Scott
Foundas, Chief Film Critic June 2014
In 1962, the same year that a quartet of working-class New
Jersey youths called the Four Seasons shot to the top of the pop charts with
the irresistible doo-wop single “Sherry,” a solo artist from the West Coast
made a less auspicious chart appearance with an earnest cowboy ballad inspired
by his character on a popular TV Western. Entitled “Rowdy,” the song featured
its gravelly voiced performer lamenting life on the open range, set to a
gentle, galloping tempo. That singer was Clint Eastwood.
Surely, few listening to the radio back then would have
imagined that, 50-odd years later, the Four Seasons’ pint-sized frontman,
Frankie Valli, would still be selling out arenas with his vibrating falsetto.
Fewer still would have wagered that Eastwood, then in his fourth season as
Rowdy Yates on CBS’ “Rawhide,” would not only go on to become one of
Hollywood’s most iconic leading men, but one of its most lauded
director-producers, with four Oscars to his name and a feverish pace of work
that, at age 84, rivals the 80-year-old Valli’s own. So perhaps it isn’t as strange as it first seems that
Eastwood now finds himself at the helm of “Jersey Boys,” the long-gestating
screen version of the hit Broadway musical about Valli’s rocky road to
superstardom.
Indeed, while the recording of “Rowdy” didn’t exactly set
the airwaves ablaze or prompt Eastwood to quit his day job, it’s been one of
the defining contradictions of his career that his large hands are as comfortable
tickling the ivories as they are grasping the trigger of the “world’s most
powerful handgun.” Long before embarking on “Jersey Boys,” Eastwood directed
two other music-centric narrative films, the 1982 country-Western tearjerker
“Honkytonk Man” (in which he also sang and played guitar) and the acclaimed
Charlie Parker biopic “Bird” (1988), as well as a documentary, “Piano Blues,”
for the PBS series “Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues.” And starting with
“Mystic River” in 2003, he has composed the original scores for nearly all of
his films, frequently in partnership with his musician son, Kyle.
“My dad was a singer,” Eastwood recalls of his steelworker
father, Clinton Eastwood Sr. “He had a group during the Depression, and they’d
play parties and little clubs. When I was a kid, I played piano. I started
imitating records that were popular at the time.” By the time he was a
teenager, Eastwood Jr. was playing at various Bay Area watering holes, where he
discovered that carrying a tune was a handy shortcut to free pizza and beer —
and not a bad way to meet girls, either.
The script for “Jersey Boys” showed up on the doorstep of
Eastwood’s Malpaso Prods. during an atypical lull: a three-year stretch,
following 2011’s “J. Edgar,” in which the filmmaker was absent from the
director’s chair (his longest gap between directing projects since 1980).
Not that he was taking it easy, exactly: He produced and
starred alongside Amy Adams and Justin Timberlake in the 2012 baseball drama
“Trouble With the Curve,” directed by his longtime producing partner, Rob
Lorenz; and made a controversial appearance at that year’s Republican National
Convention that struck many as a strange kind of performance art piece, when he
recited an in-absentia complaint letter to President Obama, who was represented
onstage by an empty chair.
“Yeah, I was surprised,” Eastwood says in his typically
unflappable way about the media scrutiny that followed his speech. Waiting in
the wings at the Tampa Convention Center, he says he began to bristle at the
parade of other speakers showering GOP nominee Mitt Romney with sound-alike bon
mots. “I thought, ‘I’ve got to come up with something different.’ So I just
started working on it backstage. Then they were calling my name, and I said,
‘Just give me a chair.’ Some people loved it.”
Eastwood also had spent two years prepping a remake of “A
Star Is Born,” a project that became mired in endless delays and false starts.
So he was eager to get back behind the camera when a call came from
Oscar-winning producer Graham King, who had won the “Jersey Boys” film rights
in a competitive 2010 bidding war, and was just as keen to finally get into
production.
Having first set “Jersey Boys” up at Sony, King had moved
the project to Warner Bros. in 2012, and soon attached Jon Favreau to direct.
Filming was set to begin in January 2013 for a Christmas release, but mere
weeks after announcing the project, and with casting under way, Warners put
“Jersey Boys” into turnaround (allegedly over budgetary disputes and concerns
about the film’s foreign box office appeal) and King was back to square one.
That’s when Eastwood’s phone rang.
“Graham King said, ‘We’d like you to do ‘Jersey Boys,’ ” and
I said, ‘OK, I’ll look at it.’ They sent over a script — it was OK, by a good
writer, John Logan, but it was missing a lot of things, and I said we’d need to
sit down and do a rewrite.”
But Eastwood was compelled by Valli’s underdog rise from a
kid Newark’s mean streets to pop icon, and he asked Warner’s then-movie chief,
Jeff Robinov, to reconsider the picture. After all, Eastwood says as though it
were perfectly obvious, “Where else do you get a project that’s been
road-tested for a decade?”
