because of the special effects. Eastwood’s camera remains at street level, watching the wave as it rushes closer and closer, getting picked up and carried along with Marie. The sequence is such a tour de force that it’s heartbreaking when Marie—who’s not dead but not not-dead—has a vision of the afterlife that looks like the old TV promos for Lost, with actors (in this case all streaky and whited-out) at various distances staring into the camera. It gets so tacky so fast.
In San Francisco, meanwhile, Matt Damon’s George abandons a lucrative career as a John Edward–style medium because he can’t handle the pressure that comes with being a conduit to the hereafter. Although he sounds like a typically bogus cold reader—“I’m seeing a woman with dark hair: Is that right?”—he’s supposed to be the real McCoy, a man who can grasp someone’s hand and see … those blurry Lost promos.
The final protagonist is Marcus (played by both George and Frankie McLaren), a working-class London boy whose twin brother, Jason (also played by George and Frankie—a curious casting gimmick that pays off), gets chased by bullies into the street and run over by a car. Snatched away from his junkie mom and placed in foster care, the bereft Marcus, who always let Jason make the decisions, Googles in anguish for someone to help him talk to his brother, preferably on a daily basis. A couple of clicks and there’s George.
Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) said he wrote Hereafter after losing a close friend and longing—as we all do, at some point—to make contact with “the other side.” That, of course, is how unscrupulous charlatans earn seven-figure incomes. But while Morgan is careful to show us some phonies—cold readers asking questions that are bound to elicit “hits”—he’s firmly in the camp that says, “Hey, it’s possible.” Given that early in the film, the existence of an afterlife is firmly established and George’s powers are proved authentic, there’s little left for the movie to do but bring him and Marcus and Marie (now also plagued by Lost promos) together. And that’s exactly what happens—in about an hour.
As usual with Eastwood, the performances are all over the map. Damon is so self-effacing you can almost see Eastwood’s visage superimposed over his, the mole supernaturally shifted from the right side to the left. A long section of the film centers on George and an effusive young woman he meets in an Italian cooking class, which is meant to show how his links to the dead inevitably sabotage his connection with the living. But watching Bryce Dallas Howard madly overact—she looks like she wants to ravish him over his cutting board—while Damon stares at her in a semi-stupor, you wonder if the scene is meant to be played as farce. The final scene, in which George is suddenly able to see the future as well as the dead, is just plain bewildering.
My impression is that Eastwood—while revered by many as a premier auteur with a strong personal vision—picks scripts he likes and shoots them pretty much as they are; and when a script is, like Morgan’s, badly in need of a polish and minus a satisfying windup, he’ll shoot it anyway and figure the lapses will be viewed as powerful artistic choices attributable to his laid-back, jazz-inflected style. That seems to be the case with Hereafter, which closed the New York Film Festival and has already been hailed as a masterly summing-up of his long career—although what Morgan’s first-draft stab at a crossing-over weepie has to do with the rest of Eastwood’s oeuvre is a mystery as unfathomable as what happens after death.

Rolling Stone magazine, Peter Travers, Oct 14th 2010
In more than half a century of making movies, Clint Eastwood, 80, has sent many a varmint to his maker. Hereafter is the first time he's showed any curiosity about what lies on the other side. It's typical of Eastwood's mastery as a director that his approach to the topic is introspective, not inflammatory.
Though Hereafter begins with a stunningly staged tsunami, it's the quiet moments that draw us in. Matt Damon excels as George Lonegan, a San Francisco construction worker who has turned his back on his psychic gifts. George doesn't want to talk to the dead. But even the babe (Bryce Dallas Howard) he meets in cooking class pushes him. So does Marcus, a London lad who wants to commune with his dead twin, Jason (both twins are played by George and Frankie McLaren). Then there's Paris TV journalist Marie LeLay (the excellent Cécile De France), whose near-death experience in the tsunami provides a link to George.
Eastwood hits narrative bumps on this atypical spiritual journey, as does politics-obsessed screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon). No worries. It's exhilarating to watch these two talents explore new ground without bias or trendy cynicism. Hereafter, set to a resonant Eastwood score, truly is haunting.

Eastwood's pensive 'Hereafter' is a matter of death and life
By Claudia Puig, USA TODAY
A tsunami looms both realistically and as a metaphor for the overwhelming surge of emotion rising from below the surface in the haunting Hereafter.
A meditation on mortality, the movie deftly interweaves the stories of three people in different countries, who have in common their exploration of death and the mysteries surrounding it. This is no tale of paranormal activity. It offers no clear-cut answers on life after death. Rather, it calmly examines death, grief and melancholy, packing an unexpectedly profound emotional gut-punch.
Blending the mystical with the multinational, Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) has crafted an intimate, thought-provoking, dialogue-driven story, directed masterfully by Clint Eastwood.
There are a few glitches in this ambitious globe-spanning narrative, mostly having to do with too much time and detail spent on less-than-integral relationships. But the main performances are subtly compelling.
Matt Damon plays George, a lonely San Francisco man who tries mightily to deny his rare ability to hear dead people. He's somehow a conduit for the thoughts and feelings of the deceased, an ability he regards as a curse. A good-natured man seeking to forge a normal life, he makes a tentative romantic connection with Melanie (Bryce Dallas Howard), but he can't escape his otherworldly "gift." Damon is superbly understated in the role.
Marie (Cecile de France) narrowly survives a tsunami while on vacation in Indonesia with her married boyfriend, Didier (Thierry Neuvic). After losing consciousness and sputtering back to life, Marie is consumed with her near-death experience. Upon returning to her native Paris, she abandons her work as a journalist so she can find answers to what she endured. De France's nuanced portrayal conveys both strength and vulnerability.
London schoolboy Marcus (Frankie McLaren) is stricken with grief after the unexpected death of his twin brother, Jason (George McLaren). Desperate to connect and learn whether there's an afterlife, Marcus delves into a world of psychics and charlatans. Both young actors give deeply moving and surprisingly mature performances.
An early scene of the roiling tsunami is awe-inspiring for its computer-generated special-effects muscle. The rest of the film is much more contemplative. Eastwood never rushes a story, even amid exhilarating action scenes. For some, the unfolding of the intertwined tales may be too languid. But the narrative's complexity has a quiet force that requires an unhurried pace. Our compassion for each of the key characters is enhanced by the measured storytelling.
The idea has been repeatedly put forth that Hereafter represents the 80-year-old Eastwood's contemplation of his own mortality. Perhaps. But you don't have to be an octogenarian to be fascinated with what comes after life as we know it.
Hereafter is a pensive saga that transcends death and lyrically examines our darkest fears and our most deeply held beliefs.

The Dead Have Messages for the Land of the Living
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: October 14, 2010 NEW YORK TIMES
The afterlife is not necessarily where you would expect to find Clint Eastwood, who at 80 shows no signs of tiring out or settling down. His latest film, “Hereafter,” is at once recognizably his — in tone and atmosphere — and a startling departure from his previous work.

Death has never been a stranger in Mr. Eastwood’s cinematic universe: the lone riders and taciturn gunmen that defined his heroic phase as an actor were frequently pitiless avatars of mortality, and the grave has often been the horizon toward which both the righteous and the wicked in his movies are drawn. But like most filmmakers working outside the genres of horror or sudsy religious comedy, Mr. Eastwood has shown little inclination to point his camera beyond that horizon.
Nor is Peter Morgan, who wrote the screenplay for “Hereafter,” known to have much of a spiritual or supernatural bent. His specialty — marvelously evident in “The Deal,” “Frost/Nixon,” “The Queen” and “The Damned United” — has been the prickly interactions of living people in a decidedly secular world. The closest Mr. Morgan has come to a ghost story may be “The Queen,” but only if you imagine it from the perspective of the recently departed Diana, Princess of Wales, flitting unseen through limbo, raising a spectral eyebrow at the consternation she has caused her mother-in-law by dying in such dramatically inconvenient fashion.
One of the reasons that “Hereafter” works as well as it does — it has the power to haunt the skeptical, to mystify the credulous and to fascinate everyone in between — may be that its subject matter is so clearly alien to the sensibilities of its makers. Communication with the dead is a risky business, principally because once the door to the beyond opens a tiny crack, all kinds of maudlin nonsense come rushing in.
But one of Mr. Eastwood’s great and undersung strengths as a director is his ability to wade into swamps of sentimental hokum and come out perfectly dry. Directed by anyone else, “The Bridges of Madison County”would most likely have been as unbearable as the book on which it was based. “Million Dollar Baby,” though derived from much better source material, walked through a minefield of clichés and emerged as a masterpiece.
“Hereafter” does not land with the clean, devastating force of either of those movies. Instead, it is quiet, gorgeous and contemplative. Mr. Eastwood’s longtime cinematographer, Tom Stern, composes a world of rich, deep shadows and heavy, saturated colors, making you aware of encroaching darkness, but also of the intense, almost tactile beauty of existence. The inhabitants of this world — ordinary people whose plans and expectations are knocked off course by intimations of an afterlife — have a fine-grained individuality that makes you care even if, from time to time, you have trouble believing.
The film follows three independent story lines, which converge (not quite convincingly) only at the last moment, and each involves a collision between the living and the dead. In San Francisco, a man named George Lonegan (Matt Damon) suffers with a gift that feels, to him, more like a curse. His ability to receive messages from the dead loved ones of anyone he touches once made him a nice living, but despite the pleas of his entrepreneurial brother (Jay Mohr), George has chosen a life of obscurity and manual labor.

In London, Marcus, a melancholy young boy, intuits the presence of his twin brother, Jason, whose violent death has left Marcus adrift in a world where compassion and indifference are hard to tell apart. (The brothers are played by George and Frankie McLaren.) And in Paris, Marie Lelay (Cécile de France), a television journalist who survived the 2004 tsunami, is convinced that her near-death experience in that catastrophe showed her a metaphysical reality that the rest of the world is blindly determined to ignore.
This kind of braided plot, almost unavoidable in the superstitious age of “Babel” and “Crash,” may be as surprising, coming from Mr. Eastwood, as the large-scale, computer-generated tsunami sequence that snaps the audience to horrified attention early in the film. At the same time, there is an austerity in “Hereafter” that keeps the melodramatic possibilities latent in the script safely at bay. Mr. Eastwood’s stripped-down, highly efficient approach to storytelling serves as an anchor to the busy narrative and the complicated visuals, and perhaps the most gratifying thing about “Hereafter” is its patience.
You would not want a movie about death to be in too much of a hurry, and Mr. Eastwood lingers over scenes and details that curl away from the plot. A meeting in the boardroom of a French publishing house, at which Marie proposes a book on the life and times of François Mitterrand, the former president of France, is both perfectly irrelevant and completely engrossing as a snapshot of Gallic politique.
George, cautiously trying to shake off his gloom and find a social life, enrolls in a cooking class, where he meets Melanie (Bryce Dallas Howard), a young woman who seems as eager to fall in love with him as he is reluctant to believe it. Their early flirtations, delicate and funny with a palpable ache of longing, dispel the gloom and portent that linger around George, offering him a tantalizing peek at what a normal life might look like.
Normal life, in the terms proposed by this film, might be defined as existence pursued in a state of studied incuriosity about what comes next. What gives “Hereafter” its strange, unsettling mood and its curious momentum is the growing tension between this relatively happy state and the sense, shared by Marie, Marcus and George, that what comes next lies at once close at hand and beyond the reach of any organized system of beliefs.
Persuasion is not really the point, though if anyone could make me believe in ghosts, it would be Clint Eastwood. And the afterlife itself remains, throughout the film, a vague, conjectural place, a zone of speculation rather than a freshly discovered and surveyed continent. The fuzzy digital ghosts that occasionally flutter across the screen are more symbolic placeholders than literal apparitions. Something seems to be out there, and cinematic technology provides an available shorthand to indicate its presence.
What does seem new — newly strange, newly beautiful — is what “Hereafter” makes of the here and now. It is a curious movie in both senses of the word: an unusual experience and an open-ended inquiry into something nobody can really claim to understand. It leaves you wondering, which may be the most fitting way of saying that it’s wonderful.
Here’s a nice feature from the New York Times that ties in with Hereafter.
Eastwood Breaks Another Mold
By CHARLES McGRATH Published: October 13, 2010
ALMOST every fall lately, it seems, Clint Eastwood drops a little surprise on the moviegoing public: an unheralded, modestly budgeted film about a subject that hardly seems to fit the Eastwood mold. In 2004 there was “Million Dollar Baby,” about a female boxer; in 2008 there was “Gran Torino,” about a bigoted Korean War vet, played by Mr. Eastwood himself, who forms an unlikely, heartwarming friendship with a young Hmong boy. His latest film, “Hereafter,” which opened Friday in New York and will be released nationwide a week later, ventures into supernatural territory, which is about the last place you’d expect to find Mr. Eastwood. “Hereafter” concerns itself with just what the title suggests: what we can look forward to after we die.
Mr. Eastwood is 80 now, and his film immortality, as both an actor and a director, is assured. He has never seemed remotely spiritual. His trademark characters — Dirty Harry and the Man with No Name, and even Walt Kowalksi, the “Gran Torino” vet — all face death squarely and unflinchingly, without a lot of hand wringing about what happens on the other side. “Hereafter,” though, weaves together the stories of three people who have death on their minds pretty much all the time: a French journalist (Cécile de France) who has a near-death experience during the 2004 tsunami; a reluctant psychic (Matt Damon) who has visions of the afterlife; and a London schoolboy (Frankie McLaren) who is desperate to get in touch with his dead twin brother. They all meet, and their stories connect, at the London Book Fair, of all places. No one gets shot, no blows are exchanged.
Has Mr. Eastwood, famously flinty and cold-eyed, at long last gone squishy? On the phone recently he sounded mellow but not mushy.
“Everyone has had these thoughts pass across his mind once in a while,” he said. “Is there an afterlife? What’s it like? All the great religions have tried to deal with these questions.” He added that what he liked about the script is that “it has a spiritual feeling without any particular religious touch.”
But mostly what appealed to him about “Hereafter” was the storytelling. “I liked the way the script took contemporary events like the tsunami and the London terrorist bombings and used them in a story that tapped into a general curiosity about the hereafter and whether it exists,” he said. “I liked the way the three tales all converged. That’s something I had never tried before. And the reticent hero is always interesting, the hero who doesn’t appreciate the gift he has.”
“Hereafter” was written by Peter Morgan, better known for his films about British royalty — “The Queen,” “The Other Boleyn Girl” — and for his play “Frost/Nixon,” which he later turned into a movie as well. His involvement in a project about the afterlife is in many ways even more remarkable than Mr. Eastwood’s, and his script, as it happens, underwent a near-death experience and then a resurrection.
“How did this come about? I have no idea, really,” Mr. Morgan said from his car while stuck in traffic in Vienna, where he lives part of the year and does almost all of his writing. “I am a person of the Enlightenment, as it were.”
What prompted “Hereafter,” he went on to say, was the book “If the Spirit Moves You: Life and Love After Death,” by Justine Picardie, a British journalist devastated by the premature death of her sister, Ruth. At once hopeful and skeptical, she visited spiritualists, mediums and people who claimed to be able to record the voices of the dead and examined her own experience of bereavement. “I was just gripped by it,” Mr. Morgan said of the book. “It made me realize that we know so much of life before birth, and so little about life after death.”
Normally an obsessive outliner and reviser, he began writing a screenplay without any clear idea of where it was going. “So much of what I usually do offers solution or explanations, but this time I wanted to write something open ended,” he said. “I didn’t want answers. I wanted to ask questions.”
The first character he imagined was Marcus, the twin who lost his brother, and then the two others, the journalist and the psychic, quickly suggested themselves. “I was writing instinctively, almost in sketch mode,” he said. “It was all so spare and skeletal that the pages were very white.”
He put the script away for a while, but after a close friend died unexpectedly, he picked it up again. “That really startled me,” he said of his friend’s death. “In the church I kept thinking: ‘Now what? Where? What’s happened?’ ”
Hoping just for a reaction, he passed the script to his agent, who instead sent it off to the producer Kathleen Kennedy (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “Jurassic Park”). Seeing a resemblance to “The Sixth Sense,” she in turn showed it to the director of that film, M. Night Shyamalan. Later she happened to be on the soundstage of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” while talking to Mr. Shyamalan on the phone, and she was overheard by Steven Spielberg, who according to Mr. Morgan said, “I like the sound of that.” He liked the sound of it so much that he read the screenplay and made extensive notes, which Mr. Morgan immediately addressed in a revision.
But Mr. Spielberg thought the revision was not as “humble” or “pure” as the original, Mr. Morgan said. “He told me, ‘I think I’ve ruined your screenplay.’ Then he said, ‘Can I show it to my friend Clint?’ ”
“So now we’re really in the realm of the absurd,” Mr. Morgan said. A couple of months later he was further bewildered when he learned that Mr. Eastwood, who had purchased the rights to “Hereafter,” was already filming off the original script. Though known for writing on spec and resisting the traditional development process, Mr. Morgan had been looking forward to working with Mr. Eastwood.
“I imagined we’d have all sorts of conversations about the characters, about the plot,” he said. “But we never did. What you see on the screen is this thing I wrote very sketchily in the mountains of Austria.”
Mr. Eastwood said he typically works this way. “I believe very strongly in first impressions,” he explained. “When something hits you and excites your interest, there’s really no reason to kill it with improvements.” He even resisted the idea of having Penélope Cruz play the female lead, because it meant changing the character from a French journalist to a Spanish one.
“Clint is incredibly instinctive,” Mr. Morgan said, “and he’s anti-neurosis. It’s like antimatter. He’s totally without neurosis. The set of ‘Hereafter’ was one of happiest places I’ve ever been. It comes from trusting yourself and eliminating fear.”
Referring to Ron Howard, who directed the film version of “Frost/Nixon,” he continued: “Ron is the same way. He’s completely at home on a movie set, and I think it comes from practically growing up there. He and Clint are rather like sailors from a bygone century. They come into port every now and then, but really they live on the ship. They’re seafarers.”
Movie review: 'Hereafter'
Clint Eastwood explores death and the beyond through three stories with solid performances by Matt Damon and Cécile de France.
By Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times Film Critic
October 15, 2010
Death is the barrier we can't get around, an eternal void burdening those among the living who yearn for those who are gone. What would it mean if we could communicate with the other side, or even just be sure it existed?That is the theme of the haunting "Hereafter," the latest work from Clint Eastwood, which presents a trio of stories having to do with what might be on that far side and how it relates to the world we know.Over the years, Eastwood has very much become a director we expect to deliver the unexpected, and he's done that here. Hollywood once upon a time made films exploring these kinds of issues, but in today's climate only a filmmaker like Eastwood, determined to never do the same thing twice, would have the nerve and the clout to take it on.
Though its subject matter is unusual, the compelling thing about "Hereafter" is the way it places spiritual themes squarely in the kind of Hollywood context that attracts stars like Matt Damon and top Belgian actress Cécile de France. What's surprising and satisfying about this film are its determination to deal with unconventional material in a classical way."Hereafter" was also a departure for screenwriter Peter Morgan, best known for fact-based stories like "Frost/Nixon" and "The Queen." He apparently wrote the script after the death of a friend and, because it was so out of the ordinary for him, put it away for years.Morgan's script turns out to be a fine match for Eastwood's fluid, unassuming directing style. His direct, unadorned approach pares everything down to its essence, the better to express the core of the narrative in the most direct and effective way possible. This is quiet but potent filmmaking that believes nothing is more important than the story it has to tell.Actually, it is three stories that are told, and "Hereafter" begins by providing a wonderful sense of uncertainty, giving us the gift of not knowing where these tales are going and whether or not they will have things in common besides dealing with death and the beyond. Like the similarly affecting "Never Let Me Go," "Hereafter" is best approached with as little specific information as possible.The first story introduces us to a French couple, unmarried lovers and professional colleagues, vacationing in Indonesia. Marie (De France, who appeared in "Mesrine") is a journalist who leaves her napping companion to get some last-minute shopping done.This small excursion takes a nightmarish turn when, in a formidable piece of special effects work — orchestrated by visual effects supervisor Michael Owens, effects house Scanline and editors Joel Cox and Gary Roach — Marie gets caught in a monstrous tsunami.Eastwood's team makes this wall of water and Marie's near-death experience in it so convincing that it can't help but be deeply disturbing to watch, giving us more of a sense of what being trapped in a tsunami would actually be like than we may want. So it's easy to believe that once Marie returns to Paris, she finds herself disturbed by what happened and her glimpse of the beyond.Next up is Matt Damon's George, a blue-collar guy who operates a forklift in San Francisco and yearns for a normal life. For it turns out that George, rather like the Bible's Jonah, is a man fleeing from his calling. In a world of fakes and frauds, he is the genuine article, a psychic who is very much for real and gets authentic messages from the other side.But having the kind of gift that leads frantic people to invade your life day and night can be a terrible burden, especially when George meets a cute young woman ( Bryce Dallas Howard) he thinks of getting serious about. As he himself says, "A life that's all about death is no life at all."The film's third story is set in London and involves a set of identical twin schoolboys (George and Frankie McLaren) who run interference for their substance-abusing mother. Something happens in this family that demonstrates how the desperate need to communicate with the departed can take over the lives of those still living."Hereafter" cuts back and forth among these three stories in an increasingly gripping way. Especially involving as always is Damon, convincing as an everyman torn by the kinds of conflicts few people have to deal with. Can peace be made between the here and the hereafter? It's a question that can't be answered, but few directors have the ability to explore the possibilities as gracefully as this singular filmmaker approaching in his 80th year.

