American Rebel (32 page)
Authors: Marc Eliot
Nonetheless, Warner had problems getting a “name” interested to star in
Heartbreak Ridge
, a problem that often arose when a project was purchased without a star already attached; the reasons usually quickly became apparent. In the case of
Heartbreak Ridge
, very few actors wanted to play age against youth, presenting their own aging
facade against a bunch of scene-stealing newcomers. Clint, however, was not afraid to age on-screen and did not make conventional love stories; he was looking for just such a script, and as always one by a writer with little or no clout to challenge him.
After a couple of rewrites with specific verbal suggestions from Clint, an exasperated Carabatsos begged off any further work on
Heartbreak Ridge
, claiming other commitments. Clint promptly enlisted Dennis Hackin, who had written
Bronco Billy
, to punch up the action and the comedy. Still not satisfied, Clint next brought in Joseph Stinson, who had written
Sudden Impact
. Finally Clint and Megan Rose laid out pages from all the versions and cobbled together something they felt was at least filmable. Clint then brought back Hackin and Stinson and asked them to work on the script together. That marked the end of Rose’s involvement with Clint, and the start of an ongoing dispute over who was responsible for the final shooting version.
*
One reason the script may have been so hard to tailor to Clint’s satisfaction was that few, if any, of the writers understood how personal, rather than genre-driven, the film actually was. Clint’s days as a leading man were all but over, and even the facade of his long-standing relationship with Sondra Locke was gone. According to Clint:
Heartbreak Ridge
[is about] what warriors do when they haven’t got a war. That’s always interested me. And I thought, here’s a character, let’s see how he interacts with people, especially with women. It was an interesting story, also about a solider who hasn’t ever done anything but fight wars, and he discovers that he’s reached the end of his career, and he has nothing to look back on and nothing at all he can concentrate on now.
In its final form, an aging drill sergeant has separated from his wife and fears his time is just about up. He won the Medal of Honor at the battle of Heartbreak Ridge during the Korean War but has now been reduced to training new recruits, transforming boys still wet behind the ears into combat-ready Marines (for the invasion of Granada that took place in 1983). If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because a similar story had been made in 1982 by Taylor Hackford,
An Officer and a Gentleman
, that starred Richard Gere as a punk runaway who is turned into a “real man” by his discovery of true love (via Debra Winger) and a tough-guy gunnery sergeant played by Louis Gossett Jr. It was Gere’s picture, but Gossett Jr. took home a Best Supporting Oscar for his performance.
*
Perhaps ego, and Clint’s long-simmering anger at the Academy for failing to recognize his achievements, were what really attracted him to a role very close to the one that had brought the elusive statuette to Gossett.
Besides the heavily doctored script, and Clint’s clenched-teeth style of acting that made him seem now more doddering than daring, the production ran into trouble with the U.S. Defense Department. They had at first agreed to cooperate with the film but withdrew after seeing the final cut because of the excessive use of profanity and unfair combat tactics.
(An Officer and a Gentleman’s
below-the-belt training methods were unhampered by the military, as it was made without their cooperation.) One thing the DOD most objected to was Sergeant Highway (Clint) pumping an extra bullet into the back of an enemy soldier who had already been shot. Another was the fact that the Marines, in the real-life invasion, got to Grenada via Beirut, which
Clint eliminated from the film. Soon enough Clint grew tired of the military’s constant bickering. When hey pointed out that the army, not the Marines, had rescued the medical students in Grenada, he drew the line. He actually threatened to call Ronald Reagan and have him intervene if the military did not get off his back, and most of the military’s requests were quietly agreed to.
*
When the film finally did open, for the 1986 holiday season, it did surprisingly well, although more than one critic questioned that someone of Clint’s age (which he had done nothing to disguise) would be involved in the film’s action sequences.
Heartbreak Ridge
wound up doing almost as well as
Tightrope
, grossing over $70 million in its initial domestic release and double that overseas, where no one cared how old Clint looked or how accurate the film’s depiction of the military. All foreign audiences wanted was to see their hero, Clint Eastwood, in action, and that’s what they got.
Warner mounted a heavy and expensive campaign to promote
Heartbreak Ridge
for Oscar consideration, but all the heat that year went to Oliver Stone’s
Platoon:
it won four Oscars, including one for Stone as Best Director and one for Best Picture, and it was nominated for four more.
Heartbreak Ridge
managed only one nomination, for Best Sound, which it lost to
Platoon
.
According to sources, Clint was angered all over again by what he considered to be this latest snubbing by the Academy and looked for someone besides himself to blame. He pointed his finger indirectly at the Department of Defense and directly at Fritz Manes, whose job as executive producer, Clint insisted, was to “handle” these kinds of situations. Manes had been on the outs with Clint since he had enthusiastically supported Locke and her
Ratboy
film. After that debacle everyone at Malpaso thought Manes, one of Clint’s oldest and closest friends and one of his most trusted employees, became a scapegoat for everything that had gone wrong with
Heartbreak Ridge
.
Locke says that as her relationship with Clint broke down, so did Manes’s:
I had known Fritz as long as I had known Clint, and Fritz and Clint had been close friends since junior high days; it seemed a shame for things to deteriorate [between them] that way. Clint only replied, “Stay out of this. This has nothing to do with you! I don’t like the way he’s running my company.
He’s
not Malpaso. I am, nobody else.”
