Authors: Richard Schickel
“I’ve got a special message for you little pardners out there,” Billy says in his curtain speech. “I want you to finish your oatmeal at breakfast and do as your ma and pa tell you, because they know best. Don’t ever tell a lie and say your prayers at night before you go to bed.” The looks on the little pardners’ faces are variously rapt, restless and uncomprehending, as Billy presses serenely on to his utterly banal conclusion. “And so, as our friends south of the border say, ‘Adios, Amigos.’ ”
It is sublime—a perfect parody of low-business pieties and clichés, but for once felt and meant as a sober summary of a man’s character and philosophy. It is also wonderfully played by Clint—how the man loves playing dumb—and beamishly reacted to by the rest of the cast, with
Scatman Crothers’s nods of encouragement and endorsement particularly well timed.
There may be things that are not quite right about this movie. One does wonder how a company this small, this lacking in a capacity for spectacle, attracts any audiences at all. One wonders how a shoe salesman and ex-con ever got together the capital to purchase even an outfit as modest as this. And, yes, as many critics observed at the time, there is something shrill in Locke’s performance. She isn’t quite to this manner born, doesn’t have the saving ironic glint in her eye that, for example, Claudette Colbert flashed as the ur–runaway heiress of
It Happened One Night
.
But these flaws are modest in comparison to what’s right with the film. Its light (the cinematographer was a newcomer, David Worth) is warmer, more dreamy and glowing, than it usually is in an Eastwood production, and its people are Capraesque in that economic affliction is not allowed to sour their eccentric kindliness. We also see in it some of Clint’s best directorial qualities, his easy pace and the confidence with which he digresses from his main line, his ability to sustain a chosen pitch without strain. He knows the values this movie defends have a quaint air about them—they are funny looking and funny sounding—and that you have to play them very straight. To satirize them is superfluous; it’s been done. To celebrate them too enthusiastically is self-defeating; you begin to sound like a right-wing crazy high on his own loopy rhetoric.
Bronco Billy
simply asks us to contemplate certain core values—kindness to the weak and tolerance for the eccentric, loyalty to the jointly striving group, above all a belief in the redemptive and reinventive possibilities of a free country—and after we’re done chuckling at the way its protagonist states them, ask ourselves if they are really so quaint, so irrelevant, after all.
One could argue that this movie is, in its way, its director’s most self-referential work. For Bronco Billy is Clint, or the Clint who might have been had Malpaso turned out to be a rundown Wild West show. He is the same guy with the same values, but operating out there on the eccentric fringe of things instead of at the center of our admiring attention, living in a place where we (and he) would inevitably perceive him as more quixotic than exemplary. That urge David Thomson has mentioned, to see “just how far he could stretch the audience’s support,” is operating here as surely as it is elsewhere. He wanted to know if we’d accept goofy righteousness as eagerly as we did the more outraged kind.
As it happened, we did not—at least in our customary numbers. Warner Bros. thought it had, perhaps, another
Every Which Way but Loose
here. The industry, conscious that a trade-paper poll had early in
1980 named Clint the top box-office star of the seventies, aware that he had not had a flop since
The Beguiled
, also expected great things of
Bronco Billy
. The reviews, though mixed, were on the whole encouraging. Richard Corliss in
Time
said it was “as if one of the faces on Mt. Rushmore suddenly cracked a crooked smile. Watching
Bronco Billy
millions of moviegoers are likely to smile back.” If some critics insisted on biting their lips, the majority agreed with Janet Maslin’s assessment that Clint “never seemed more sweetly accessible.”
But it opened, as they say, “soft.” It didn’t help that Maslin described Billy as an outsize Peter Pan, and that others made the same point less memorably. Soon learned disquisitions were appearing in the trades and elsewhere about the movie’s disappointing grosses. It was of a piece, some said, with other failures of the summer—Burt Reynolds in
Rough Cut
, Robert Redford in
Brubaker
, John Travolta in
Urban Cowboy
. All of them, it was said, seemed to promise the audience its favorites in familiar roles, then disappointed by slightly off-casting them in pictures that did not satisfy genre expectations, either. Exhibitors—traditionally whiners—insisted that this “product” was just not going to live up to its advance publicity the way the summer’s great hit,
The Empire Strikes Back
, did.