'Hereafter' among Clint Eastwood's best
Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle Movie Critic San Francisco Chronicle October 20, 2010 Wednesday, October 20, 2010
That Clint Eastwood has become a great filmmaker is something few would contest, yet the nature of his greatness is as surprising as it's little understood. You can talk about the pristine technique - the new film, "Hereafter," provides lots of examples. But what's much more fascinating and enriching is Eastwood's Olympian vision, the sympathetic and all-encompassing understanding of the pain and grandeur of life on earth.
This vision is consistent in Eastwood's late work, no matter who is doing the screenwriting, and it boggles the mind to realize that this is coming from a guy who, until he was about 60, was best known as an action hero. Make no mistake, Eastwood's directorial output, from "Mystic River" on, constitutes the 21st century's first cinematic marvel, and "Hereafter" is among the best things he has ever done.
Like Alejandro Inarritu's "Babel" and Wayne Kramer's "Crossing Over," "Hereafter" is an attempt to convey the bigness of life though a story involving disparate characters in different parts of the world. All three movies are responses to the interconnectedness of the world, but "Hereafter" is by far the most successful, partly because it has the best screenplay - by Peter Morgan ("The Queen") - and partly because it has a director who understands the difference between important and self-important.
Importance is earned, shot by shot, scene by scene. Self-importance is assumed, and is largely a matter of adopting an attitude and keeping a straight face. Eastwood takes us into the story from the opening shots. From a hotel, we see a beach resort, filmed with the kind of color saturation we might see in an old postcard. The effect is reassuring, but misleading. A vacationing French journalist (Cecile De France) goes into the village to buy presents. And suddenly, there's a rumbling, the sight of a rising wave, and within seconds, buildings are washed away, and cars, trucks and people are all caught in a rushing flood.
There have been tidal waves in movies before, but what makes this one so effective (aside from being perfectly realized on the technical end) is that Eastwood stays with De France. He doesn't show us an overview, so that we might get our bearings. Rather, we experience the catastrophe from one person's terrified and completely subjective vantage point. It's as close as you'll ever be to a tidal wave without getting wet.
"Hereafter" features three central characters that have been touched by death. The newswoman drowns and is revived. A construction worker (Matt Damon) in San Francisco is cursed with an ability to talk to the dead. (If he touches someone, he finds himself in communication with that person's dead relatives - so much for his love life.) And a little boy in London develops an all-consuming desire to talk to a recently deceased loved one. These stories play out separately, then gradually move toward one another.
Notice how every shot communicates something precise, whether it's plot detail or a thought or emotion. As an actor, Eastwood is used to breaking up a script into a succession of specific actions, and he does the same as a director. Such meticulousness serves his actors well and allows Eastwood to take his time within scenes and let them expand and feel lived in. He never wastes his audience's time, because he is always feeding it new information.
Eastwood's practical unwillingness to neglect any actor ends up giving "Hereafter" a humane essence: Everybody is important, not just Damon as the tortured psychic or De France as a breezy extrovert deepened by trauma. Thus, the little boy's mother (Lyndsey Marshal), is more than a desperate alcoholic, and Bryce Dallas Howard gets to create a rich character as Melanie, the psychic's partner in a San Francisco cooking class - a young woman masking pain under a superficial facade that has become her personality.
The ironic result of all this meticulous care is that we don't see Eastwood's hand but rather have the illusion that this gallery of humanity is telling the story for him. It's the most self-effacing way to do great work, and it's an approach that couldn't be more suited to this material. The film's notion that people share a common destiny, that they're participating in some overarching order, that they're being watched over by a benevolent all-seeing understanding, doesn't need to be spelled out. It has its analogue and expression in Eastwood's technique.
He just tells the story, and we get it.

Eastwood looks to Hereafter
Director takes a let-the-viewer-decide approach in afterlife movie, which is gaining Oscar buzz
By PAUL WILNER Yahoo
Oct. 19, 2010
Carmel, Calif. - Needless to say, Clint Eastwood arrives at the Mission Ranch Inn without an entourage. No handlers required — nor, it is clear from his casual but confident demeanor, are they welcome. After exchanging pleasantries with the hotel manager - he owns the joint, after saving it from being torn down and replaced by condominiums in the early '80s - he settles down at a table in the restaurant to talk about his latest movie, Hereafter, written by Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon).
An interlocking tale of three characters in search of answers about the afterlife, it stars Matt Damon playing a blue-collar San Francisco psychic with an unwanted connection to the dead. Already mentioned as an Oscar contender, the film features a breakout performance by Belgian actress Cécile de France. She plays a French television journalist who has a near-death experience after surviving a tsunami in a CGI-enhanced opening sequence described by Time magazine as "the most exciting, expertly assembled flood scene in movie history." Under Eastwood's aegis, their stories connect with that of a London boy dealing with the death of his twin brother with almost paranormal agility.
Asked whether he was drawn to the subject because of his own aging, the 80-year-old auteur is having none of it.
If anything, he's more interested in the gender question. "Did your wife like the movie?" he asks. "Women seem to like to think about (the subject) more, whether they believe in the hereafter or not. I'm not sure what I think, but it's interesting to delve into. It's a what-if story, like most stories … I'd like to think I would have been attracted to this project 40 years ago. Of course, I had to prove myself as a movie actor first."
Organized religion is clearly not Eastwood's bag. His parents "were Protestant but belonged to no particular sect. If we lived in Redding, we went to a Methodist church, and in Oakland, a Presbyterian or interdenominational church. I lived in Hayward for a while with my grandmother because my parents were trying to get jobs, and in that era, they didn't have welfare or unemployment (so I) had to really scramble.
"I've always been, If I see it, I believe it," he said. "I guess it's an agnostic position. But it (the afterlife) is a subject people are curious about. I don't think I'm as curious about it as I was at a younger age, but I'm curious enough to do a story like this.
"I remember when I was very, very young; my dad took me in the Pacific Ocean off Santa Monica. I was riding on his shoulders, and a big wave came along and knocked him down, and me off him … It certainly wasn't a near-death experience like Cécile had in the movie, but I remember the colors vividly, being underwater and swirling around, as a panicky little kid. For an adult who knows they're in deep trouble, it's a whole other thing."
Matt Damon's character lives in a lonely guy apartment that doesn't seem too different from one of Dirty Harry's old abodes.
Although Damon's character was in Chicago in the original script, his scenes in Hereafter were shot in San Francisco for "very practical" reasons, Eastwood said.
"He became available in January and I said, 'January in San Francisco can be very nice. On the other hand, January in Chicago is not the best time to be there.' Selfishly, it's close to home, and I do have ties there …" But the lure of the past goes only so far.
After our talk, Eastwood headed to Los Angeles to work on a Dave Brubeck documentary airing on Turner Classic Movies on Dec. 6, Brubeck's 90th birthday, then to the New York Film Festival, which Hereafter closed, before taking a break.
Brief, of course.
He's already launched his next project, a biopic about J. Edgar Hoover and his sidekick Clyde Tolson, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, with a script by Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. Will it address the rumors about Hoover and Tolson's relationship?
"Nobody knows," Eastwood said. "Some speculate that it was asexual, some that it wasn't. They'll have to draw their own conclusions. I'd rather have them do that, so you're not just throwing something at them, saying, 'This is what it was.'"
It's his credo: Show, don't tell.
"(Director) Don Siegel used to say, 'I've worked on so many movies where people have come in and wanted to kill it with improvements,'" he said. "I want to get that first impression from the actors. I may go back and do another take, and a take after that, but I don't want to tamper with things before I have a chance to see it."
The Hollywood veteran is, er, agnostic, about Hereafter's commercial potential.
"At this point in my life, I'm not going after some particular demographic to make money," he said. "I like telling adult stories; I guess I like telling stories I'd like to see."
"There are kids who can't go anywhere now without texting on BlackBerries. If people are going to see this movie, they should be willing to submerge themselves in it." He pauses. "If not, they should see something else."
At this point, it's ventured, Eastwood should be able to write his own ticket.
"Sometimes," he laughs. "If you wanted to do Dirty Harry coming out of retirement, they might jump a little higher than for Million Dollar Baby. They said, 'It's a movie about a girl boxer?' I said, 'No, it's a love story.'

Below: Hereafter was shown at the 48th New York Film Festival. Clint, Dina and Matt were there for the film's screening on Oct. 10th 2010

Clint talks about his movie Hereafter, Matt talks about Clint
GAYLE MacDONALD, Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010

Clint Eastwood pulls up a chair and slides his lean, 6-foot-4 frame alongside that of his friend Matt Damon, whom he slaps good-naturedly on the back. He’s here to chat about his latest film, Hereafter, a cinematic exploration of the eternal question: Is there life after death?

It’s a weighty subject for a balmy September afternoon. But before delving into the existentialist meat of it all, Eastwood cracks a joke about the real reason Damon initially turned down the lead role in this film.

“Sure, he’s been busy – busy siring children,” says Eastwood, who is referring to the fact that Damon and his wife, Luciana Barroso, are expecting their third child (she also has a daughter from an earlier marriage).

“But finally he acquiesced and came back [to us] after Christmas,” adds the 80-year-old. “So we shot his segment in San Francisco and then headed back to England to do the conclusion.”

Damon, who previously collaborated with Eastwood on the South African rugby film Invictus, simply grins at the older man seated to his left. Then he offers his explanation.

“I turned it down only because I didn’t think I could pull it off with this other movie [The Adjustment Bureau] on the go. Somehow all my stuff got crammed together,” he says. “But it all worked out. I love working with Clint. He’s decisive, he doesn’t dwell on things, and he keeps the train headed somewhere. Too often, directors fall into the trap of second-guessing and fiddling with something forever. Clint pulls the trigger and moves on.”

Dressed in a golf shirt and pressed pants, Eastwood comes across as a calm but still imposing guy. Unlike many celebrities who surround themselves with “their people,” Clint – as he introduces himself, with a firm handshake – prefers to saunter around the room, playing a jazzy ditty on a nearby piano, and later, grabbing a snack off a communal table of grub.

Despite his age, Eastwood remains one of this generation’s most prolific directors. Since his 1992 Oscar-winning film Unforgiven, he’s churned out 15 feature films. Hereafter is his 32nd as a director.

Damon, now 40, refers to Hereafter as “Clint Eastwood’s French film.” And there is no question the script is a cerebral departure for a man who normally focuses his camera on taut action and real-life grit.

Eastwood agrees it’s not his norm. But that, he adds, is precisely the point. Over the course of eight decades, he’s learned to like “trying on new things.

“I used to do sequels, but I’m past that. In my younger years I did more violent stuff, but now I’m concerned there’s too much violence in film,” says the man who played Dirty Harry. “But I liked the idea of telling three separate stories in one film. And I liked Peter Morgan’s script. This film explores the notion of an afterlife, but it doesn’t give any definitive answers.”

Hereafter follows three geographically disparate people who have been traumatized by close encounters with death. Damon is a Bay Area psychic, newcomer Frankie McLaren is a London youngster mourning the death of his twin, and Belgium-born actress Cécile de France is a Paris-based journalist whose life changes after she is almost killed in the 2004 tsunami.

Eastwood says the core of the story – filmed in London, Paris, Hawaii and San Francisco – is the simplest of questions: What’s next? “We don’t know what’s on the other side, but on this side, it’s final,” he says. “People have their beliefs about what’s there or what’s not there, but those are all hypotheticals. Nobody knows until you get there.”

“I’ve talked to people,” he adds, “who claim to have had near-death experiences, and they paint a similar picture. But I don’t know. I haven’t been there. And I don’t intend to go there before my time.”

Damon says Eastwood’s directorial style is as to-the-point as the man himself. “He gives the kind of direction that he would want as an actor. And he’s been acting longer than –”

“Don’t say God!” Eastwood interrupts, causing Damon to burst out laughing.