It’s early May, and with “Jersey Boys” now in the can,
Eastwood is already several weeks into directing his 34th movie, the military
drama “American Sniper,” on a sprawling Santa Clarita ranch that has been dressed
to resemble a Fallujah military base. Inside the temporary, barracks-like
structure that serves as the set cafeteria, he stands in the lunch queue with
the rest of the cast and crew, dressed in light-green golf shirt, khaki pants
and black sneakers, sporting a beard he grew during the film’s location shoot
in Morocco. He takes a seat at one of the long picnic tables, and makes
leisurely stabs at a plate of fresh salmon, broccoli and fruit (he gave up
eating red meat decades ago).
He recalls traveling to Las Vegas to see a performance of
“Jersey Boys,” and being surprised to find that the show differed considerably
from Logan’s script — which, among other things, scrapped the play’s multiple
narrators in favor of a single p.o.v. Upon his return, he was even more
surprised to learn that there was an earlier version of the “Jersey Boys”
screenplay, written by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, the authors of the
original Broadway book.
Only in Hollywood do they take a play that’s run for nine
years on Broadway, six years in London, and five years in San Francisco, then
go out and hire another writer,” marvels Eastwood, who’s nearly as famous for
trusting writers’ first drafts as he is actors’ first takes. Back in 1971, when
he teamed with director Don Siegel for the original “Dirty Harry,” the script
had been rewritten so many times that the studio copy room had run out of
shades of colored paper to differentiate the revisions. But when Eastwood and
Siegel looked back at the original draft by the team of Harry Julian and Rita
M. Fink, they deemed it superior to anything that had come after, and proceeded
to put that version before the cameras.
“He’s never been one to bog himself down with development,”
notes Lorenz, who joined Malpaso as a second a.d. on “The Bridges of Madison
County” (1995), and earned his first full producing credit on “Mystic River.”
“If something comes in, and it’s well written and it strikes him, then we do
it.”
Armed with the Brickman-Elise script and a pared-back
budget, Eastwood quickly moved into production on “Jersey Boys” last summer.
Though he admits the studio “would have liked us to come up with a few names”
for the cast, he insisted on cherry-picking his Four Seasons from among theater
actors who had previously played the roles onstage, including John Lloyd Young,
who won a Tony as Valli in the original Broadway production. “You’ve got people
who’ve done 1,200 performances; how much better can you know a character?” says
Eastwood.
Yet for all his fidelity to the Broadway source, the
director has made a “Jersey Boys” movie that ultimately differs from the stage
version in several key respects. It’s an altogether moodier, more real, edgier
piece of work, more “Bird” than “Bye Bye Birdie,” giving equal weight to the
personal tragedies of Valli and his bandmates — busted-up marriages, estranged
children, embezzlement scams and dangerous entanglements with the Jersey mob —
as to their professional triumphs. Onstage, misfortune was frequently softened
by the show’s overarching uptempo mood. But onscreen, Eastwood hits as many blue
notes as four-part harmonies.
“It was so interesting to sit there and recognize almost
every single line of dialogue from the stage production, and yet experience
something that couldn’t be more different,” says Young, who saw the completed
version of the film after wrapping a return engagement as Valli in the London
West End production of the show. “Clint definitely understands melancholy. That
sort of darkness, which is authentic to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’
beginnings, is much more on display in this film than it is in that fast-paced
treadmill of a slick Broadway show.”
By the time “Jersey Boys” arrives in theaters June 20,
Eastwood already will have wrapped shooting on “American Sniper,” which doesn’t
yet have a release date, but could well end up on screens in time for this year’s
Oscars. Based on the bestselling autobiography of U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Kyle,
“Sniper” stars Bradley Cooper as the author, an expert marksman who claimed to
have killed more than 250 enemy combatants during four tours of duty in Iraq,
and who was himself fatally shot by a fellow PTSD-afflicted vet on a Texas gun
range in 2013. Like “The Bridges of Madison County” and “Flags of Our Fathers”
before it, the project was originally set to be directed by Steven Spielberg.
When Spielberg left the project last summer, Cooper and Warner Bros. production
prexy Greg Silverman asked Eastwood if he’d step in.
“I called Spielberg and said, ‘Steven, I’m always doing your
leftovers! Why’d you bail out of this thing?’ ” Eastwood says with a chuckle.
“Then he came over one day and we talked for a couple of hours about it.”