Clint was not amused. This was a child of his heart, and he thought Warner Bros. had not prepared the public for it properly. So studio executives backed one of their jets out of the hangar one Saturday and “wearing sack cloth and ashes,” as John Calley put it, flew up to Jackson Hole, where Clint was making
Any Which Way You Can
, the sequel to
Every Which Way but Loose
, to placate him with promises of a revised and enhanced ad campaign (on which, prudently, they delivered). Even so, the movie passed into legend as a rare Eastwood flop.
But that’s not so: The film was a disappointment only in relation to expectations. Eventually it did quite a tidy business—returning some $15 million to the studio in domestic rentals and a similar amount from overseas distribution. It also produced a hit single for Warner records, “Barroom Buddies,” a duet sung in the film by Clint and Merle Haggard—at long last a musical success. This was not bad for a picture that had cost around $5 million, and not at all bad as a conclusion to a five-year period during which Clint achieved a quality and range of workmanship—and of box-office success—that were unprecedented in his career to date and never quite so seamlessly paralleled in the years that immediately followed.
C
lint Eastwood turned fifty a couple of weeks before
Bronco Billy
opened. This fact was duly noted in the press. Here and there writers attributed the sunniness of the film and the sweetness of his performance to the mellowing effects of maturity, and Clint was inclined to agree. The “
sexy legend,” as
Cosmopolitan
called him in the title of the profile it ran coincidentally with the film’s release, suggested to its writer that “serenity” and “tranquility” were qualities he now required in a relationship. Inevitably, he said, “the warrior ego gives way to something higher,” and he implied that he had reached that “plateau” now.
This new mood was reflected in real estate as well as in relationships. Making a personal appearance in Shasta County, raising funds for the family of a highway patrol officer killed in the line of duty, Clint had been given a tour of the Bing Crosby ranch. This was something like home country for him, since he passed a boyhood year in nearby Redding. Learning that the Crosby estate—the singer died in 1977—intended to auction the ranch off, he was determined to bid on it and won the property in the fall of 1978, while he was making
Escape from Alcatraz
. Since then, it has become his most closely guarded retreat, the place he often goes to clear his mind and put himself in top condition before shooting a film or to unwind (and often to make the first cut) after he finishes principal photography. The ranch buildings are simple in design and decor, the vast acreage surrounding them a nature preserve, offering him unsurpassed solitude.
His contentment, as he began a new decade, was thus nearly perfect. For after four years he could see that the most significant of his commitments, the one with Warner Bros., tested and proved by its quick and accommodating response in the
Bronco Billy
crisis, was close to ideal. As of 1980, Ted Ashley and John Calley were in the process of departing, with Frank Wells soon to follow. But Steve Ross was still setting the tone of the place, Clint’s allies Terry Semel, Barry Reardon and Joe Hyams
were still aboard, and Robert Daly, recruited from CBS to be the new CEO, was his kind of guy. To succeed in the movie business, Daly once told Connie Bruck, Ross’s gifted biographer, you need three things—“
the intelligence and the financing and the guts to stay at the table and play”—and all these he and his associates at the studio had, as their long and successful reign would eventually prove.
These virtues, translating into stability and great steadiness in adversity, have been vital in sustaining a relationship between star and studio unduplicated in the modern American motion-picture industry and crucial to Clint’s long-running success. If, like so many stars, he had been obliged to wander from studio to studio, hawking his wares to anxious strangers, enduring the long delays between pictures that this process entails, he clearly would not have made as many films as he has. Nor as an actor-director for hire would he have been able to mount his quirkier projects so quickly and easily; he might, indeed, have found himself bankable only in a much narrower, action-oriented range, which as he aged would have rendered him increasingly implausible and irrelevant to the young male audience for whom those films are made. What happened to Burt Reynolds and Charles Bronson in the eighties, what is happening to Sylvester Stallone in the nineties, could have happened to him.