Clint then began a campaign of collecting petty details to discredit Fritz … and then he learned that Fritz had let Judi, Clint’s own secretary, occasionally use the company gas credit card, and had let the accountant, Mike Maurer, and his wife make occasional long-distance phone calls that got charged to the company …
Clint did not actually confront Fritz. He played cat and mouse. Once Fritz was safely fired, Clint … wanted Fritz’s car phone returned; he didn’t care that it was the old-fashioned kind that had been bolted down, he wanted it … He even concocted a scheme in which he wanted [my husband] to break into Fritz’s home and make a sample of the type on Fritz’s typewriter so that he could see if it matched that on the anonymous hate-filled letters he’d been receiving for several years.
Not long after
Heartbreak Ridge
failed to make a dent with Oscar, the long and fruitful professional and personal relationship between Fritz Manes and Clint came to a permanent end.
*
The award was made by Pierre Viot, the former boss of the National Cinema Center and newly appointed president of the Cannes Film Festival, instead of Culture Minister Jack Lang, who excused himself due to a prior commitment. It was widely believed in France that Lang, who was a Socialist, did not want to honor an American star whose films frequently promoted a right-wing-leaning law-and-order view of society. In support of Clint were Terry Semel, Richard Fox (newly appointed head of WB International), and Steve Ross of Warner Bros. Their show of support for their star further affirmed that their past troubles were, at least for the time being, set aside.
*
The French version of British knighthood.
*
“For the past fifteen years, Clint Eastwood has been the most popular film star in the world!”
*
Jane Agee Brolin died in a car accident in 1995.
*
The ordinance itself had actually been partially reversed the previous November. It had required the new addition be set back farther from the street, with less exterior glass and mostly wooden exterior. Clint rejected that offer, and even after his full tenure as mayor, the problem went unresolved until the mid-1990s, when it was finally built, mostly to the specs of the original compromised plans, “only uglier,” as one close to the project said.
†
Heroes
was a vehicle for Henry Winkler, best known as “Fonzie” from television’s
Happy Days
.
*
The Rose affair began and ended in typical Clint fashion: it was heat-fueled, ran its course, and ended rather coldly, when Clint wanted it to end. When
Unforgiven
was finally made, nearly a decade later, Rose received no on-screen credit or compensation (no co-producer or finder’s fee). Meanwhile, she had moved on, left Warner Bros. after a brief but serious illness, then found a western vehicle for TV actor Tom Selleck, who was looking to move to the big screen. The script she found was
Quigley Down Under
(1990, Simon Wincer). She received co-producer credit. After
Unforgiven
was nominated for Best Picture, she hired a lawyer and asked for both the finder’s fee and the production credit. To avoid the lawsuit, Clint offered her instead $10,000 to serve as story editor on his next film
(A Perfect World)
. On March 8, 1993, the story hit the gossip pages, beginning with the
New York Post’s
Page Six, and made its way through the snake-tunnel of gossip-and-whisper rags. Perhaps feeling the damage was done, Clint withdrew his offer. Eventually, Rose dropped her lawsuit and left Clint’s life and world for good. Rose’s contribution to the final script has been publicly questioned by the film’s executive producer, Fritz Manes. In the end, Carabatsos received sole screen credit, after objecting to Clint’s wanting to give Stinson a co-writer credit. The dispute went to SWG arbitration, which Carabatsos won. After the film opened, Clint continually referred to the contributions of Stinson, prompting an SWG official to advise Clint to refrain from any further public comments on the issue or face sanctions from the guild.
*
Gere wasn’t nominated. Winger was, for Best Actress, but lost to Meryl Streep in Alan J. Pakula’s
Sophie’s Choice
.
*
Some thought that Clint’s noticeably lower and rougher voice in the film was his homage/impersonation of Ronald Reagan. Clint denied it, claiming it was actually his impression of an uncle who had damaged his vocal cords and had to talk that way.
Clint, with Liam Neeson in the fifth and final Dirty Harry film
, The Dead Pool
(1988), hangs up his Magnum for good
.
I went to a jazz concert one time at the Oakland Philharmonic. This guy comes out in a pinstripe suit, standing off to one side, the joint is jumping, and then all of a sudden he steps up and starts playing and everything is doubled up. I’m thinking, “How the hell does he do that?” … It was a great acting lesson—the amount of confidence [Parker] exuded. I’ve never seen an artist, an actor, a painter, any artist have that kind of confidence
.
—Clint Eastwood
T
hat March, after the 1987 Academy Awards ceremonies, Clint reimmersed himself in the business of running Carmel. One of his first chores was to oversee an ongoing conflict over Carmel’s Mission Ranch, a large wetland just south of the city limit that had been purchased by a private consortium that wanted to develop it into a modern housing project, with expensive town houses and maybe even a self-contained modern mall with ample parking facilities. The town council was opposed to the development, preferring to keep the land preserved in the image of Carmel, a beautiful, natural seaside village. To prevent the development from advancing any further, the city offered $3.75 million for the land, about half of what the owners said they would take to settle. The situation remained deadlocked until Clint decided to put up $5.5 million of his own money to help Carmel acquire the land. Having completed the sale, he took it out of the hands of any and all developers and vowed to keep it as it was. The elders of the township hailed the move, and the national press as well looked upon it favorably.
With that victory under his belt, Clint dove deeper into Carmel’s municipal activities. He actively pursued projects meant to improve pedestrian access to beaches, adding public toilets, walking trails, and also a new library for the town. He began writing a column in the local paper, the
Pine Cone
, his personal forum to discuss and respond to issues of the day, especially those that generated the most mail to his office. And he even put a bit of the old-style, back-door politics of vengeance into play when he made it difficult for former councilman David Maradei to get a variance to put a gable on his roof. Maradei had been one of the people who had made it difficult for Clint to build his Hog’s Breath Inn annex. Even though Clint officially abstained from voting on the issue, he made sure everyone knew he did not support it.