“I was going to say,” Damon continues, “he’s been acting longer than most of the actors he’s working with, so he’s got an immense amount of knowledge about how to do it, what’s helpful, what’s not helpful. As a director for 30 years, Clint also knows how to create an environment that works for his crew. He knows everybody’s jobs, and how to make it easier. As a result, everybody feels like they get to do their best work.”

“And he gets you home at a reasonable hour, too. I just wish he wouldn’t yell so much,” Damon adds.

Hereafter’s international cast also includes Jay Mohr, Bryce Dallas Howard, Marthe Keller, Thierry Neuvic and Derek Jacobi. Eastwood, an accomplished jazz pianist, composed much of the soundtrack for Hereafter. As he approaches his 81st birthday this May, Eastwood muses that now was likely “the right time” for him to finally take on a film about mortality. But he figures he’ll be around for a while yet.

“Hereafter explores life after death, but it also measures time. And in this MTV generation that we live in – where everything has to be immediate and over with – measuring time is something I still like to embrace,” he says, his weathered face crinkling into a grin.

Vintage Clint Eastwood PSA 1969 for the Will Rogers Institute

2010-10-01T12:02:00.006Z

We have been fortunate to see some wonderful vintage material of late and this new discovery continues to see that trend is set to continue. From 1969 here is a wonderful colour PSA which would have been circulated in cinemas at the time. More than $90 million has been raised in movie theaters across the country for pulmonary research, neonatal ventilators and free educational materials.

Thanks goes to The Will Rogers Institute. Please visit them at www.wrinstitute.org
Click below to view this great piece of historic film

Warners release new Hereafter one sheet poster design

2010-09-23T13:29:00.006Z

Yes, it's here at last. Here is the latest official poster release for all the Eastwood poster collectors out there. A rather striking design it is too. I'm hoping there will be variations on this design for other countries, something that is not done too often these days. As soon as I know of anything else, you'll know.

Below: The British quad poster for Hereafter 30x40

Below: The latest picture released from Hereafter

Hereafter 2009 World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival

2010-09-14T21:17:00.027Z

Hereafter world Premiere

A drama centered on three people who are haunted by mortality in different ways. George (Damon) is a blue-collar American who has a special connection to the afterlife. On the other side of the world, Marie (de France), a French journalist, has a near-death experience that shakes her reality. And when Marcus (Frankie/George McLaren), a London schoolboy, loses the person closest to him, he desperately needs answers. Each on a path in search of the truth, their lives will intersect, forever changed by what they believe might-or must-exist in the hereafter.

Click below for U.K. Trailer

Click below for U.S. Trailer

Eastwood nostalgic about 'Fistful of Dollars' as he shows 'Hereafter' at TIFF
By: Andrea Baillie, The Canadian Press
TORONTO - Screen legend Clint Eastwood unveiled his new drama "Hereafter" at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday 12th September, and recalled another premiere in the city over four decades ago.
"I came here originally (for) the first appearance I made for 'A Fistful of Dollars' 46 years ago," Eastwood said in an interview, looking trim and relaxed in grey pants and a light-coloured golf shirt.
"United Artists thought, at the time, that because Toronto (had) a large Italian population and (the film) was made by an Italian, Sergio Leone, that this would be a great place to come.... We opened it downtown in a theatre — I think it was probably about half full.... There's a great nostalgia there."
Eastwood, 80, has not premiered a film at the Toronto International Film Festival since 1990, when he was here with "White Hunter Black Heart."
He said there's no particular reason why he finally decided to return to Toronto, noting simply that the fest here is "well thought of" and that "it seemed like the thing to do."
"I'm glad to be here because you do get a lot of people who are very interested in cinema here in Toronto and that's nice," he said.
"Hereafter" stars Matt Damon as a blue-collar worker with a special connection to the afterlife. Three parallel storylines unfold in London, San Francisco and France, all involving characters who have lost loved ones or had brushes with death.
The film opens with a spectacular rendering of a tsunami (Eastwood's biggest foray into special effects to date), but after that mind-blowing sequence, the story unfolds at a slow and thoughtful pace.

Eastwood said he is drawn to that type of measured storytelling.
"In this MTV generation that we live in, I think it's something that I still like to embrace," he said.
"That we actually unfold the stories and get to know the people and get to know a little more detail about them, rather than play to the common denominator or the lack of attention span that sometimes people feel goes on now."
Damon's character is at the centre of the film — a no-nonsense psychic who regards his powers as a curse rather than a gift.
Eastwood and Damon forged a bond while filming the 2009 apartheid drama "Invictus."
Asked why he wanted to work with the actor again, Eastwood joked: "I've asked myself that question many times," before adding that he's long been a fan of Damon's work.
After a long and varied acting career, Eastwood, of course, has become a prolific director in recent years, helming Oscar contenders including "Mystic River," "Million Dollar Baby" and "Flags of Our Fathers."
Still, the plain-spoken movie-maker — who could be heard playing piano in the hotel lobby before a series of media interviews — gave little insight when asked how he creates such cinematic magic, chalking it up to "intuition."
Damon said Eastwood just makes it look easy.
"I think it's like any great artist or musician. It seems very simple and of course it's not because it's years of plying his trade.... Things feel intuitive but they're not."
Asked what he learned from working with Eastwood, however, Damon begged off.
"Too numerous to count," he said. "TNTC."
"The great thing about making movies is you can't perfect it," he added. "It's like golf or one of those things. It's just really fun because you learn something every single time out, whether it's working with a great director or whether it's working with a schmo, and you learn what not to do."
The weighty subject matter of "Hereafter" has many observers suggesting that Eastwood is contemplating his own mortality. The director, however, said he doesn't really have any theories about the afterlife.
"I've talked to people who claim to have had near-death experiences and they paint a similar picture, but I don't know. I mean I just haven't been there," he said.
"And I don't intend to go there before my time."
"Hereafter" is slated for release on Oct. 22.
Below: Clint and Dina at the world premiere in Toronto
Hereafter: Clint Eastwood Goes Supernatural
By Richard Corliss, TIME, Monday, Sep. 13, 2010

Clint Eastwood's Hereafter opens with the most exciting, expertly assembled flood scene in movie history. A tsunami gathers force in its path toward an Asian beach resort, swatting a large ship as if it were a toy boat. Then it crashes on shore and pours through the town. Special-effects experts know that water is among the hardest computer-generated elements to render accurately, but this tsunami's power is utterly plausible. At Hereafter's world-premiere screening on Sunday at the Toronto Film Festival, the 1,500 spectators in the Elgin Theatre gasped as one — one frightened, enthralled child at the ultimate Saturday matinee.
What they saw was a scene whose editing builds the tsunami horror with urgency and clarity. It inundates viewers in the larger disaster while assuring that they keep track of the two characters they already know: Marie (Cecile de France), a popular anchorwoman on French TV, who's shopping in the resort village when the wave breaks and is swept away in the churning tide, and her boss and lover (Thierry Neuvic), back at their hotel. Marie is pulled underwater but surfaces, and seems to have survived, when —Whack! — she is knocked out. As she loses consciousness, she has a near blinding glimpse of shadowy figures in a tableau of radiance. She is thrown ashore, where two men desperately try to revive her, without success. A minute later, she spits out water. If she were dead then, she's back with the living now.

Eastwood movies don't usually boast moments like this: a CGI action scene so brilliantly managed that Michael Bay could only dream of having it on his résumé. Was the tsunami sequence mostly the work of second-unit directors and effects wizards? Or did Steven Spielberg, one of Hereafter's executive producers, lend his legendary gift for painting grand canvases of disaster that also show an acute attention to human detail? Even if the scene were all Eastwood's doing, it launches the movie with a wondrous blend of art, technique and entertainment. And it has almost nothing in common with the pensive, sprawling supernatural narrative that follows.
At a slim, graceful 80, and at the end of the most acclaimed decade of his long and lauded career (with Academy Awards as director and producer of Million Dollar Baby, plus five more Oscar nominations for Baby, Mystic River and Letters from Iwo Jima), Eastwood has nothing to prove. Yet in Toronto, he sounded a little defensive about his films' laconic style. As he told Andrea Baillie of the Canadian Press: "In this MTV generation that we live in, I think it's something that I still like to embrace: that we actually unfold the stories and get to know the people and get to know a little more detail about them, rather than play to the common denominator or the lack of attention span that sometimes people feel goes on now." Hereafter is a daunting test for the video-game crowd — and, for more patient viewers, a film of mixed rewards and challenges.

The script is by Peter Morgan, best known for dissecting British royalty (The Queen, The Other Boleyn Girl and, on TV, Henry VII), American Presidents (Frost/Nixon) and African tyrants (The Last King of Scotland). No one in Hereafter has a title; the three main figures are ordinary people with unusual abilities and startling visions. Marie, after her tsunami trauma, has difficulty concentrating on her anchor duties; taking a leave from the show, she feels compelled to write a book about near death experiences. In San Francisco, George (Matt Damon), a psychic with an apparently genuine knack for connecting people with dead relatives, is cropped by his gift and leaves town, fleeing his entrepreneur brother (Jay Mohr) and a potential girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard). In London, 11-year-old twins Jason and Marcus (George and Frankie McLaren) give moral support to their wayward mother (Niamh Cusack). When Jason is flattened and killed by an onrushing truck, Marcus is left alone, with nothing but his dead twin's ashes and cap to comfort him, and perhaps speak to him.

Eastwood the director is, as he acknowledges, a man with a slow hand. He lets the story play out at a measured pace. Rather than fiddling with scripts, he shoots them pretty much as written (which is why screenwriters love him). If there's inherent drama in the work, it will emerge; if not, scenes can lie there like a row of carp at San Francisco's Sun Fast Seafood Co.
Hereafter has a few of these longueurs: the disintegration of Marie's affair with her producer; George's budding romance (Howard, who can be a winning actress, undercuts her character here with giggling and nervous tics); Marcus' travails in a foster home after his mother gives him up. A half-hour cut from the film's middle portion would enhance the mystery and the mood. But even in this section, the movie has its privileged moments. Marcus' adventure in the Charing Cross underground station is one to savor: a crowded platform, an elusive cap, lives abruptly ended and another one saved. Like the tsunami scene, it boasts deft editing and a killer climax.
Damon, more comfortable here than as the South African rugby star in Eastwood's Invictus, gives a marvelously understated reading of George, a man whose gift is a curse, whose unquiet mind is tormented by the deaths and afterlives of strangers. De France, so impressive in the role of the crime lord's girlfriend in Mesrine: Killer Instinct, has to be both tough and vulnerable as Marie, and she adroitly balances her character's conflicts, afflictions and dreams. The fates of Marie and George, and of Marcus too, are destined to converge. This involves as much coincidence as supernatural manipulation; but the payoff could leave viewers in tears.
Or not. The movie will divide some Eastwood fans, conquer others. The naysayers will be grateful that, from this healthy, workaholic actor-director, there is always the promise of a good movie — if not here, then hereafter. But if you go with his new picture's slow flow, and stick around for its rapturous resolution, you'll see this as a summing up, a final testament of so many Clint characters, from The Man with No Name to Dirty Harry, from Million Dollar Baby's Frankie Dunn to Gran Torino's Walt Kowalski, for all of whom facing down death was a natural part of life. For Eastwood, and viewers in synch with his mature, melancholy worldview, the hereafter is now.

Director still satisfying his creative urges in new movie starring Matt Damon

By Bob Thompson, Post media News September 10, 2010
Clint Eastwood is famous for telling his actors not to over think things. Since 2003, he seems to have taken his own advice by following his instincts as an artist.
His latest directorial effort is a ghost story, called Hereafter. The supernatural thriller opens theatrically Oct. 22, and will screen at the Toronto International Film Festival in its world premiere Sept. 12. (The last movie Eastwood brought to the festival was 1990's White Hunter Black Heart).

Above: Matt Damon arrives for the Premiere
In Hereafter, three stories intertwine for one climactic suspense yarn. Matt Damon portrays an American factory worker-turned-psychic who can communicate with the dead, but is uneasy with the calling.
Cecile De France portrays a French TV reporter and near-death survivor of the great tsunami. Frankie and George McLaren are English brothers, one of whom dies in a car crash. Co-starring are Bryce Dallas Howard, Jay Mohr, Lyndsey Marshal and Thierry Neuvic.
While Eastwood is the driving force behind the film's eerie themes of mourning and loss, the 80-year-old is quick to give credit to Hereafter screenwriter Peter Morgan, who's best known for his Oscar-celebrated scripts for the movies The Queen and Frost/Nixon.
Typically, Eastwood would rather let his film about the afterlife do the explaining, as would Howard.
The actress didn't want to go into detail about Hereafter in an interview last June, but the daughter of Oscar-winning director Ron Howard did offer a brief description of Eastwood as an efficient, no-nonsense moviemaker.

Above: Actress Bryce Dallas Howard at the premiere
"He is truly masterful at what he does," she said. "He knows exactly what he has to get from his actors, and he knows when he has it."
Certainly, Hereafter is another in a string of pictures made to satisfy Eastwood's creative urges.
"A friend of mine said that when you hit your 70s, you kind of do what you want," Eastwood told Postmedia News last year. "Because, what can they do to you and what do you care?"
That attitude has served him well over the last few years. He's received acclaim and Oscar recognition for 1992's Unforgiven, 2003's Mystic River and 2004's Million Dollar Baby.
But he'd much rather discuss the actors' performances, and the fact that he directed four of his stars to Oscar victory two years in a row: Sean Penn won best actor for his part in Mystic River while Tim Robbins won best supporting actor, and Hilary Swank won best actress for her role in Million Dollar Baby, with best supporting actor going to Morgan Freeman.
Even more amazing, Eastwood picked up best picture and directing Oscar nods for 2006's Letters from Iwo Jima. Only eight other foreign language films have managed that, including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000 and 1998's Life Is Beautiful. And let's not forget his Letters from Iwo Jima companion war film, Flags of Our Fathers.
In 2008, Eastwood continued his momentum. He helped Angelina Jolie get an Oscar nomination for her lead role in his crime tale, Changeling. And although he was Oscar-snubbed for Gran Torino, the low-budget revenge movie he directed and starred in, the picture did well at the box office.
Last year, the director guided Damon, his Hereafter co-star, to a supporting actor Oscar nod for his role in Invictus, a fiction-based-on-fact movie about rugby and South African President Nelson Mandela's first term.
If that weren't impressive enough, Eastwood is in the pre-production phase for Hoover, the film profile of the controversial FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, which might feature Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role.
It's quite a variety of films reflecting his more perceptive style, although he only begrudgingly acknowledges it.
"I don't know how I balance anything," said Eastwood about his new approach. "I just kind of go along. I do think that, as I've matured -- which is essentially a way of saying aging -- I've reached out to different sides of different stories and different stories that maybe were appealing to me."
The irony is that Eastwood received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the Oscars in 1995 for his body of work, as if the story was complete.
Mind you, his accomplishments were already impressive as an actor, director and producer in a career spanning five decades.
Classic portrayals included the cowboy with no name in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, his Dirty Harry cop pictures, Unforgiven, and his early directorial efforts, such as 1971's Play Misty For Me, the underrated but newly discovered Bronco Billy in 1980, 1982's Honkytonk Man and the acclaimed Bird in 1988.
Even when he was labelled a right-wing, gun-toting headliner, he admits he was interested in less formulaic films, "but the pressure was on as a young man when I started out in movies to do a lot of action."
That was then, all right. And this is the Toronto festival-bound Eastwood now -- more prolific and more vital than he's ever been.

Exclusive interview with Eastwood and Damon about Hereafter

It’s been twenty years since legendary filmmaker and actor Clint Eastwood premiered, “White Hunter Black Heart” at the Toronto International film festival. He has finally returned, with his latest offering, “Hereafter” that stars Matt Damon as a blue-collar worker with a special connection to the afterlife. Three parallel storylines unfold in London, San Francisco and France, all involving characters who have lost loved ones or had brushes with death. Eastwood who recently turned 80 and Hereafter star Matt Damon sat down with Tribute’s Bonnie Laufer and an exclusive group of reporters to talk about the film.

Bonnie Laufer: So Clint, I understand that in order to get Mr. Damon again, you had to rearrange schedules because he’s got so many projects on the go. Is that a true statement?

Clint Eastwood: He was busy siring children (laughs). Finally he acquiesced and he came back after Christmas and we did a few sections, but then went back to England to conclude the film.

Q: This seems like a bit of a style change for you, Clint…

Clint Eastwood: Well, I just liked the story. I liked the idea of telling three stories simultaneously. I guess it is like some of those French films where at the conclusion the people all come together…

Q: Matt, how does he get such concise performances out of actors?

