Clint Eastwood (82 page)

It is often painfully funny to watch disused wheels start to turn as Highway pours the oil of rueful memory into his brainpan, to see him scanning women’s magazines (he’s like an adolescent sneaking a peek at
Penthouse)
in order to learn a little new male lingo to try out on Aggie
(“Did we mutually nurture one another?”), trying to relate to Private Stitch Jones (Mario Van Peebles), a street-smart black kid, something of an anarchist, who talks trash to a rap beat.

Stitch is, at heart, a good kid, but like the rest of Highway’s troops, like the rest of America these days, he has lost touch with the military virtues. So besides confronting his own failures as a traditional family man Highway must now confront his surrogate family’s failure to provide him the camaraderie, yes, the “nurture,” he had always thought he could count on it to provide. No wonder the man drinks and swears and brawls.

And no wonder Clint Eastwood decided to do this movie on the basis of “about fifteen good pages” in James Carabatsos’s first-draft screenplay (despite his sole credit, the result of a Writers Guild arbitration, most of the final version was, Clint says, by Joe Stinson). Highway is, if you will, Harry Callahan at the end of his tether, another individualist who has paradoxically sold his soul to an organization, and paid a price for it. The difference is that Highway’s organization, being much more rigidly hierarchical, has caused him to repress more anger. And that means his head of steam has a lot more heat and pressure in it. Unlike Harry, this man is often parodically stupefied by outrage.

Clint loved the role. When he costarred in
Unforgiven
with Gene Hackman, the latter told him he thought Highway was his best work. Here and there were reviewers who agreed with him. “His most complex, fully dimensional character,” Dave Kehr wrote in the Chicago
Tribune
. Vincent Canby called his performance “the richest he’s ever given” and praised his “essential humor … now overt.” He also said: “
At 56, Mr. Eastwood doesn’t look especially young, but neither does he look old. Nor does he look preserved, or perhaps surgically improved, like some of his contemporaries. He looks as if he’s absorbed the years and turned them into guts and grit.”

If Canby came late to a recognition of Clint’s humor, he perceptively recognized the quality that would be the most important factor in perpetuating his career: the decision not to hide his age but to play it gracefully. His practical, director’s judgment is that actors who resort to cosmetic surgery or diffusion filters just make the problem worse by calling attention to it in a way the camera, and thus the audience, can’t help but notice.

After his electoral efforts it was a relief for Clint to be among people with whom he did not have to watch his language, among whom he was the tested professional. His on-screen antagonist Marsha Mason (giving one of her best performances) had worried about Clint’s habit of not rehearsing much; she was an actress who liked to polish things in
private. But on her first day he greeted her with the reassuring promise that they wouldn’t shoot until she felt fully rehearsed and ready. Later, she had to dance with him in a party scene, when he was duded out in stiff dress blues and had to direct all the movement and act at the same time. Jack Green was using a steadicam and moving around them as they danced, and Mason couldn’t figure out exactly how Clint knew where to lead her, since they had choreographed nothing. Oh, he said casually, “
I was catching the light as it played across your face.”

With Van Peebles, young enough to be his son, he was much more the mentor. Interviewed a few years later, when he was well along in his own directing career, Van Peebles quoted as his credo some advice he got from Clint on this picture: “
Whip me, beat me, but don’t bore me.” All kinds of bonding took place on this picture—but not with military officialdom.

The title refers to the bloody Korean War engagement in which Highway is supposed to have won his Medal of Honor. It had been primarily an army battle, and Clint had originally sought its cooperation in filming. When the army objected to the script, he turned to the marines, who permitted the company to shoot first at Camp Pendleton, then at Vieques, a base in Puerto Rico, where they were able to join marine maneuvers, doubling them for the Grenada invasion that rather awkwardly brings the film to a climax.

But as the movie went into prerelease screenings objections arose on every hand. Army veterans insisted it would have been historically impossible for a marine to serve, let alone win a medal, at Heartbreak Ridge. Then the marines expressed pique with Fritz Manes, who had for some strange reason disported himself on location in a marine major’s uniform, an affair that, along with some other curious incidents, led to his departure from Malpaso. Then marine officialdom, hearing the film’s rough dialogue coming at them from the screen, beat a strategic retreat. They primly declared that it did not accurately represent current training procedures and compared it unfavorably to
Top Gun
, which had done wonders for navy recruiting. They demanded that acknowledgment of corps cooperation in filming be removed from the credits and that premieres scheduled to benefit marine relief organizations be canceled.

This controversy, as well as a televised “All Star Party for Clint Eastwood,” a variety show-cum-tribute, assured a successful launch for the film, which grossed solidly. With the exceptions noted, however, it fared poorly with the critics, who expressed general dismay at its raucousness. One or two found some of the dialogue excessively homophobic, which is true; there are times when realism must yield to social realities.
Many objected to its triumphant conclusion, the tin-pot invasion of Grenada.

Clint does not entirely disagree. “It was a stupid invasion,” Clint now says, “kind of a Mickey Mouse operation.” He had not suddenly turned cold warrior, but he felt he had to, as he puts it, “tour the group,” that is, put them in some life-and-death situation where their sergeant’s hard work would pay off, and this was an available option. He would have been glad to ironize it—it might have completed Highway’s cycle of disillusion very forcefully—but he was shooting with Marine Corps cooperation, and marines tend not to be ironic about such matters. Moreover, this was at heart a comedy requiring an upbeat ending—a band playing, flags flying, Marsha Mason misty-eyed as the troops come home. Clint notes dryly that at least he kept the welcoming crowd “sparse,” and not exactly wild with patriotic fervor.