Consistent success aside, it may be that the most important element in Clint’s relationship with Warner Bros. is its lack of long-term contractual ties. Malpaso has headquartered in the same five-room Spanish-style stucco building on the Warners lot—people used to call it the Taco Bell—since
Josey Wales
. Rather dimly lit and until a recent refurbishment decorated more by accretion than design, it stands not more than one hundred yards from the studio’s executive building. But nothing other than propinquity and incalculable self-interest link Clint with management. Whenever they agree on a project—and Clint has released all but two of his twenty-five films between 1976 and 1996 through Warner Bros.—Lenny Hirshan and Bruce Ramer negotiate a deal for it alone. He is, in theory, free at any time to work elsewhere; Warner Bros. is, in theory, free at any time to ask him to leave.
To put it simply, where there is no contract, there is nothing to argue about—not among men determined to treat one another honorably. But unspoken trust, a quality that, like good movies, has always been hard to come by in Hollywood, requires further exegesis. In this instance, it begins with the corporate culture Steve Ross established as he put together the Warner Communications conglomerate. Ross may have betrayed a certain slipperiness in some of his dealings, but no entrepreneur of his era inspired greater loyalty among his associates. Famously
generous with salaries, bonuses and perquisites, he was yet more generous with freedom. He had a mystical belief in talent and a sort of boyish wonder in its presence. He thought that given patience and unquestioning support, gifted people would over the long run deliver consistently profitable work. Conversely, he believed that nagging oversight of their plans, extensive second-guessing of their failures, would only distract their energies and dim their spirits.
A lifelong and knowledgeable movie fan, he loved the studio more than any of his other corporate holdings and indulged its management and its stars more fully than anyone else. Warner Bros. was, like Malpaso, a self-described “family”—albeit a much more extended one—and probably, in the last analysis, no less a patriarchy than its competitors. But in this case, as opposed to Universal, for instance, the patriarch smiled benignly down on it from a distance, leaving day-to-day decision making to trusted lieutenants. He sent gifts and extended invitations to glamorous getaways and events and always left the keys to the family’s several airplanes on the mantelpiece where everyone could grab them and take off.
Nothing could have suited Clint Eastwood better. “
My father’s dream in life was to own a hardware store,” he once told a reporter. “I’m his son.” Though Malpaso is obviously dependent on the studio for financing and marketing, more than any comparable operation in Hollywood, it is run like a small free-standing business, with its sole proprietor enjoying astonishing autonomy. No one can remember a time when Clint was denied a project he wanted to make.
John Calley and the late Frank Wells set the tone of this relationship. The former has, he says, seen every kind of bad and stupid star trip, and though he is not an uncynical man, he remains somewhat awed by Clint’s voyage through the heavenly realms. “The messages he got from himself about what he wanted to do were much more significant than most guys got. He never fell into that horrible trap: ‘Well, yes, I’m a star and, yes, it’s a huge success, and, yes, I can do anything I want, but to make sure I can do that for the rest of my life I’d better do three or four more of the same and then I’m really established.’ And then twelve years later they’re still doing the same movie and it’s not fashionable anymore and they’re gone.” He adds: “I was very comfortable being passive with him. I mean, I just figured he knows more about it than I do, so why fuck with him.”
Calley—smart, volatile, unguarded—amused and delighted Clint, but Wells, besides being Calley’s perfect balance wheel, was his old friend and trusted adviser. A former Rhodes scholar, he was as lanky as Clint and, more important, as dry, reserved and commonsensical. If
Clint didn’t know he was a movie star, then Wells didn’t seem to know he was a movie mogul, so distant was his style from the clichés associated with that breed.
Wells had perfect trust in Clint’s skills, instincts and frugality. “
Clint’s greatest moment of pride,” Wells said, “was not when he called you up to say, ‘Hey, I made a good one, come on down and see it.’ It was when he called you up the last day of shooting and you had to play a guessing game as to how much under budget they were.” Clint became, he said, the standard by which the studio’s executives judged the work of other independent producers.