Matt Damon: Well he is an actor, so he knows a lot about acting and gives the kind of direction that he would want as an actor. He’s been acting longer than…

Clint Eastwood: Don’t say God. (laughs)

Matt Damon: (laughs) I was just going to say usually than most of the actors that he’s working with, so he’s got a lot of knowledge about what’s helpful and what’s not helpful, and the kind of environment to create. And then obviously as a director for 40 years, he knows what kind of environment is great for his crew and knows a lot about everybody’s job and how to make it easier on everybody. And as a result, everybody really feels like they get to do their best work—and in a really fun atmosphere, too.

Q: You don’t dwell on things, I understand… Clint Eastwood likes to move things along?

Matt Damon: Yeah, and that’s good. I think you can fall into a trap with second guessing yourself and fiddling with something forever, and never pulling the trigger and moving on. So much of directing seems to be that ability to be decisive and keep the train headed somewhere, anywhere, and not just stop and tinker until everybody goes crazy.

Q: Were there any issues with the subject matter? Any concern that it will read the wrong way to some people?

Clint Eastwood: Not really. You just kind of do the project the way the story is, in your mind, supposed to unfold. And you can’t tailor it to any particular person; you can just tailor it to your likes and you hope that people will respond to it.

Bonnie Laufer: Matt, was there any preparation on your part, because, you know, usually when you hear about psychics, most of them are out for a quick buck and you don’t know if they’re telling the truth. But with your character in this film, that’s not what it is; it’s a gift, but he calls it a curse. Did you talk to people who say that they do this, or is it something where you went by the script?

Matt Damon: No, I really went by the script. There are some books that I’d read by people who’ve had near-death experiences. But the script was really tight and really well done. Peter Morgan’s a playwright and it feels like doing a play, you know, where every answer you need to get is already there. There wasn’t any point where we looked at each other and said, “I don’t know what he was thinking with this scene.” It all made sense and fit together really nicely.

Q: Clint, you mentioned that everyone has their own take on the afterlife. What is yours ?

Clint Eastwood: Well, I’ve talked to people who’ve claimed to have had a near death experience and they paint a similar picture. But I don’t know—I haven’t been there and I don’t intend to go there before my time [laughs]. You just think of what it must be like and you have to do it in your imagination. Does it exist? I don’t know.

Matt Damon: That’s one of the things that I like about the movie. It comes to that point where this kid says to me, “Where do we go?” and I say, “I don’t know.” And he says, “But you’ve done all these readings,” and I say, “I’m sorry kid, I still don’t know.” And I like that. I like that the film doesn’t try to give any answers.

Q: The tsunami sequence, was that difficult to shoot?

Clint Eastwood: Yes. [laugh]

Matt Damon: Well, you’ve got to wait for the tsunami… [laugh] That’s really tough.

Clint Eastwood: That was the thing that I liked about the material to begin with. Peter Morgan took incidents that really happened—the tsunami, the London bombings, all of these true events—and incorporated them into the story. I thought that was rather clever.

Q: What took you so long to come back to TIFF?

Clint Eastwood: Everything is just sort of, whatever the timing was. This was the first appearance that I’ve made since A Fistful of Dollars, 46 years ago [laugh]. But no particular reason except that the festival is well thought of, people will come here to enjoy it. And it seemed like the thing to do.

Q: Why Matt Damon? What is it about Matt that makes you want to continue working with him?

Clint Eastwood: At first, I didn’t think of using Matt Damon because he had other conflicts. And then finally it came to a slight conclusion in my brain that we were doing three stories, so why not just do two stories and then do Matt’s story when he’s available? So we did that—we did the first two-thirds and then took a hiatus, and then when Matt was available we started his sequence, then went back to England to do the conclusion of the film.

Q: There’s a real sense of time in this movie. There’s a real measuring sense of accomplishment and something coming together…

Clint Eastwood: In this MTV generation that we live in, something that I still like to embrace is that we actually unfold the stories and get to know the people and get to know a little more detail about them. Rather than play to the common denominator of a lack of attention span that sometimes people feel goes on nowadays with the great information age that we live in where everything has to be immediate and over with. Its two hours and you sit there for two hours, and you enjoy the stories or you don’t enjoy it. If your attention span doesn’t have it in you, then you should be watching something else.

Q: The children were amazing, how did you find them?

Clint Eastwood: With the kids, you get the usual kind of child actors, mimicking their adult trainers. We took two that were the least experienced, but they had great faces and they came from a working-class neighborhood in England that was kind of on the rough side. And they just really wanted to do it. It wasn’t as easy as working with the actors that were all professionals, but at the same token, they had a natural kind of way. Sometimes they’d give you absolutely pure gold, and other times you’d have to wring it out of them. [laughs]

Bonnie Laufer: You did such a wonderful job on-screen in Gran Torino, we didn’t see you in Invictus, and you didn’t appear in “Hereafter.” I hope you’re not going to give up being in front of the camera. Are you going to come back?

Clint Eastwood: [coyly] You never know. [laughs]

Q: What are you working on now that’s exciting?

Clint Eastwood: Well, we just finished this one, Hereafter, and I’m just kind of sitting tight. Gran Torino was the last—not the last acting role, but maybe the last acting role. If a great script comes along, I would entertain that, but so far there isn’t one and I’m not looking for it. But directorally, I’m doing this and I’m delving now into a story about J. Edgar Hoover.

Bonnie Laufer: You’re talking Leonardo DiCaprio for that? Sorry, Matt.

Clint Eastwood: He actually approached us on it. He’s very interested in doing it, so that may come about. We haven’t really gotten into that yet. The reason this one has taken longer than normal in post-production—we had it edited in one week—is because of the tsunami. Water is the hardest thing to do in the world in a CGI format. That had to be a really a convincing sequence, because it’s a key sequence. It just took time.

Q: What have you learned from Clint, Matt?

Matt Damon: Oh man, too numerous to count. TNTC. [laugh] The great thing about making movies is that you really can’t perfect it. It’s just really fun, because you learn something every single time out. Whether you’re working with a great director or you’re working with a schmo and learning what not to do [laugh]. Every movie is different—the problems are different, the solutions are different. It’s just kind of fun. You go every day and you’re with this group of people—and Clint put together a great group—and the problems you have to solve are different. You kind of figure your way through the day and get excited over things that go really well, and he gets you home at a reasonable hour.

Clint Eastwood: Everybody asks who your greatest influences are. But even bad directors that you work with or bad actors that you work with, you learn something from them. You learn what not to do.

Bonnie Laufer: Matt you have so much stuff coming up, do you ever get time to rest?

Matt Damon: I haven’t worked since May—I got the whole summer off and I’m not working ‘til December. But this job, because of the way it got set up, all my stuff got crammed together. So rather than being with the crew for a few months, it was really only a month and it was just concentrated, working every day for a month. And then I did True Grit, which was really only 25 or 26 days of shooting, which was spread out over three months. So it seems like I have a lot coming up, but they weren’t like, six-month movies, one after the other.

Bonnie Laufer: We’re going to see you on the season premiere of 30 Rock?

Matt Damon: Yes! Yeah. I love those guys. I really love that show. I actually saw Tina Fey at an awards show and my wife and I went up to her to tell her how much we love the show. So I joked with her by saying, hey if you ever have apart for me… and soon after she called me up and asked me to be in the premiere.

Q: Is the Liberace project going forward with Michael Douglas?

Matt Damon: Well, yeah, it is. We’re really excited about it. He’s obviously going through his health issues, but from what I understand, it’s not going to be a problem. The numbers are very much on his side and he’s a healthy guy, so we’re all just hoping that everything goes well. We’re hoping to be right on track for shooting next summer. But obviously, we’re willing to wait for our star as long as we have to.

Q: You’ve come a long way from “The First Traveling Saleslady” with Carol Channing… Was that your first role?

Clint Eastwood: My first role was Revenge of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. [laughs] Jack Arnold was the director and Bill Alland was the producer. He was the guy who played the reporter in Citizen Kane.

Screen International, 13 September, 2010 By Mark Adams, chief film critic

Hereafter Dir/music: Clint Eastwood. US. 2010. 123mins

Clint Eastwood takes a bold change of pace with Hereafter, a compelling and thoughtfully structured delve into the world of the supernatural, weaving together three separate storylines that all finally converge to satisfying effect. This is no spooky chiller though…instead a fascinating look at how death affects a series of completely different people.
Above: Clint with actress Cecile de France
The film is scripted by Peter Morgan – whose impressive track record includes The Queen and Frost/Nixon) - and he has set Eastwood a rather different directorial challenge. This is not a film dominated by action or effects, but instead a complex interwoven story of people trying to deal with the traumas and find solace rather than solutions.
That being said, Hereafter does open in quite spectacular fashion. Successful French television reporter Marie (the spectacularly good Cecile de France) is on holiday with her TV director boyfriend at a tropical beachside resort and one morning she wanders into the nearby town to look for trinkets to take home to Paris.
The resort is then hit with a massive tsunami, and she finds herself swept away in the terrifying torrent of water. She is plucked from the water, and while two men try and save her she finds herself mentally seeing ‘the other side’, strange shadowy white figures against a misty backdrop. She is miraculously brought back to life, but cannot forget or totally comprehend her near-death experience.
Meanwhile in San Francisco, factory worker George (Matt Damon) is trying to hide away from his previous career as a psychic who could communicate with the dead. For him his power is a terrible curse rather than a gift, and he tries to hide himself away and not get close to people.
Taking a night school course in Italian cooking – Damon is engagingly clumsy chopping tomatoes – he meets a woman trying to start her life over (Bryce Dallas Howard), but when they start to get close she asks him to ‘read’ her. He delves into her past and tells her truths which drive her away.
In England young twins Marcus and Jason (Frankie and George McLaren) try to protect their druggie mother from the local social service, but when Jason is killed in a car accident Marcus finds himself taken away from his mother and also haunted by the loss of his brother.
The threesome of George, Marie and Marcus are all touched by death in different ways, and each struggle to find ways to deal with the ways that their memories and emotions drive them to find answers.
Marie takes a leave of absence from her job and writes a book about her experience in the tsunami and about the afterlife – after taking a side trip to Switzerland to talk to an academic who ha studied the hereafter (Marthe Keller in a nice cameo) – while young Marcus visits fake psychics and doctors as he looks to find a way to communicate with his brother. While searching the net he comes across an old website detailing George’s abilities.
The three finally come together in London. George is there on a holiday – and a way to escape his brother (Jay Mohr) and his plans for George to go back into the psychic business – and Marie is in the city on a book tour. The three meet by accident at a book fair, where George is drawn to Marie at a reading and where Marcus spots George and follows him back to his hotel.
Eastwood ends the film with no crash-bang effects or profound announcements. Simply that these three very different people find ways to deal with their brushes with death. George helps Marcus to let his bother go, and in a low-key moment at the end George and Marie find the possibility of love.
Clint Eastwood does not resort to any clever editing to tell the three parallel stories, instead opts for a linear style switching between each storyline in 10 minute bursts, and allowing each of the characters to develop gradually. He does a great job in reflecting the socio-economic circumstances of each character (Marie is wealthy and glamorous, Marcus has a tough housing estate life and George lives modestly and along and works in a local factory) and with no fuss of grandstanding elegantly weaves the parallel storyline together.
Cecile de France is thoroughly enchanting as the glamorous TV presenter who finds her life unraveling after the tsunami (a brilliantly staged effects sequence), while Matt Damon underplays impressively as a man trying to hide from life. Young Frankie McLaren has a tougher job as the tormented youngster, called on largely to look doe-eyed and sad for most of the film, but he holds his own a his storyline develops.
It is good to see Clint Eastwood trying something very different. Fans expecting to see a supernatural thriller will be disappointed….but those interested in a shrewdly made and well-scripted drama about loss and compassion will be intrigued and impressed.
Production companies: Malpaso Productions, The Kennedy/Marshall Company
US and International distribution: Warners Bros
Producers: Clint Eastwood, Kathleen Kennedy, Robert Lopez
Executive producers: Frank Marshall, Tim Moore, Peter Morgan, Steven Spielberg
Screenplay: Peter Morgan
Cinematography: Tom Stern
Editors: Joel Cox, Gary Roach
Production designer: James J Murakami
Main cast: Matt Damon, Cecile de France, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jay Mohr, Frankie McLaren, George McLaren, Marthe Keller

Variety, Justin Chang, Sept 12, 2010

A Warner Bros. release of a Malpaso, Kennedy/Marshall production. Produced by Clint Eastwood, Kathleen Kennedy, Robert Lorenz. Executive producers, Steven Spielberg, Frank Marshall, Peter Morgan, Tim Moore. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Screenplay, Peter Morgan. George Lonegan - Matt Damon Marie LeLay - Cecile de France Billy - Jay Mohr Melanie - Bryce Dallas Howard Marcus/Jason - George McLaren, Frankie McLaren Didier - Thierry Neuvic Dr. Rousseau - Marthe Keller Himself - Derek Jacobi

Clint Eastwood moves into risky new territory with old-fashioned grace and sturdy classical filmmaking in "Hereafter." An uneven but absorbing triptych of stories concerning the bonds between the living and the dead, the 80-year-old filmmaker's latest feature is a beguiling blend of the audacious and the familiar; it dances right on the edge of the ridiculous and at times even crosses over, but is armored against risibility by its deep pockets of emotion, sly humor and matter-of-fact approach to the fantastical. Oct. 22 release may divide even Eastwood partisans, but the intriguing supernatural angle should help generate positive B.O. readings.
Above: Clint and his cast at the TIFF
The screenplay by Peter Morgan (taking a break from dramatizing the lives of British celebrities) quickly establishes three parallel narratives, the first of which kicks off in disaster-movie mode: French TV journalist Marie LeLay (Cecile de France) is vacationing in the tropics with b.f. Didier (Thierry Neuvic) when the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami hits. Borne along by the rapidly moving tides, rendered with inexpert visual effects but a vivid sense of peril, Marie hits her head, blacks out and has an otherworldly vision -- all blinding white light and ghostly silhouettes -- before regaining consciousness.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, construction worker George Lonegan (Matt Damon) tries to repress his apparently genuine psychic gift, fending off requests from acquaintances and strangers hoping to communicate with their lost loved ones. Finally, in London, young twin brothers Marcus and Jason (played interchangeably by George and Frankie McLaren) try to ward off social services by covering up for their alcoholic mother, yielding unexpectedly tragic consequences.
Eastwood allows each of these stories to develop in unhurried fashion, always keeping the specter of death hovering in the background. Marie returns to Paris but has trouble readjusting to her job after her traumatic experience, while one of the boys, Marcus, becomes eerily obsessed with psychic phenomena. And George, in an unusually charming development, joins an Italian cooking class (taught by Steven R. Schirripa, boisterously channeling Emeril Lagasse), where he's paired with a beautiful stranger, Melanie (Bryce Dallas Howard).
The question that propels "Hereafter" is how these three yarns will eventually converge (the answer: creakily), and on the face of it, this fractured, globe-trotting tale of fate and mortality bears a strong resemblance to the work of scribe Guillermo Arriaga, specifically "Babel." But while the film trades in too many coincidences -- suffice it to say the tsunami is not the only real-world disaster invoked -- the mitigating charm of Eastwood's approach is how subdued, unportentous and laid-back it is. He seems in no hurry to establish the missing links, trusting us to engage with the characters before we know exactly how they fit together.
As though aware of the raised eyebrows that may greet his borderline-schlocky choice of material, Eastwood pauses midway through to register a healthy measure of skepticism; a montage shows one character consulting a series of psychics, every one of them a charlatan. Even still, we're meant to take it on faith that Damon's George is the real deal (his gifts are even given a biological explanation), and the film presents his frequent glimpses of the netherworld -- similar to Marie's near-death visions -- in an unquestioning manner that viewers will have to either accept or reject.
As unabashedly suffused with emotion as any of Eastwood's films, "Hereafter" is finally less interested in addressing life's great mysteries than in offering viewers the soothing balm of catharsis; the portal to the beyond, as conceived here, serves merely as a practical gateway into inner peace, romantic renewal and, most consolingly, the reassurance that our loved ones never leave us. This sentiment is conveyed when George reluctantly performs a reading for Melanie, all the more powerful for its apparent disconnection from the rest of the story.
The fact that much of the film is set in Europe lends it a unique look and texture in the helmer's oeuvre; Tom Stern's camera at times pulls back to take in the varied landscapes, but bathes many of the interiors in his customary inky blacks, the intense chiaroscuro serving to up the hushed, spiritual quality of the film's most intimate moments. As usual, Eastwood's score is a tad overinsistent if melodically spare, its few notes reiterated on various instruments (including piano, guitar and harmonica), and supplemented here by snippets of Rachmaninoff.
Damon and de France (toplining her first major studio picture) are sympathetic enough as characters who are more or less at the mercy of the cosmos, while the brothers McLaren eventually cast off their Dickensian-moppet shackles, particularly in the final reel. But it's Howard whose relatively brief presence really lingers, her performance starting off goofy and ingratiating before taking on an almost otherworldly intensity.
Camera (Technicolor prints, Panavision widescreen), Tom Stern; editors, Joel Cox, Gary D. Roach; music, Eastwood; production designer, James J. Murakami; supervising art director, Patrick Sullivan; set decorator, Gary Fettis; costume designer, Deborah Hopper; sound (Dolby Digital/DTS/SDDS), Walt Martin; supervising sound editors, Alan Robert Murray, Bub Asman; re-recording mixers, John Reitz, Gregg Rudloff; visual effects supervisor, Michael Owens; stunt coordinators, Rob Inch, B.L. Richmond, Thom Williams; assistant director, David M. Bernstein; casting, Fiona Weir. Reviewed at Toronto Film Festival (Special Presentations), Sept. 11, 2010. (Also in New York Film Festival -- closer.) MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 129 MIN.

