Word: eastwoods
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Hollywood on a Saturday morning. The world's biggest box-office star is pulling his forest green GMC Typhoon out of a parking lot when four guys with clipboards dash toward him through the traffic. What would Dirty Harry do? Never mind. Clint Eastwood is not Dirty Harry. He stops, signs a few autographs and produces his patented tight-lipped smile as his supplicants bob their heads and murmur profuse thanks...
...real life, Eastwood knows how to play the self-deprecating good guy. Just listen to him explain why they wanted him to sign blank slips of paper rather than personalized greetings to Uncle Cappy in Port Clyde. "It's a business," he says. "They trade them." He pauses, grins, then adds, "You get one Steve McQueen for four of mine...
...anymore, even though the inventory of McQueen autographs is not going to increase. This is Eastwood's Year of Being Taken Seriously. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences showered Eastwood and his latest film, ^ Unforgiven, with nine Oscar nominations, and the Directors Guild of America improved his odds for taking home a statue when it made him its choice for his work on Unforgiven. Whatever the results on Monday night, Eastwood had crossed the divide that separates a constellation from a star and a serious filmmaker from someone who merely makes movies...
...puzzle is, How did people miss the big transition? It's not that Eastwood has been toiling in obscurity, making little jewels about the plight of the sea otter in the Gulf of Alaska. This is a man who has been the biggest draw in movie theaters for more than 20 years. How big? The 21 movies he has made for Warner Bros. since 1971 have had box-office sales of $1.2 billion worldwide. (Harrison Ford and Arnold Schwarzenegger may one day be contenders.) The videotape sales of his movies have brought in an additional $139 million, and the sound...
Nevertheless, Eastwood almost fell into the trap successful actors sometimes set for themselves. For the better part of four decades, he created superficial, though memorable, characters. First there was Rowdy Yates, the carefree cowpoke in the television series Rawhide. Then came the Man with No Name, an avenging angel wearing spurs in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns. After that it was Dirty Harry, the police inspector who cleaned up the streets of San Francisco. Both his fans and his critics seemed to conspire to keep him in character: they continued to see him, for good or ill, as they first...