“Sniper” is the 28th film Eastwood has directed for Warner
Bros., a loyalty between filmmaker and studio not seen since the golden age of
the studio system. (John Ford, the director to whom Eastwood is perhaps most
often compared, did 24 films for Fox.) Those movies run the gamut from populist
crowd-pleasers (“Space Cowboys,” “Gran Torino”) to personal passion projects
(“Bird,” “White Hunter Black Heart”), prestige literary adaptations (“Madison
County,” “Mystic River”), politically tinged biopics (“Invictus,” “J. Edgar”)
and Eastwood’s two best picture Oscar winners: “Unforgiven” and “Million Dollar
Baby.” And while the relationship hasn’t been without its bumps — Warners
initially passed on both “Mystic” and “Million,” eventually greenlighting them
only after Eastwood brought on a co-financier — it’s an alliance both director
and studio are eager to continue.
“Clint is one of the touchstones of Warner Bros.,” says
Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara, who praises Eastwood’s work ethic and fiscal
responsibility. “At this point, it’s a real relationship that’s built on a
number of different things; it stops being about dollars and cents.”
Still, it can’t hurt that the two biggest worldwide grossers
of Eastwood’s career, “Million Dollar Baby” ($217 million) and “Gran Torino”
($270 million), were both made within the past 10 years, when their director
and star was well past Social Security age.
Eastwood describes “Sniper” (in which he does not star) as a
movie about the irony of war, a theme he has previously explored in films such
as “Heartbreak Ridge” (about the U.S. invasion of Grenada) and his 2006 Iwo
Jima diptych.
Cooper, for one, is enjoying the experience of working with
the famously laidback director. “I’m just sort of pinching myself every day
that I’m on set with him,” he says. “He’s an actor himself, and you can just
tell that he thinks in those terms. It’s a very easy set, and he’s very
collaborative.”
For a war picture with lots of heavy artillery, the mood on
the “Sniper” set — as on all Eastwood’s sets — is one of pervasive quiet and
calm. He rarely raises his voice above a whisper, and his crew communicates via
secret-service style earpieces rather than by squawking walkie-talkies. No one
ever yells anything, least of all “Action!” or “Cut!” Rather, Eastwood will
roll camera and then prompt the actors with a gentle “OK, whenever you feel
like it.” At the end of a scene, an equally soft-spoken “Good” or “Stop”
suffices.
“A lot of sets are loud and noisy, people bang around, and
you just have to learn how to incorporate that into your work, but it’s hard,”
says Laura Linney, who starred in Eastwood’s “Absolute Power” (1997) and
“Mystic River.” “So it’s a huge advantage for an actor to have a quiet set, and
a huge relief.”
Some other truisms of making a movie with Eastwood: He
typically does no more than two takes of any given shot — sometimes even
shooting, then using, what actors think is a mere rehearsal; he works with the
same crew time and again; is usually ahead of schedule and under budget; call
time is rarely before sunrise; and everyone gets home by dinner.
“I always think of it as being the jazz man in him,” says
Sean Penn, who won the actor Oscar for “Mystic River,” one of five thesps
Eastwood has directed to Academy Award-winning performances. “The jazz man
wants all the players onstage, and to see what happens the first time when
everyone plays off each other. You might want to go back and ask for another
take of your chord or your instrument, but it’s never going to be as good as it
is at large. In other words, the integrated thing is what he’s after.
“Clint,” he adds, “has the least insecurities of anybody
that I’ve ever worked with.”
Morgan Freeman, who won a supporting actor Oscar for
“Million Dollar Baby,” echoes that appreciation. “He doesn’t push actors
around,” he says. “He just directs the movie. He’s very quick, very decisive,
and I respond to that.”
Lorenz says Eastwood lets his instincts guide him. “Too
often there’s pressure, with all the money movies cost nowadays, to make sure
you’ve thought of every possible combination, and then you start to
second-guess yourself and things fall apart. But he moves through things
quickly and keeps that momentum up, and instead of working from an intellectual
place, you’re working from a more artistic place.”
After lunch, while the crew sets up a low-angle shot of a
sniper on a Fallujah rooftop, Eastwood reminisces about his first movie
appearance, the 1955 “Creature From the Black Lagoon” sequel “Revenge of the
Creature.” He talks about the old Mitchell movie cameras that were used to
shoot it, so much bulkier and more cumbersome than the HD technology that he
used on “Sniper” and “Jersey Boys.” Then he turns to consult with his
visual-effects supervisor, Michael Owens, to see if they need to wait for
nightfall to get
the roof shot, or if the sky can be darkened digitally in
post. It’s a small but telling reminder of how nimbly Eastwood has managed to
change with the times while in other respects has remained timeless.
“I don’t want to repeat what I did in the last decade or the
decade before that,” says Eastwood, who has repeatedly rebuffed offers to bring
Inspector Harry Callahan out of retirement. Asked if he’s already thinking
about his next project, he notes, “Two pictures in one year is enough. Right
now, I don’t want to hear about any great scripts, and I don’t want to read any
scripts. Next year, we’ll see where life is.”
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