The Hollywood Reporter, Hereafter - Film Review
By Kirk Honeycutt, September 13, 2010

TORONTO -- Clint Eastwood continues his search for challenging stories that delve into extreme reaches of the human condition in "Hereafter," a globetrotting inquiry into the nature of the afterlife. The film also marks an unexpected turn in the screenwriting of Peter Morgan, away from his survey of political personalities in such films as "The Queen" and "Frost/Nixon" and into metaphysical speculation. The film never is less than intriguing, right from its tour de force opening sequence, and often full of insights into why people long for answers, sometimes with great urgency.

By now Eastwood has established a reputation for the unexpected, so his admirers -- "fans" no longer seems the right word -- plus anyone curious about the subject matter certainly will line up when Warner Bros. releases the film domestically Oct. 22. The film should do very well in Europe next year as well.

One would expect such subjects as mortality and the afterlife would mean a contemplative, even moody piece. But Morgan has planted a sense of immediacy within these international stories about three people searching for answers.

Strange as it sounds, the film reminds a little of old Claude Lelouch movies -- and not just because Marthe Keller, looking wonderful, shows up in one sequence -- because Morgan's story plays with fate and destiny as people's paths eventually cross after incidents in different parts of the world send them on a collision course.

A tsunami tears through a tropical beach town, causing a French television news anchor (Cecile de France) to have a near-death experience. An otherwise normal American (Matt Damon) desperately wants to flee his "curse," a psychic ability to communicate with the dead. Two twin boys in London are inseparable until they are separated by death, leaving the shyer, more dependent brother (Frankie McLaren) desperate to reach beyond the grave for assurance.

Each story has its own subplots and captivating characters. The French woman, something of a celebrity, is in a relationship with her married producer (Thierry Neuvic). The experience has so shaken her that he suggests she take time off to write a political book. She does, but her writing veers off course as she investigates scientists who research the afterlife and the stigma attached to their work.

The psychic aches to get out of the "reading" business, but his brother (Jay Mohr) knows a gold mine when he sees it, and a fledgling relationship with a bright, pretty woman (Bryce Dallas Howard) falls apart because of his unwanted ability.

The twins' mother (Lyndsey Marshal) is a junkie. Following the death of the "older" brother (George McLaren), social workers and even the mother finally agree that his brother must go into foster care while she rehabs. It couldn't happen at a worse time for the lad.

All three stories have a sense of urgency: these are people tormented by the inexplicable. Eastwood establishes their stress but never hurries the film. Many absorbing moments dot the movie that luxuriate in situations and details, such as a cooking class where the psychic meets a potential lover or a London Underground sequence where an enigmatic event rescues the brother.

Eastwood's actors underplay what has potential for hokey melodrama. Indeed, the film nimbly maneuvers through territory few American films enter. Perhaps for good reason: Remember the debacle of "What Dreams May Come?"

Even with all this, the ending is a letdown. It's too facile, too ... well, Lelouch, as a matter of fact. One wants a film dealing with the ultimate metaphysical issue to end on a more profound note than the finish Morgan comes up with.

However, it certainly will give audiences something to debate on the way home. As with "Letters From Iwo Jima" and "Million Dollar Baby," Eastwood has made a movie that shakes up the whole notion of what studio movies can be.

A final note: Eastwood's lilting musical score is among his best.

Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Warner Bros.)Production companies: Warner Bros. presents a Kenndy/Marshall Co./Malpaso Productions productionCast: Matt Damon, Cecile de France, Frankie McLaren, Jay Mohr, Bryce Dallas Howard, George McLaren, Thierry Neuvic, Marthe Keller, Derek Jacobi, Richard KindDirector/music: Clint EastwoodScreenwriter: Peter MorganProducer: Clint Eastwood, Kathleen Kennedy, Robert LorenzExecutive producers: Steven Spielberg, Frank Marshall, Tim Moore, Peter MorganDirector of photography: Tom SternProduction designer: James J. MurakamiCostume designer: Deborah HopperEditor: Joel Cox, Gary D. RoachSales: Warner Bros.Rated PG-13, 123 minutes

Above: Clint and Matt at the TIFF
Can Clint Eastwood regain his awards luster?
Written by Steven Zeitchik / Los Angeles Times
Tuesday, 21 September 2010 11:52

TORONTO—Judging by the reaction to him at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre on Sunday night, Clint Eastwood can still muster a lot of love. There was standing ovation when he came out to introduce his new film, Hereafter, and the kind of murmurs through the crowd reserved for rock stars and world leaders.

Yet in recent years, the response Eastwood has received from awards voters—those arbiters of taste, for better or worse, in modern Hollywood—has been less enthusiastic.

After three movies that landed Best Picture nominations in a span of four years (Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby and Letters from Iwo Jima) Eastwood has gone colder than the hands around Scorpio’s gun. His last three movies—Changeling, Gran Torino and Invictus—each had clear awards potential. And yet apart from a few acting nominations and two technical nominations, Oscar acclaim has eluded the icon. No director nominations for Eastwood on any of the three films; no Best Picture nominations either.

Eastwood’s most recent effort, the Nelson Mandela-centered sports movie Invictus, was a particular disappointment on that front. Although not a unanimous reviewer favorite, the film contained political subject matter, an inspirational story, historical and period flourishes, and a larger-than-life central character. Its omission from the Oscar Best Picture list last year, when the academy had the luxury of 10 selections, might have stung even a more awards-agnostic filmmaker.

The film that could break Eastwood’s cold streak this year comes in the form of Hereafter, a spiritual/supernatural triptych starring Matt Damon. Those looking for blazingly original subject matter may not be entirely satisfied with three afterlife-related story strands that, inevitably, come together at the end, in the manner of an Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu film or a host of indie dramas from the last decade or so. And with its sometimes gauzy exploration of the topic of the afterlife—particularly in the story of a French woman who believes she has seen the white light and then undertakes a search trying to understand it—the movie leaves itself open to the criticism of pseudodepth that seemingly comes whenever Hollywood tackles spiritual subjects.

But there is a quiet drama and pacing in Hereafter that could appeal to reviewers and the academy’s base. More important, there is a stretching of subject matter and genre, even by the standards of the already-elastic Eastwood. The academy likes to give what are essentially lifetime achievement awards (e.g., Martin Scorsese’s 2006 wins for The Departed) to reward an icon for doing something particularly well for so long. With Eastwood, it sometimes seems moved for a very different reason: to reward an icon for doing so many different things for so long.

If that’s the criteria, Hereafter stands an excellent chance this season. Eastwood’s moral preoccupations are often similar from movie to movie, but his backdrops and genres are radically different. The film is a departure even by those standards. Drop a filmgoer into a theater that’s showing Hereafter and ask him to guess the director. Eastwood may be the 30th or 40th name that comes up.

Eastwood has, in recent years, shown a remarkable consistency at the box office. In the last six years, every one of his movies (aside from Letters from Iwo Jima) grossed almost exactly the same amount, between $33 million and $37 million. (The one exception was Gran Torino, his most successful movie as either an actor or a director, when he caught lightning in a bottle and grossed a whopping $148 million.)

There is a die-hard base that is attracted to Eastwood and his work, a group that is not large but is exceedingly reliable. There used to be a corresponding cadre among awards voters. We’ll see if they return with Hereafter.

Paint your Wagon New Rare BTS Photos

2010-09-14T21:05:00.007Z

Jerry Whittington has again sent me some very rare behind the scenes shots from Paint your Wagon, which offer a great insight into the production.

Above: 'These were some of the standins and stuntmen, all horsemen, the guy on the left is Buddy Van Horn Clint Eastwood's standin and stuntman. They were all down to earth gents. Eastwood's standin had his family with him as did many others including me. The buildings you see in the background are part of the city that was built for the film' - Jerry

Below: Jerry can be seen in the top photo adjusting the ark light.

And Above: That's Jerry (Bottom left of photo) about to light Clint on horseback.

Thanks again Jerry for sharing these photos with us here.

Rare photos of Eastwood composer Dee Barton

2010-09-11T11:19:00.005Z

The Archive's good friend Jerry Whittington has been in contact over the weekend and again, supplied us with some wonderful material. Jerry worked closely with composer Dee Barton in the music and sound effects mixing department during Clint's classic films Play Misty for me and High Plains Drifter. Barton was also responsible for the Thunderbolt and Lightfoot score, made during the same terrific decade. As mentioned last week, Jerry started in the film business around 1960 and was fortunate enough to have worked on several Eastwood projects, including Paint Your Wagon.
Below: This week, Jerry kindly sent me a real treasure, The No Name City Gazette. These mock newspapers were produced and handed out on the set for the film's cast and crew to keep, which I guess kept them all hugely entertained in between set ups.

It's great to finally begin to get some input on the great Dee Barton. As a soundtrack collector myself, it has become increasingly frustrating to watch each decade pass by without any sign of his soundtracks seeing any kind of release. Play Misty for me (Clint's directorial debut) is a great suspenseful score. It also has some terrific Jazz material which was featured during the Monterey festival sequence and of course, the Erroll Garner classic title track. High Plains Drifter (Clint's western directorial debut) has a genuinely haunting and mysterious quality to it, as well as an incredible central theme. Taking into account their historical importance, especially in terms of the Eastwood timeline, they really do deserve some form of release.
Below: A couple of very rare photos. On the left, composer Dee Barton and on the right is Jerry Whittington (who turned 69 in July). The girls behind Jerry are all part of the sound Dept associated with the post production music mixing and sound effects on both High Plains Drifter and Play Misty for Me.

Below: Jerry also provided this great picture, which I have never seen before. Looking at Clint's jacket, I would guess that this was taken circa 1978 while Clint was making Every which way but loose. A very rare chance to see both Clint and Dee Barton together.

Thanks again Jerry for sharing these great items with us here.

NEW! A Man named Eastwood Full length featurette!

2010-09-10T00:49:00.004Z

I was contacted today by Jerry Whittington, the gentleman that recently posted highlights of the original 1973 featurette over at You Tube. Jerry was also responsible for posting the original Paint Your Wagon featurette (also featured on this site) and on You Tube. Jerry has been involved in the film industry for a great number of years and built a terrific body of work. He worked as an electrician on Paint Your Wagon and in between his electrical obligations, appeared in front of the camera as part of the community of 'No Name City'. Jerry also appeared in Kelly's Heroes and worked along side composer Dee Barton on films such as Play Misty for Me and High Plains Drifter.

Today, Jerry very kindly asked me if I would like to see the full version of the High Plains Drifter featurette (A Man named Eastwood). Naturally, I had to think long and hard about this, as I have only been waiting to see this little gem forever!

The new version is quite stunning. Jerry did look at the colour on the original 16mm print, but informed me that it just didn't work too well. Certain film stock (over years) does tend to turn, leaving the film either red or pinkish in colour. Transferring it in b/w remained the cleanest and best option.

The sound is superb and now includes full opening credits including the mini Eastwood bio at the start, which is fun in itself. I am deeply indebted to Jerry for providing the many fans an opportunity to view this unique and important piece of film history. This featurette has never appeared on any DVD release of High Plains Drifter.

Thank you again Jerry.
The Clint Eastwood Archive

Exclusive: New Eastwood Book on the way!

2010-09-08T17:55:00.005Z

I had a wonderful email arrive today from author Kevin Avery who expressed how much he enjoys The Clint Eastwood Archive. Reading on, Kevin explained about his new book, Conversations with Clint – 1979 to 1983: Paul Nelson’s Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood.

I have posted the background information below. It certainly sounds like being a fascinating read.

Continuum Books will be publishing my second book, Conversations with Clint – 1979 to 1983: Paul Nelson’s Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood.

A little background:

In 1979, critic and records review editor Paul Nelson convinced his higher-ups at Rolling Stone magazine that a cover story about Clint Eastwood was in order. A devout genre film and literature fan, Paul idolized Eastwood, who for him was, among other things, a handy and accurate cultural reference point. Reviewing a live performance by rock & roller Warren Zevon in 1976, Paul had written that “seeing the man onstage was like experiencing... Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry... at a very impressionable age. Rightly or wrongly, your life got changed.”

Paul embarked on what at the time, according to critic Dave Marsh, was “probably the longest series of interviews Clint Eastwood's ever done with anyone,” occurring off and on until 1983. Much to Paul's pleasure, he and Eastwood hit it off. The actor-director seemed to trust him and enjoyed spending time with him, and provided him with a wealth of material.

Still acting in other people’s films, the most bankable star in the world was honing his directorial craft on a series of inexpensive films that, without fail, he brought in under-budget and ahead of schedule. Operating largely beneath the critical radar (he took the critics even less seriously than they took him), he made his movies swiftly and inexpensively. Few of his critics then could have predicted—nor would they most likely have gone on record if they had—that Eastwood the actor and director would ever be taken as seriously as he is today.

But Paul Nelson did.

Unfortunately, for reasons explored in the chapter of Everything Is an Afterthought that is devoted to his relationship with Eastwood, Paul—despite the almost twenty-two hours he'd recorded with Eastwood and another ten with his friends and associates—was unable to get beyond page four of the article he'd set out to write.

For over twenty years, the whereabouts of Paul Nelson’s legendary “lost” interviews with Clint Eastwood have been talked about by Eastwood and Nelson fans alike with the same holy-grail hopefulness that cinephiles used to invest in the directors’ cuts of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil or Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One. The tapes were discovered in Paul's apartment following his death in 2006.

The recordings reveal that Eastwood was indeed relaxed and confidential with Paul, speaking openly and without illusions about his influences, his strengths, and his public persona. Aside from their obvious value as a window into the life of one of our major actors and directors at a specific time and place in his career, they reveal a man who’d found a friend in his interviewer and who gave him the benefit of the doubt again and again over a four-year period because he liked him and believed in him.

The publication of Conversations with Clint – 1979 to 1983: Paul Nelson’s Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood will finally bear out that belief.

Kindest regards,

Kevin Avery

Kevin added that the publication date will be approximately one year from now, but he will be keeping The Clint Eastwood Archive right up to date with any developments. Thank you Kevin.

Clint Eastwood on the Jamie Cullum Show

2010-09-07T21:46:00.007Z

Tonight the Jamie Cullum show was broadcast featuring part 1 of his exclusive 2 part interview with Clint. Jazz artist Cullum spoke to Clint about his love of Jazz music and his influences growing up in America during the 1940’s and 50’s. It was a great interview which found Clint in fine form. Cullum, who has worked with Clint on a couple of his projects including Gran Torino, was clearly at ease with Clint and obviously shares an interest in terms of their musical tastes.

Above: Jamie Cullum visits Hollywood actor, director and producer Clint Eastwood at his production studio in LA, the place where he records the scores for his films. In this clip Jamie asks Clint Eastwood about the clubs and bars where he used to go and see live Jazz back in the day.

Above: Jamie speaks to Clint Eastwood about the serious approach that has been adopted towards jazz in recent years and how it contained more humour in the past.

From the BBC:
The first of a two-part special in which Jamie visits Hollywood actor, director and producer Clint Eastwood at his production studio in LA, the place where he records the scores for his films.
Clint talks about the humorous side of jazz and how that has changed over the years, about the clubs he used to visit in his youth and about the legendary artists he would go to see perform, or even mingle with as well as his time in the army and the musicians he met there.
In a warm, personal interview, we see Clint Eastwood from a different angle, reunited with Jamie who he worked with on the soundtrack for Gran Torino, and talking passionately about the music he loves.

Above: Jamie asks Clint Eastwood about how he writes the music for his films and at what point during the making of the film he gets the idea for the melodies.