“I’d have done it even if the script was no good,” Clint says of
Bird
. It had been out there for years, Joel Oliansky’s screenplay about the short life, troubled times and soaring gifts of Charlie Parker. Clint had heard about it, and vaguely resented the fact that someone else was going to tell the life of his musical idol. Producer Ray Stark controlled the property, which had been developed with Richard Pryor in mind: one dangerous master of the improvisational riff, one famously self-destructive genius, one notorious addict of controlled substances, playing another.

But after the freebasing accident of 1980, in which Pryor suffered third-degree burns over half his body, both his spirit and his career had been sadly tamed. By the mideighties the project was languishing. So was another one,
Revenge
, an adaptation of a Jim Harrison novel that Clint had passed on, and Warner Bros. had on its shelf. Learning that Stark was sniffing around this tale of a husband seeking retribution against his wife and her lover who had tried to kill him, he proposed a simple swap for the Oliansky script, which by this time he had read (he swiped a copy from Lenny Hirshan’s office) and liked.

This deal was completed shortly before Clint began his run for public office. But shooting did not begin until two years later, delayed by his political duties and his quest for absolute musical authenticity. “
A jazz movie had never been made by someone who really liked jazz,” Clint said later. He particularly recalled
Young Man with a Horn
, the movie based loosely on the life of Bix Beiderbecke, which he had seen in 1950: “The breathing was off, the dubbing was terrible, and the plot line—I thought, oh God, what have they done, and I went out of the theatre
dejected.” He was determined that
Bird
would avoid such mistakes and somehow re-create the improvisational excitement of a live performance as no fictional film ever had.

As is always the case in films of this kind, the source of music for the many scenes of Parker working in jazz clubs or in studios had to be recorded before shooting, so that the mimed playing of the actors could be synchronized accurately with the sound track. Moreover, Clint did not want to hire a contemporary alto player to imitate Parker; he wanted to find a way to use Bird’s original recordings in the film. But most of the music Parker recorded in studios, where the sound quality was passable, was very short—useless for the live-performance sequences, where Parker typically played longer pieces. Some of this material had been recorded, but on inferior equipment. It would be embarrassing emanating from a modern theatrical sound system.

The solution was to track down these fugitive tapes and reprocess them. Clint led the pursuit of material (some of which was found just a couple of miles from the studio); Lennie Niehaus, his old friend from Fort Ord, who was now virtually his composer in residence, supervised the reconstruction, which required many months of sixteen- and eighteen-hour days. He and his technical crew electronically eliminated from the old tapes the frequencies carrying the other instruments, leaving Parker’s work standing alone. He then brought in the best available sidemen to reproduce the work of the other musicians, and when no other alternative was available, Charles McPherson, a San Diego-based sax man, to stand in for Bird. The resultant mix was recorded on state-of-the-art equipment. While this work was proceeding, Niehaus, who had begun his musical career as an alto saxophonist, had to teach the young actor engaged to impersonate Bird, Forest Whitaker, to play well enough to look plausible on the bandstand.

Fortunately, Whitaker required only minimum makeup to pass for Bird. More important, he had some musical training—he had studied voice in college—and was by nature a rather studious sort. He read up on Parker, played his records day and night, studied the scraps of film in which he appeared, flew to Paris to talk with Chan Parker, his fourth and last wife, on whose unpublished memoir,
Life in A-Flat
, Oliansky’s script was largely based. At the same time, Clint consulted with many musicians who had worked with Parker, drawing particularly on the memories of Red Rodney, the white trumpet player whose role in the film is probably somewhat larger than it was in Parker’s life, since writer and director wanted to provide white audiences with a surrogate to help draw them into this essentially black world.

The issue for everyone was the same: sustaining period authenticity
while retaining dramatic values. Cinematographer Jack Green recalls an early meeting where Clint told him that he wanted the movie lit as if it were being shot in black and white. Green, who had also been a youthful jazz fan, flashed on “
these beautiful black-and-white photographs, very hard, very contrasty,” that had been a feature of
Downbeat
and the other jazz publications of the fifties, and shot some tests in this manner. Clint immediately recognized their inspiration, and according to the cameraman, the film became “easy and simple” for him precisely because “the whole lighting concept was just absolutely ironclad.”

Despite an offer from Oliansky to do some rewrites on what he considered to be a first-draft screenplay, Clint went with what he had, though he cut about forty pages from a script that still required close to three hours to realize on-screen. He began shooting in October 1987, working with a kind of contented conviction, depicting “the music of the forties and fifties or the feeling of a club the way it was.”

For this, he was able to draw on memory. The decor of each jazz joint might be unique, but the smoke and funk of these rooms was universal, he thought. In one important respect he could improve on memory. When he was a kid he could not afford a trip to New York’s West Fifty-second Street, bebop’s avatar. Now, on a budget near $10 million, he could afford to have Ed Carfagno, his art director, re-create it with meticulous historical accuracy.

He lingered over
Bird
longer than he did most of his films—it had a nine-week shooting schedule. Both Whitaker and Diane Venora, who gave a remarkable performance as Chan, spoke of his patience in letting them find their characters. “
In one scene,” she said, “I did three different things in three different takes and I knew it wasn’t right. Clint said, ‘Good, now play all three things at once.’ I did, and that was it.” She also remembers his interrupting the flow of an intense fight scene between Chan and Charlie in order to dismiss the two-year-old who was playing their son as soon as he had all the reaction shots from him he could possibly use. “I don’t want to be responsible for him having to see a psychiatrist when he’s fifteen or sixteen,” she recalls him saying.