The music featured in tonight’s show:
Erroll Garner — Play Misty for Me
Play Misty for Me (Soundtrack), Verve
King Pleasure, John Lewis, Percy Heath, Kenny Clarke — Parker’s Mood
Bird (Soundtrack), Sony
Fats Waller — Honeysuckle Rose
Honeysuckle Rose, ABC
Charlie Ventura — East of Suez
East of Suez, Columbia
The Dave Brubeck Quartet — Blue Rondo à la Turk
Time Out, Columbia
Nat King Cole — Sweet Lorraine
Jazz at the Philharmonic, Verve
Billie Holiday — Strange Fruit
Jazz at the Philharmonic, Verve
Kid Ory — Muskrat Ramble
New Orleans Parade, EPM
Shelly Manne & His Men — A Gem from Tiffany
Live At the Manne Hole, Vogue
John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman — My One & Only Love
John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman, Impulse!
Charlie Parker, Charles McPherson, Red Rodney, Walter Davis Jr, Ron Carter, John Guerin — Now’s The Time
Bird (Soundtrack), Sony
Charlie Parker — April in Paris
Bird (Soundtrack), Sony
King Pleasure, John Lewis, Percy Heath, Kenny Clarke — Parker’s Mood
Bird (Soundtrack), Sony
Lennie Niehaus and Clint Eastwood — Claudia’s Theme
Unforgiven (Soundtrack), Varese Sarabande
Clint Eastwood and Jamie Cullum — Gran Torino Theme
Gran Torino (Soundtrack), New Line Records
Fats Waller — Your Feet’s too big
The Cream Series, Pearl

Above: Jamie asks Clint Eastwood to do some drops for his Radio 2 show, resulting in a comical interaction between the two stars.

Part 2 of Jamie Cullum's interview is broadcast at 7.00pm GMT next Tuesday 14/09/2010 when Clint Eastwood continues to take Jamie Cullum on a musical journey of his life, revealing his true love of jazz, speaking about his favourite artists, about scoring his films and his involvement with the Monterey Jazz Festival.

Here's some nice pictures from the interview and Jamie's visit to LA.

Photographer: Simon Cordova

A Big thank you to my friend Dave Turner

2010-08-21T18:02:00.007Z

I had a wonderful collection of magazines and various cuttings arrive this week. For this, I have to thank my good friend and former president of The Clint Eastwood Appreciation Society, Dave Turner. Among the material are some very nice pieces that were new to me and a rather nice interview from the U.S. which was published in June 2010. I will be scanning these magazines and adding them to their dedicated area which can be found in the drop down site archive menu to the right.

My sincere thanks to you Dave and for your continued support.

The Clint Eastwood Archive

CLINT 35 Films 35 Years DVD Box Set Full Review

2010-07-30T19:46:00.006Z

2010 has been something of a special year for Mr. Eastwood. As busy as ever, his latest movie Hereafter (2010) is already in the can and currently in the post production stages of completion. His next film, a story based on FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover not only serves as a mouth watering prospect, but is already in the early stages of pre production. In May, Eastwood celebrated a milestone 80th birthday in a typically low key and unadorned fashion. Warner Brother’s has been home for Eastwood since he settled there in the shape of a modestly built bungalow back in the 1970’s. As a mark of their huge admiration and genuine respect for Eastwood, the studio honoured their iconic statesman by releasing the mammoth retrospective DVD collection, Clint Eastwood: 35 Films 35 Years. Handsomely crafted, it’s hard to ignore this beautifully presented capsule of films. It is only when we are presented with such a huge and incredibly interesting body of work (contained within a singular package) that we can perhaps fully appreciate Eastwood’s immensely diverse and ‘brave’ choice of projects. From big budget epics like Where Eagles Dare, through genre classics including Dirty Harry and The Outlaw Josey Wales to modern day masterpieces such as Mystic River and Million Dollar baby, 35/35 is a truly fascinating exploration.

Released back in February 2010 (see site archive on right column), The Clint Eastwood Archive takes a closer look at this remarkable collection with detailed analysis of the set contents. Presented in a bound book form, each of its pages are representative of a specific genre or chapter in Eastwood’s career. With 2 discs per page (inserted from the top) and for the best part, 2 films per disc (1 film to each side), Warner’s have insured that the set never runs the risk of becoming too cumbersome or heavy. It’s smartly and simply laid out which makes finding a particular title easy to locate. Also added to each of the pages are the film’s relevant U.S. 1 sheet poster designs which also make for a nice touch.

Page 1 is titled ‘COPS’ In essence, it is Eastwood at his 1970’s hero cop best. Four superb titles including Dirty Harry (1971), Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976) and the comic book actioner, The Gauntlet (1977) ensure that this set makes for an explosive opening.

Disc 1 Side 1 Dirty Harry (1971) Special Edition

I was happy to see that Warner’s pressing of Dirty Harry was actually the same master used for the Dirty Harry Ultimate edition released on both Blu ray and standard DVD. Most significantly of course, is that this version contains the restored Warner / Kinney opening shield which ran from 1970-72 (Dirty Harry, Site archive, Feb, 2009).

So for serious Eastwood fans and film historians alike, this simple but effective move on the studio’s part is particularly appreciated. Also included is an informative film commentary by Eastwood biographer Richard Schickel. While Schickel’s narration is entirely ‘academic’ in style, it nevertheless provides the listener with an abundance of instructive background detail. Dirty Harry: The Original (29:41) is a tribute look at the Dirty Harry franchise and hosted by the late Robert Urich (rookie cop officer Michael Grimes in Magnum Force). It makes for an enjoyable watch and focuses on the influential aspect of Eastwood’s character and the modern action hero of today. Featuring Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Milius and Scorpio himself Andy Robinson, it works particularly well. Dirty Harry’s Way (7:03) is an original vintage featurette with some great behind the scenes footage of Eastwood and director Don Siegel at work. An interview gallery is a selection of extended interview clips from the previously mentioned Dirty Harry: The Original documentary. A Dirty Harry trailer gallery rounds off the extras and are the regular trailers that have been previously included on their individual titles in the series. Although there is nothing new included on this disc, it’s an excellent collection of material for anyone who is new to the Eastwood DVD market.

Disc 1 Side 2 Magnum Force (1973) Special Edition
Magnum Force continues to be a personal favourite of mine. While Dirty Harry remains at the top of my list, Magnum Force (for me) epitomises Harry as the personification of hero cop. Some critics labelled the original Dirty Harry as ‘fascist’ while others held the film in contempt due to the nature of its violence. For Siegel and Eastwood, it was simply nothing more than ‘a great little cop movie’. But with Magnum Force, Eastwood and director Ted Post decided to really give the critics something to moan about. Political red tape, murder, corruption and even a ‘death squad’ may have been a little too much for some critics. Yet, these same people remained blissfully blind to the fact that Magnum Force was an entirely plausible story of what was happening in the world and in particular, closer to home in American society.

Again, Warner Brothers have included their original Warner Communications company intro at the start of the film, allowing Lalo Schifrin’s opening percussion to be heard over that terrific 70’s logo (Magnum Force, Site archive, Feb, 2009). Also included is a great running commentary from screenwriter John Milius, who provides a much more relaxed approach. The accompanying documentary ‘A Moral Right: The politics of Dirty Harry’ (24:11) is a very good watch and explores the political standpoints of the Dirty Harry character. Also included is the original featurette ‘Hero Cop: Yesterday and today’ an excellent short with some great behind the scenes footage including the filming of the supermarket robbery sequence and director Ted Post at work. As with all of the Dirty Harry titles, the trailer gallery is also included.

Disc 2 Side 1 The Enforcer (1976) Special Edition
Warner’s remastering of the Harry titles sees The Enforcer opening with its original Warner Communications logo in place. The film is again an excellent entry in the series and has Harry teamed up with woman partner Inspector Kate Moore (Tyne Daly). James Fargo was promoted within the ranks of Malpaso and handed the director’s chair for the feature. James Fargo also supplies the audio commentary track and gives us a fine insight into the production and will prove particularly interesting for fans of Eastwood’s 1970’s movies. Included is an interesting documentary, The Business end: Violence in Cinema (30:05) which is pretty much self explanatory. The vintage short ‘Clint Eastwood, Something special in film’ (6:00) is another excellent ‘Professional Films/Robin’s Nest’ production which again provides a unique behind the scenes glimpse at the making of the film and leaves the viewer wishing these featurettes remained much longer. The Dirty Harry Trailer gallery again rounds off the disc.

Disc 2 Side 2 The Gauntlet (1977)

Eastwood’s last cop film of the 70’s was a great piece of comic book adventure and remains an essential classic of the decade. Eastwood plays Ben Shockley, a hard drinking, no nonsense cop with a reputation of getting the job done. Shockley survival skills are tested to the limit when he is sent to escort a ‘no name witness for a no name trial’ from Vegas to Nevada. The film’s big action sequences are well staged, if completely over the top. The film includes many Eastwood regulars of the time including Sondra Locke (excellent as witness Gus Malley) and the ever reliable Bill McKinney is great as a slightly disturbed cop who Shockley and Malley encounter along the way. There is also a superb Jazz score provided by the late great Jerry Fielding who had provided excellent soundtracks to Eastwood’s two previous pictures, The Outlaw Josey Wales and The Enforcer. Sadly, the original Warner’s Communication opening has not been restored to the print. Extras are only in the shape of the original theatrical trailer (a great trailer it is too). I understand there was an original featurette made at the time of production, but unfortunately it does not appear in the collection.

Page 2 is a continuation of the COPS collection

Disc 3 Side 1 Sudden Impact (1984) Special Edition

The fourth entry in the Dirty Harry series was the first and last to be directed by Eastwood himself. Sondra Locke co-stars as a rape victim who plans a number of revenge killings upon each of the gang that raped both her and her sister. Harry stumbles into the case while taking some time off at the request of his superiors. Sudden Impact remains an interesting piece in the series, as director Eastwood explores the character’s soul and questions his sense of moral justification. The film’s original Warner Communications logo has been lovingly restored again to this print, while Richard Schickel returns again to give an informative and insightful audio commentary. ‘The Evolution of Clint Eastwood’ (25:39) is another excellent documentary in the series, and the Dirty Harry Trailer gallery again completes the disc.

Disc 3 Side 2 Tightrope (1984)
Tightrope is a hugely underrated little cop thriller that emerged quietly in the mid 80’s. Eastwood stars as New Orleans law enforcer, Wes Block. ‘A cop on the edge’ as the film’s tagline informed us. Eastwood’s Wes Block proved to be an interesting departure. For once, his cop character became openly vulnerable and to some degree, a troubled man. The film also marked a starring role for the young Alison Eastwood playing one of Block’s own daughters and was the first feature to be directed by Richard Tuggle. Extras are only in the form of a single theatrical trailer.

Disc 4 Side 1 The Dead Pool (1988) Special Edition
It is no secret that Eastwood’s final film in the Dirty Harry series The Dead Pool, is by far the least popular with fans. While enjoyable enough, it is clear that Harry is about as far removed as possible from the charismatic cop that we had continued to celebrate some two decades before. It is notable for including a young Jim Carrey (as doomed rock star Johnny Squares) and provided the opportunity for Eastwood’s long time stunt double Buddy Van Horn to step into the director’s chair. For what is considered to be the weakest entry in the series, the disc certainly makes up for it in the extra features. Malpaso crew members Jack N. Green (Director of Photography) and David Valdes (Producer) provide an excellent audio commentary. ‘The Craft of Dirty Harry’ (21:35) proves to be one of the best of the Dirty Harry documentaries and includes an inside look at Eastwood’s regular Malpaso team. The documentary also features an interview with composer Lalo Schifrin and looks at his significance to the series, as well as exploring the prolific efficiency of Eastwood’s crew. The Trailer gallery again brings the extras to a close.

Disc 4 Side 2 The Rookie (1990)
The Rookie was directed by Clint Eastwood and produced by Howard G. Kazanjian, Steven Siebert and David Valdes. It was written from a screenplay conceived by Boaz Yakin and Scott Spiegel. The film stars Charlie Sheen, Clint Eastwood, Raul Julia, Sonia Braga, Lara Flynn Boyle and Tom Skerritt. Eastwood plays a veteran police officer teamed up with a younger detective played by Sheen, whose intent is to take down a German crime lord in downtown Los Angeles following months of investigation into his illegal activities. Extras are only in the form of a single theatrical trailer, which is a real shame as the comedic short, ‘Clint, the rookie and me’ (shot during the movie) is absolutely hilarious and really deserves to be seen.

Page 3 is titled ‘Man of Action’

Disc 5 Side 1 Where Eagles Dare (1969) Special Edition

Where Eagles Dare takes place during World War II. In the winter of 1943–44, U.S. Army Brigadier General George Carnaby, enroute to Crete to rendezvous with Russian forces to plan the final details of the invasion of Normandy, is captured by the Germans when his aircraft is shot down. He is taken to the Schloß Adler (The Castle of the Eagles – hence the story's title), a fortress high in the Alps above the town of Werfen and the headquarters of the German Secret Service in southern Bavaria. A special team of mainly British commandos is hurriedly assembled and briefed by Colonel Wyatt Turner and Admiral Rolland of MI6, and led by Major John Smith, MC (Richard Burton), and US Army Ranger Lieutenant Morris Schaffer (Clint Eastwood). Their mission is to parachute into the locality, infiltrate the Schloß Adler, and rescue General Carnaby before the Germans can interrogate him. Extras include the excellent original featurette ‘On location, Where Eagles Dare’ (12:38). The original theatrical trailer is also included.

Disc 5 Side 2 Kelly’s Heroes (1970)

Kelly's Heroes is an offbeat 1970 war film about a group of World War II soldiers who go AWOL to rob a bank behind enemy lines. Directed by Brian G. Hutton, who also directed the 1968 World War II drama Where Eagles Dare, the film stars Clint Eastwood, Donald Sutherland, Telly Savalas, Don Rickles, and Carroll O'Connor, with lesser roles played by Harry Dean Stanton, Gavin MacLeod, and Stuart Margolin. The screenplay was written by British film and television writer Troy Kennedy Martin. Extras are in the form of a single theatrical trailer.

Disc 6 Side 1 Firefox (1982) Special Edition
Firefox is a 1982 action film produced and directed by, and starring, Clint Eastwood. It was based on a 1977 novel with the same name written by Craig Thomas. The film details a joint Anglo-American plot to steal a highly advanced Soviet fighter aircraft (MiG-31, NATO code name "Firefox") which is capable of Mach 6, is invisible to radar, and carries weapons controlled by thought. Eastwood stars as Maj. Mitchell Gant, a Vietnam veteran who infiltrates the Soviet Union, aided by his ability to speak Russian (due to his Russian mother) and a network of Jewish dissidents and sympathizers, three of whom are key scientists working on the fighter itself. His goal is to steal the Firefox and fly it back to friendly territory for analysis. Extras include the excellent original BBC documentary ‘Clint Eastwood Director’ (29:58) which is in essence, a terrific making of Firefox. Also included is the original theatrical trailer.

Disc 6 Side 2 Heartbreak Ridge (1986)

Heartbreak Ridge is a 1986 war film, starring Clint Eastwood (who also produced and directed) and Mario Van Peebles, surrounding the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada, West Indies. Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Highway (Eastwood) is nearing mandatory retirement from the Marine Corps. He finagles a transfer back to his old unit. On the bus trip to his new assignment, he meets fellow passenger "Stitch" Jones (Van Peebles), a flashy wannabe rock musician who stiffs him for a meal at a stop and steals his bus ticket, leaving him stranded. Extras are in the form of a single theatrical trailer.

Page 4 is a continuation of the ‘Man of Action’ collection

Disc 7 Side 1 Absolute Power (1997)

Absolute Power is a 1997 American political thriller produced and directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Eastwood as a thief who witnesses a murder. The screenplay by William Goldman is based on the 1996 novel of the same name written by David Baldacci. It was screened out of competition at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. The story describes a conflict that arises after a burglar witnesses Secret Service agents killing the beautiful young wife of an elderly billionaire during her drunken rendezvous with the President of the United States. The burglar is Luther Whitney (Eastwood), a master jewel thief. The President is Alan Richmond (Hackman), a known philanderer. The billionaire is Richmond's friend and financial supporter Walter Sullivan (Marshall), and his wife is Christy (Hardin). Luther has a daughter, Kate (Linney), who works as a prosecutor and has been estranged from him for years.

Disc 7 Side 2 True Crime (1999) Special Edition
True Crime is a 1999 mystery drama film directed by Clint Eastwood, and based on Andrew Klavan's 1997 novel of the same name. Eastwood also stars in the film as a journalist covering the execution of a death row inmate, only to discover that the convict may actually be innocent. Clint Eastwood plays Steve Everett, an Oakland journalist recovering from alcoholism, given the task of covering the execution of convicted murderer Frank Beechum (played by Isaiah Washington). Everett discovers that Beechum might be innocent, but has only a few hours to prove his theory and save Beechum's life. Eventually Steve learns that a young man named Warren, who was stabbed to death three years previously, killed the victim but is unable to prove it. Extras include 2 featurettes, ‘The Scene of the Crime’ (9.26) and ‘True Crime – True Stories’ (22.04). Also featured is the Diana Krall music video for ‘Why should I care’ (3.52) and the original theatrical trailer.

Disc 8 Side 1 Space Cowboys (1999) Special Edition

Space Cowboys is a 2000 adventure/comedy film directed by Clint Eastwood. Eastwood also stars in the film alongside Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, and James Garner as four older "ex-test pilots" who are sent into space to repair an old Soviet satellite. An obsolete Soviet communications satellite is about to fall out of orbit and NASA agrees to deal with it. The onboard systems are so archaic that nobody at NASA understands them, so they ask retired United States Air Force pilot and electrical engineer Dr. Frank Corvin (Clint Eastwood), who designed the original guidance systems from which the satellite has been copied, to help them, despite the longstanding animosity between the engineer and project director Bob Gerson (James Cromwell). A flashback reveals that 40 years ago, Corvin's prospects as an astronaut had been dashed with the formation of NASA, a civilian agency. Corvin and his three-man team had been replaced by a chimp, which was a shrewd move calculated by Gerson. Meanwhile, in the present, NASA engineer Sara Holland (Marcia Gay Harden) argues with project manager Gerson regarding conflicting political and engineering concerns over the decaying satellite. Extras include 4 featurettes, ‘Up close with the editor’ (7.05), ‘Tonight on Leno’ (11.40), ‘The Effects’ (7.11) and ‘Back at the ranch: A look behind the scenes’ (28.10). Also included is the original theatrical trailer.

Disc 8 Side 2 Blood Work (2002) Special Edition
Blood Work is a 2002 mystery suspense thriller produced, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. The film co-stars Jeff Daniels, Wanda De Jesus and Anjelica Huston. Terry McCaleb is an ailing veteran FBI agent who's been given a second chance at life by receiving the heart of a murder victim. Terry is visited by the murder victim's sister, Graciella Rivers, who informs him that he is alive only because of receiving the deceased's heart and asks him to investigate who killed her. Extras include 2 featurettes, ‘Making Blood Work’ (18.09) and ‘A conversation in Spanish with Wanda De Jesus, Clint Eastwood and Paul Rodriguez (14.19).
TO BE CONTINUED

Books: Clint A Retrospective

2010-07-20T14:39:00.017Z

I’m happy to finally get this section off and started. It’s a dedicated Book area that I felt compelled to hold back for a while. For what reasons exactly, I’m not entirely sure? I received an email at the beginning of 2010 from a company asking if I would help contribute to a new book that was due to be published that same year. As ever, I am always happy to help and assist on any Eastwood project in order to see it is presented in the best possible way. What I didn’t realise at the time was that it was going to be Richard Schickel’s book, Clint: A Retrospective.
It wasn’t until I had this book arrive from Sterling Publications, that I realised exactly why I had delayed this particular section. Upon opening the pages of Retrospective, it all suddenly became very clear…

“I am just a guy who makes movies”
—Clint Eastwood
CLINT: A Retrospective
By Richard Schickel
Introduction by Clint Eastwood

For more than six decades, Clint Eastwood has made outstanding films. First as a leading actor and subsequently as an acclaimed director, Eastwood has carved out a uniquely successful career earning him five Academy Awards® for his achievements in front of and behind the camera. Eastwood’s memorable motion pictures have touched generations of filmgoers and established him as one of the true cinematic greats of all time. Celebrating Eastwood’s legendary role in film culture, the sumptuously illustrated book CLINT: A Retrospective (Sterling Publishing) offers intimate insight into his illustrious, instinct driven career that has remained unmatched in the history of the cinema. Presented chronologically, this stunning volume pays tribute to Eastwood’s accomplishments as an actor, moviemaker, and Oscar winning icon. Encompassing his earliest work as the heartthrob in the TV western Rawhide (1959), to his role in Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964), which reinvented the Spaghetti Western genre, CLINT follows Eastwood’s growth as an actor and talented director. Special emphasis is paid to some of his best-loved and most well-respected movies, including his role as “Dirty” Harry Callahan in the five Dirty Harry films and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), the relatively early film that Clint continues to have great affection for; in addition to films such as Tightrope 1984), Bird (1988), Unforgiven (1992), In the Line of Fire (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Mystic River (2003), Million Dollar Baby (2004), Gran Torino (2008) and his latest, Invictus (2009), starring Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman.
CLINT: A Retrospective includes:
• Movie stills from memorable screen performances
• Revealing behind-the-scenes photos showing the filmmaker at work
• Three hundred and twenty-five photographs, meticulously researched from Warner Brothers’ files and other key image archives
• An introduction by Eastwood himself

Incisive commentary is provided throughout CLINT: A Retrospective by Richard Schickel, the acclaimed film critic and award-winning documentary filmmaker. In addition, the book includes an exclusive 22-minute DVD, an intimate documentary from Schickel and Warner Home Video entitled The Eastwood Factor.

CLINT: A Retrospective is timed to release alongside Warner Home Video’s comprehensive, elegant giftset, Clint Eastwood: 35 Films 35 Years at Warner Bros., available February 16. The collection will be packaged in a 20-page double-side album and will contain 19 discs that include 34 of Eastwood’s most classic films from the Warner library as well as The Eastwood Factor.

Considered the largest feature film box set ever released for a single artist, Clint Eastwood: 35 Films 35 Years at Warner Bros. highlights the depth and breadth of his work. Included are his “Dirty Harry” movies, Westerns, war movies, comedies, Best Picture Oscar-winning dramas including Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven, and many more. Select titles from the set will also be available for download via
iTunes, Xbox Live, Zune Marketplace, Amazon video on Demand and other digital retailers.

**I will be posting my full review of this set here at The Clint Eastwood Archive very shortly**

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Schickel is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, movie historian,and film critic who has published more than thirty books and produced, written, and directed more than thirty films for television. He was a film critic for Life and Time for 43 years. His many books about film include Elia Kazan: A Biography; The Essential Chaplin, an anthology of critical writings about the great comedian; The Disney Version, a study of the life, times, and art of Walt Disney; and You Must Remember This: The Warner Brothers Story.

CLINT: A Retrospective
By Richard Schickel
Introduction by Clint Eastwood

ISBN 978-1-4027-7472-0
HC and DVD, 288 Pages, 9 ¾ X 11 ½
$35.00
Sterling Publishing Co, Inc.
Available NOW!

The Clint Eastwood Archive would like to thank Sterling Publications for sending this book and their support.

Playboy Magazine March 1972 "Clint Eastwood: Pushover for Pullovers"

2010-07-12T23:28:00.006Z

Here's a wonderful and rarely seen piece. Clint did this fashion shoot for the popular men's magazine in the March edition of 1972 (Vol. 19, No. 3). Called "Clint Eastwood: Pushover for Pullovers" Clint posed with model-actresses Susan Blakely and Shelley Smith. Costing $1.00 in 1972, the magazine now changes hands for between $20-25. A great little time capsule, these photos retain a great deal of charm, unlike the "Pullovers"!

Cinema Retro's Dollar Trilogy Special NOW OUT

2010-07-06T23:29:00.011Z

CINEMA RETRO ‘MOVIE CLASSICS’ SPECIAL
Issue #2: The Clint Eastwood Dollars Trilogy

Cinema Retro's eagerly-awaited limited edition Movie Classics tribute issue to the Sergio Leone/ Clint Eastwood Dollars trilogy is now shipping worldwide.
All pre-ordered issues have now been mailed.

In the footsteps of Cinema Retro's landmark Movie Classics special edition tribute to Where Eagles Dare, publishers Dave Worrall and Lee Pfeiffer present their most ambitious release yet: the most extensive tribute to the Clint Eastwood/Sergio Leone 'Dollar' film trilogy ever published. Years in the making, with contributions from prominent film historians from around the globe.

Full coverage of 'A Fistful of Dollars', 'For a Few Dollars More' and 'the Good, the Bad and the Ugly' - and why these films remain timeless cinematic classics.
80 full pages (16 pages more than the standard Cinema Retro issue)
Packed with hundreds of rare production stills, collectibles and international movie poster art culled from archives from around the world.
Many photos never before published - including rare behind the scenes production stills from people who acted as extras in 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly'
Special foreword by Leone biographer Sir Christopher Frayling
The legendary film locations - then and now
Coverage of the rare, deleted sequences
Cast and crew biographies

I was proud to work alongside both Dave and Lee on this dedicated project and the finished result is a really wonderful tribute to the 3 dollar films. Highly recommended !!
-The Clint Eastwood Archive-

Please email cinemaretro@hotmail.com
or
Full details including price and payment methods are available at http://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php?/archives/4612-CINEMA-RETRO-DOLLARS-MOVIE-CLASSIC-EDITION-NOW-SHIPPING-IN-THE-UK-AND-EUROPE.html

INVICTUS DVD Review

2010-06-16T15:24:00.007Z

Nelson Mandela had witnessed first hand, the unimaginable hardships brought upon by the Apartheid regime in South Africa. He had endured 27 years of vicious incarceration as a political prisoner. Mandela became President of his country and was adamant that the only way forward was in governing impartially. The film was adapted from John Carlin’s book, ‘Playing the Enemy’, while the title refers to William Ernest Henley’s 1875 poem which Mandela cherished within the tiny confines of his prison cell.

In 1995, South Africa hosted the Rugby World Cup which became the perfect opportunity for Mandela (Morgan Freeman) to unite the nation in support of their team, the Springboks. Matt Damon turns in a convincing performance as Francois Pienaar, the inspirational captain of the Springbok team. It was Morgan Freeman who introduced the script to director Clint Eastwood (his 29th film as director) in the hope that he would accept. Freeman had openly aired his opinion of Eastwood and regards him as one of the best directors in the business. Eastwood found the script fascinating and the project was soon set in motion. For Freeman, it was a dream to play Mandela, and the charismatic leader had previously stated that Freeman was the only actor who could possibly play him, should a project ever reach the screen. The film opens with the release of Mandela and shortly thereafter his elect to presidency. Rather then drawing heavily on the man’s ‘life story’ in the typical style of a biopic, Freeman and Eastwood chose to focus on the Rugby World Cup as the reconciliation point, and as a result, cleverly delivered an historical drama based around a sporting spectacle.

Freeman’s performance brings integrity and wisdom to the role of Mandela. It’s a role you feel he was naturally born to play and is simply quite stunning. For all his efforts, Freeman was rewarded with another Oscar nomination. Matt Damon, fully beefed up and under the guidance of Pienaar himself, is also quite outstanding, capturing the Afrikaner accent perfectly. His performance as Pienaar also gained Damon a worthy Oscar nomination for his outstanding supporting role. Sadly, both actors missed out in what was a particularly strong year at the academy awards. But as Eastwood as stated, he’s in the Filmmaking business, not the Oscar winning business.

Eastwood’s film succeeds in that it doesn’t rely upon Mandela’s political aspirations through politics itself. It is a simplistic portrayal of an arguably much heavy theme. However, Invictus unfolds gracefully and in line with Eastwood’s tried and tested theory of ‘less is more’. The film has a genuine feel good factor and an overall uplifting sense of grandeur.

And why shouldn’t it?

It is after all a triumphant story, a celebration, not just of a single man, but of an entire nation. Invictus leaves the viewer with a sense of inspiration and proves particularly poignant in light of South Africa’s current hosting of the 2010 Football World Cup. Yes, South Africa is a nation that still has its problems, but has nevertheless come a very long, in a considerably short period of time. Eastwood’s film is a remarkable achievement in that it portrays a passionate (if uncomplicated) account of a nation’s rebirth and a country’s long road to recovery. As with all of Eastwood’s projects, it remains an accomplished and compelling piece of story telling… and something of a rare commodity in filmmaking today.

The standard DVD release comes with a featurette, Matt Damon plays Rugby: Turning a Hollywood star into a Ruby Player and an Invictus music trailer.

The film is also released on Blu ray and contains:
Matt Damon Plays Rugby: Turning a Hollywood star into a rugby player
Invictus music trailer
Vision Courage and Honour - Clint Eastwood and the Power of a True Story (Picture in Picture): Clint Eastwood explains in-depth what attracted him to this story and how he fought to bring it to life on film.
Mandela Meets Morgan: Get to know Nelson Mandela as Morgan Freeman meets with him to prepare for the film
The Eastwood Factor: A Clint Eastwood documentary (22 min version)

Special Thanks to Bridget Groller of WARNER BROTHERS for supplying me with this DVD and for their continued support of The Clint Eastwood Archive

THE EASTWOOD FACTOR Extended version DVD Review

2010-06-16T00:06:00.025Z

Richard Schickel’s film The Eastwood Factor is a fascinating look at Clint Eastwood’s incredible career at Warner Brothers. The 88 minute film is an extension of Schickel’s mouth watering Featurette that was included with the mammoth, Clint Eastwood: 35 Films 35 Years at Warner Bros. which celebrated Eastwood's 35th anniversary with the studio. Eastwood’s friend and co star Morgan Freeman narrates throughout in his warm and charming style, while Eastwood informally welcomes us, the viewer, while tinkering away casually at the keys of a piano. It is obvious from the start that Eastwood is in relaxed mood, surrounded by friend’s, including Schickel, he is seemingly happy to talk at length and in an unhurried manner. Eastwood takes us back to his childhood and about his early influences such as Bogart and in particular, James Cagney and reminds us of his admiration for White Heat. It was dramas such as these that were produced at Warner Brothers in the 1930’s and 40’s and that Eastwood remembers watching fondly as a kid. A very brief look at his role in Maverick and Rawhide sets up the next stage of Eastwood’s career, before touching even more briefly, on his Sergio Leone ‘Dollar’ Trilogy (1964-1966). But in fairness, this is Eastwood at Warner Brothers, so the show really starts to bubble with the introduction of Dirty Harry (1971).

Eastwood mentions how there were several variations of the Dirty Harry script piled up for him to read, tailored for different stars and different premises. A hard enough task to read them all he recalls. But Eastwood was also smart enough to realise how the story was beginning to become lost with every subsequent read, and instead opted to choose the script that he first read and was first attracted to. It is an interesting glimpse at one of his philosophies, and one that Eastwood returns to later while discussing David Peoples’ script for his Oscar winning film Unforgiven (1992). Eastwood tells how he, ‘Started writing and fooling with things and changing things, and all of a sudden I realised I was wrecking it. So I called him (Peoples) back up and I said forget about that. I'm just going shoot it the way it is’. It’s a refreshing and humbling side of the star and one that is rarely realised by today’s equals, a simple admission that at times, even Eastwood can get it wrong. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) is touched upon, with Eastwood reminiscing fondly about his co-star Chief Dan George who couldn’t adapt to the art of memorising a script. He remembers how he would simply begin to tell stories, while Eastwood sat with him and encouraged the actor along.

There are some wonderful segments shot on the studio backlot, where Clint visits his costume house. Concealed within an old courthouse set on the lot, Warner’s hold every costume worn by Eastwood and his entire supporting cast. For this special occasion, entire outfits from Dirty Harry to Unforgiven are displayed in all there glory. But it is inside the courthouse where row upon row of historical delights can be found. An original shirt from Play Misty for Me (1971) catches Eastwood’s eye, which strangely enough was made at Universal, and suggests that this particular ‘Aladdin’s cave’ may even date back beyond his Warner years. Eastwood’s love of restoration and preservation are explored from The ‘Eastwood’ Soundstage at Warner Brothers which he saved and turned into a viable commodity through to personal projects such as his Mission Ranch. Memorable locations are revisited, such as New York Street which featured in one of Eastwood’s most personal films, Bird (1988) to the small cabin featured in the closing scene of Eastwood’s Oscar winning film, Million Dollar baby (2004).

For me, I was delighted to see many of Eastwood’s more personal films explored to a deeper degree and have tended perhaps, to me overlooked in other retrospective documentaries. The self destructive elements of Bird (1988), Honkytonk Man (1982) Tightrope (1984) and White Hunter Black Heart (1990) are characteristics that have always fascinated Eastwood and make for interesting viewing and insightful discussion. White Hunter Black Heart as Eastwood explains, is a film he enjoyed making. The story centres on a director (based on John Huston) whose obsession is to shoot an elephant instead of filming The African Queen. While its premise may not seem all that appealing to audiences, it is the concept of the character’s morality which become the focus of Eastwood’s fascination and deeper exploration. The film remains something of an undiscovered gem and a perfect example of Eastwood’s craft outside of the typical genre movie.

Lighter films such as Every which way but loose (1978) and the heart warming Bronco Billy (1980) are examined and used as examples of Eastwood’s instincts when choosing projects that were otherwise met with opposing opinion. While these characters may be described as ‘flawed’, Eastwood had no inhibitions regarding his screen image and that he was prepared to take chances along the way.

In discussing Unforgiven (1992), Eastwood acknowledges that the film will probably be his final western, the genre in which he first made his name. In his commentary, Freeman describes it as Eastwood’s ‘fully acknowledged masterpiece’, and sets the scene nicely for the last chapter. The Bridges of Madison County (1995) is a full on romance and perhaps the last thing that Eastwood’s audience were expecting. He explains how he encouraged Meryl Streep to come on board and was both equally happy with the results. Films including A Perfect World (1993) are discussed and Eastwood talks informally about how he didn’t intend to star in it all and that Costner wanted him to feature along side him. There are also some charming anecdotes regarding child actor T.J. Lowther and how he had to be caught on the first or second take at the most. So we had ‘no slates, none of that crap’. On Million Dollar Baby (2004) Eastwood informs us that everyone misinterpreted the stories content in its pre production stages and labelled it as a woman’s boxing movie, while he saw it as ‘a father-daughter love story and that's the way I approached telling it’. The Eastwood Factor is filled with such personal and delightful stories. Flags of our Fathers (2006), Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) and Eastwood’s ultimate redemption story, Gran Torino (2008) are all touched upon before concluding with Invictus (2009).

The Eastwood Factor is a highly informative piece of work. It avoids Eastwood the man and instead provides a rare look at a rare breed of filmmaker. Schickel steers clear of a typical biography approach and instead lets the actor’s body of work propel us on an intimate and insightful journey. The film’s 88 minutes encapsulates Eastwood’s integrity, charisma, passion and brilliance. For admirers of film documentaries in general, The Eastwood Factor serves as a compelling education. For Eastwood fans in particular, it’s an absolute essential for your collection!

Special Thanks to Bridget Groller of WARNER BROTHERS for supplying me with this DVD and for their continued support of The Clint Eastwood Archive

Eastwood Interviewed #07 Jazz Times September 2007

2010-06-09T23:17:00.005Z

Jazz Times September 2007 Mise En Swing

JazzTimes: You discovered jazz at a young age. What was the first music you listened to?

Clint Eastwood: When I was a kid growing up in Oakland, I started listening to a program called The Dixieland Jubilee. For 15 minutes every day, they’d play the Frisco Jazz Band, Lu Watters’ Yerba Buena Jazz Band, stuff like that. Then there was a jazz store out near El Cerrito, and I went out there and started listening to things and purchased a few records. Bop was starting to come in pretty good. So I went over and saw Dizzy Gillespie with a big band in San Francisco. I was drawn to the whole improvisational element. It was great fun and very appealing, and just outside the mainstream.

I used to go out to El Cerrito to Hambone Kelly’s and listen to Lu Watters’ Yerba Buena Jazz Band. You’d go to places where they’d let kids in. In those days they weren’t too strict. If you had the money to go to the bar you were okay. If they wouldn’t serve you beers you could drink colas. I liked blues too. There was a lot of blues being played around Oakland at that time—Ivory Joe Hunter, Joe Houston, Wynonie Harris—and I got wrapped up listening to that. I loved the humor of it. In those days jazz had a tremendous sense of humor too, with great acts like Louis Jordan. It seems to have lost that nowadays, though it seems to be regaining it in some areas now.

JT: You caught Dizzy early on. When did you first hear Bird?

I didn’t see Charlie Parker until Jazz at the Philharmonic came through Oakland in 1946. I was interested in Lester Young. I thought he was the cat’s rear end. So I went down there to listen to him with Coleman Hawkins and Flip Phillips, and this cat Charlie Parker came out. I thought, well, this is really something. I don’t fully understand what he’s doing, but I’m interested in finding out. I started buying records.

JT: You were doing a little playing yourself around this time, weren’t you?

My mother loved Fats Waller and he died about that time, so she went down and bought a bunch of 78s, those albums with four discs in them. She brought it back and said we’ve got to have this stuff, it’s classic. At first I wasn’t too sure about Fats Waller, but I loved his sense of humor, and after listening to him I realized he was a pretty good stride player. I’d listen to his things and I’d try to imitate him. I’d try to imitate Meade Lux Lewis and people of that era. Everybody was listening to either stride, bop or boogie.

JT: The trad scene was really strong in the Bay Area, but it seems like you were gravitating to the more modern players, who were starting to make a name for themselves.

I started going over to the Blackhawk, and started listening to Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond. I first saw Dave Brubeck on Lakeshore Avenue at the Burma Lounge in the mid-’40s. It was the Brubeck trio then and he was playing with Cal Tjader and Ron Crotty. Cal would play both vibes and drums. They couldn’t make it a quartet. They didn’t have the money, I guess.

JT: Did you have a chance to hang out with any of those players?

I was just a gangly kid sitting in the back. I didn’t get to know them, until years later. I would just go and listen to them.

JT: You were taking in a lot of movies at the time too. Were there any films with jazz themes that made an impression on you?

I liked movie scores but that was a different thing in those days. It was Max Steiner and Franz Waxman, who did big movie scores. I liked those, but they were a different kind of thing. I guess Elmer Bernstein and some of the guys came along with jazz scores, but that was later, in the 1950s. Sometimes jazz would be very effective on those scores if somebody knows when to turn it on and when to turn it off.

There’s been a lot of stuff over the years, and it would go in fads. Somebody would do a jazz score and it would be a hit, like Man With the Golden Arm, then people would do jazz scores for a while, and then back to something else. They’d do all country-western scores, pop scores, or rock-and-roll scores after Blackboard Jungle. Hollywood is a very faddish place. Whatever the fad is, I try to go against it.

JT: Music brought you to Hollywood long before acting ever did.

I’d travel to Los Angeles to hear bands that weren’t in the Bay Area. I’d go to Balboa Island and Rendezvous Ballroom and hear Stan Kenton back in the 1940s. Then I’d go up to the Beverly Cavern and listen to Kid Ory and then go down somewhere else and hear Charlie Parker. I’d go down to the Haig behind the Ambassador Hotel, and they’d always have great acts there. And then you’d go down to Central Avenue and there were a lot of good little crazy clubs you could fall into. There’s not much of that left. There’s a place in Santa Monica I went to the other night, the Temple Bar, where my son Kyle was playing. There used to be a place out there, the Loa, and the last person I heard out there was Stan Getz.

JT: That was Ray Brown’s club, right?

Yeah. I sat with Stan, and he had a gallon jar of water. His liver was obviously going, but he was still playing very well. I said, “Kyle, you gotta get down here and see this, he might not be around much longer; come and down and listen.” There are still some places out in the Valley, but not like what it used to be.

JT: You had discovered the Monterey area long before the festival started.

I was in the military in the early 1950s, and during the start of the Korean War there were a lot of people at Fort Ord who had been drafted: Andre Previn and Lennie Niehaus and all those guys. They’d have a lot of good music playing around the base, and we actually had a pretty good swing band there. With all these draftees you get all this top talent, who would have otherwise not joined the service. And later on I did go down to Monterey in 1958 and attended the first Monterey Jazz Festival, and I’ve been going to that for years.

JT: Is it just a coincidence that obsession and music are the themes of the first film you directed, Play Misty For Me.

No, It struck a chord with me. Originally the script was written as a late-night pop DJ in Los Angeles, but I took it up to where I lived in the Monterey area because I felt to make the character right, it should be a bigger fish in a smaller pond, so he would stand out more as a local celebrity. Then I made him a jazz-oriented DJ. I went and saw Jimmy Lyons and talked him into letting me shoot at the jazz festival to get some atmosphere in the picture. We recorded performances by Cannonball Adderley and Erroll Garner and various people.

JT: And “Misty” was the original song in the script?

Yeah, it’s what the writer had. Universal was the studio I was working for at the time, and they tried to talk me out of it. They thought it was too expensive a tune to buy, but I thought it was a good one, because it crossed over into pop and jazz and a lot of different things. It was in an era when music was turning more toward rock and roll, so this was a movie of a classic song that everybody would remember. I finally prevailed and used it and then brought Errol Garner back and recorded him for the end credits and turned it up a little bit.

Above: Clint at the 2004 Monterey Jazzfest, California

JT: Obviously that wasn’t your last musical venture in film.

That was the beginning. I guess the ultimate thing was later on when I did Bird and I got to use all jazz because that’s what the story was about, and it was terrific. It was great fun, anyway. But I love all kinds of music. I’ve appreciated jazz and classical, but I’ve even liked certain country artists. I remember going to see Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys up near Eugene, Ore., when I was stuck up there with nothing to do. I just went out thinking this might be interesting and I was taken by how good some of the musicians were.

JT: You seem to work in jazz though, even when you’re not the director. The Secret Service agent you play in In the Line of Fire comes home and puts on Kind of Blue to relax. Was that something you put in the script?

I don’t recall whether it was in the script, but I think we put it in, and everybody thought it was good to have. It might have been written in by the author. If the writer knew me, he probably put it in (laughs).

JT: Whether it’s your agenda or not, you’ve been able to draw some attention to overlooked artists, particularly with Bridges of Madison County. How important was music when you were conceptualizing that film?

I just thought that these two people, Kincaid and Francesca, were sort of outsiders. She was a war bride from Italy, and Kincaid was a loner who traveled around trying to get photos into National Geographic. So they’re sort of outsiders and they listened to stations that played outside stuff. I picked Johnny Hartman because he was a guy who never made it into the mainstream but was really good, and Irene Kral was a great singer who didn’t do that much because she didn’t live that long. But what she did do was quite interesting. She and Hartman never became pop stars.

Whenever you do a period picture, okay, it’s the 1940s, so you’re going to play Glenn Miller. Or you’re going to go with more of a swing band, Duke Ellington or Basie, maybe. But nobody looks beyond that. They don’t look into Stan Kenton, Boyd Raeburn or other bands of that era. I tried to use Artie Shaw in Flags of Our Fathers, people who were great musicians and very popular at that time, but have sort of been forgotten as generations have gone on. People call attention to the musicians who are the obvious two or three, but they don’t really understand that era. It was a tremendous era musically. It’s lasted a long time, a lot longer than contemporary music today will last.

JT: So how important would you say the music is in how you conceive of a film? Can it end up affecting the structure?

I can’t say there’s any great intellectual thought that goes into it. To me, it’s just you hear something and say, “That’s great; wouldn’t that go nice with this?” Like I did a picture years ago, Honkytonk Man, about a sort of country singer, but we stopped at a blues club and he plays a little blues. He stops in a whorehouse and plays a little whorehouse piano. Whatever suits the project. Sometimes it can add a lot of shades to a movie. You can add a lot of different colors by utilizing source music, not even with the score. I did a movie years ago, The Eiger Sanction, and I had John Williams scoring the film for me. I shot some of it in Switzerland and some in the U.S., and I said, “Whenever we’re doing the Swiss scenes why don’t we use classical music, and when we’re in America why don’t we use a jazz score?” And he loved that and he did a very nice score on it.

JT: You’ve been involved in several documentaries as an executive producer, but it was only with the PBS series The Blues that you decided to direct one yourself.

[Martin] Scorsese did The Blues series and brought in various directors and said, “Choose whatever you want to do.” I felt, I’ll specialize on the piano. I had known what some of the archival elements were [that] I wanted, from looking at some old movie shorts and various things, some when I was growing up. If you’re going to do Pete Johnson, Albert Ammons and Dorothy Donegan, there were some pieces here and there. Bruce Ricker helped me out, finding out where that stuff’s located. I got to interview Ray Charles, probably one of the last interviews he ever did. I knew he was ill, but we got a chance to reminisce, because we’re both the same age and had grown up listening to a lot of the same music. It was great. I was able to utilize Oscar Peterson and Brubeck and all these players, plus some old-time blues players, trying to get a feeling of what the history of the piano was on the American scene.

Press here for the complete Eastwood Interviewed Index

The Great Eiger Sanction DVD Dispute!

2010-06-02T19:41:00.006Z

A lot of people have contacted me over the last 6 months or so regarding the DVD release of The Eiger Sanction. I have also seen that it is a matter of discussion on other Eastwood related sites where the question has attempted to be addressed.
The dispute is over the film's frame ratio, and while people have addressed it, many have not explained it to any 'relevant' degree.
Firstly, The Eiger Sanction (Universal 1975) is a wonderful looking film. Sadly the real problem is that the large proportion of DVD releases (while in Widescreen 2.35:1), (Panavision), (Scope) or whatever you choose to call it, has remained simply 'Letterboxed' in a 4:3 full frame. Which presents a very big problem.

To explain further, most (all) films shot in this ratio today are subsequently released on DVD in Anamorphic form, or more commonly known as 16:9 enhanced. Enhanced for widescreen, 16:9 TVs. This means that the film image is actually squeezed, as real film would be in cinemas. In the cinema, it would be the projector lens that opens the film out to it Widescreen splendour. This same format is applied to the DVD and instead, the Widescreen setting on the TV does the exact same job. It 'opens the image' and preserves the clarity.

A Letterboxed Widescreen image contained in a full 4:3 frame, creates a very poor effect on Widescreen TV's. Basically you are left with 3 choices:

1) Preserving the image on TV by watching it in a 4:3 setting:
The downside of this option is that you will be watching the film with its Black bars not only at the top and bottom, but also at the sides of the TV screen, the actual image therefore is very small.

2) Selecting widescreen on your TV:
BUT, this will distort the image, you'll eliminate the Black side bars, but you will be squeezing the image down, and making the entire image look 'squashed', not a good option.

3) You can 'blow up' the image from 4:3.
Remember this way you are preserving the frame image, you can enlarge it to 14:9 or even 16:9. 16:9 will be the best way to view the DVD from the Letterboxed image, but this will now cause a secondary problem. Like a still photograph, whenever an image is enlarged, you are likely to expose more grain. So the film viewed this way is going to look pretty poor overall.

Of course, this could have been made so much easier if the DVD had been released properly in the correct format to begin with. This would solve all problems, unless of course, you still owned a standard 4:3 frame TV set..

For too long, The Eiger Sanction has been very badly neglected by the studio. Towards the end of 2009 another Eastwood Universal Box Set was produced in the U.K.

Looking into it closer, I found that The Eiger Sanction was finally re-mastered in its full 16:9 glory! Call me cautious, but I checked it out further on Amazon, read a few reviews..Yes, someone had even stated, 'at least the Eiger is in 16:9...' Fantastic.
Even my dearest said, I'll add it as a stocking filler for Christmas.
Wonderful! (See Below)

Clint Eastwood Collection - Play Misty For Me/Joe Kidd/Two Mules For Sister Sarah/Coogan's Bluff/The Beguiled/The Eiger Sanction/High Plains Drifter/Breezy

Come the morning of the 25th, the first thing I reached for was The Eiger Sanction, simply in order to admire its visual beauty. I take in the box details (under side of box)...Yes, there it is 16:9 enhanced!
I take out the case...Yes, there it is 16:9 enhanced!
I take out that little mirrored platter and lay it gently into the lap of my DVD player.
I press PLAY, and there before me....
is that bloody 4:3 Letterboxed version once again!
What the Hell?

Naturally at this point I was completely outraged, this was now quite unacceptable!
I looked the box further and noticed that The Beguiled is detailed as Full Screen Letterboxed!!! What? I put that disc in and it turns out to be 16:9 Anamorphic!?!?
I'm now quite lost, I'm silent in fact. I'm simply reduced to shaking my head slowly in a state of confusion?

I left it a month or so, so I could gather myself before I started to make contact with Universal. In between time, I researched this a little more and finally found out that the Universal France DVD was actually 16:9. I explained this all in a detailed email to Universal.
A month passed, nothing.
So I sent the same email, again and again. Until one morning I found an email waiting for me explaining that the U.S. version was actually 16:9. (I had explained that my player was multi regional). I wasn't entirely happy at first, because my research on the DVD had also informed me that the U.S version of the DVD was also just Letterboxed. But I remained patient. A week or so later I had a 'box set' arrive from Universal U.S.A American Icon Collection(See Below).

I am pleased to report (to my knowledge) this version of The Eiger Sanction and Universal's French release, are the only versions that I know of to contain the 16:9 version of the film. It took a long time, but I was adamant on this occasion. I had been fooled too many times, as I knew a lot of the fans had. There was no explanation offered by Universal, even after I had asked repeatedly. They simply didn't reply. If anything is to be learnt from this, I suppose it's to never give up and persist with your complaint. I just felt the time had come and that this particular consumer finally deserved a little more.

I hope this explanation has helped throw some light on a very long and often over looked point of concern.

TCEA