Scott Eastwood is a personable, talented, and good-looking 30-year-old actor. But he’s got a long way to go if he wants to get anywhere near spitting distance of his father’s legacy. His dad may look like just another grouchy old Hollywood octogenarian whose conversation with an empty chair at the 2012 Republican Convention had even his fans wondering if he was going senile. But no matter what your political affiliations, at the age of 86 Clint Eastwood is a living legend, with a career spanning more than half a century of acting, directing, and producing, not to mention composing music, plus a stint as mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea.
Scott is building up a solid body of mainly supporting roles (several of them, admittedly, in his father’s films) and is handsome enough to be leading man material in a Nicholas Sparks adaptation (The Longest Ride), but his screen presence is strangely underwhelming; in Suicide Squad and Snowden he all but disappears into the scenery.
Perhaps it’s telling that his most memorable role to date was in Taylor Swift’s Wildest Dreams video, which capitalized on his uncanny resemblance to a young Clint.
Then again, his father was a late starter, so maybe there’s still time for Scott to develop into more than just another pretty Hollywood scion, even if he’ll never have had to dig swimming-pools for a living, like his dad. In the 1950s, after working at a number of other blue-collar jobs, Clint played uncredited roles in a dozen movies, the best known being Tarantula, in which he plays a Jet Squadron Leader dropping bombs on a giant spider.
Clint was nearly 30 when, in 1959, a TV executive decided he looked like a cowboy and he landed the role of Rowdy Yates on the western series Rawhide, which would run for the next six years. But it wasn’t until 1964 that he was cast in his breakthrough movie role. A Fistful of Dollars was shot on a low budget in Spain by little-known Italian director Sergio Leone, and was among the first of what would shortly become known as ‘spaghetti westerns.’
At first, Eastwood wasn’t keen on playing another cowboy, but he was savvy enough to recognize the screenplay as an unofficial remake of the Japanese samurai movie Yojimbo, and decided he could do something interesting with the character. He trimmed his dialogue to a minimum, barely raised his voice above a raspy whisper, and trusted the audience’s imagination to do the rest. A Fistful of Dollars and its sequels, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, weren’t released in the US until 1967, but their success enshrined Clint’s incarnation of the cynical, taciturn, poncho-wearing, cigar-chewing anti-hero in the ranks of cinema’s most iconic figures: The Man With No Name.
Clint was learning fast. And he understood that power in film-making didn’t lie with the actors. So in 1968, using his earnings from the Dollars Trilogy, he formed his own production company, The Malpaso Company, later to become Malpaso Productions. He also found a mentor in veteran director Don Siegel, who directed him in the modern western Coogan’s Bluff. They would go on to make four more movies together, including Dirty Harry (1971) which introduced the second of Clint’s iconic screen characters – Inspector Harry Callahan, a maverick cop who would reappear in four sequels and provide the cinema with one of its most popular catchphrases: “Make my day!”
Siegel’s no-nonsense approach to film-making was a big influence on Eastwood’s own directing style — he’s known for bringing his films in on time and within budget, and for achieving most of his shots in just one or two takes. Like Siegel, Eastwood concentrates on telling an entertaining story, and avoids social or political agendas, with the result that many of his films, from Dirty Harry to American Sniper (for which Scott auditioned), can be interpreted simultaneously as both glorifications and critiques of their subjects.
Clint’s characters are invariably celebrations of American masculinity, but he has never been afraid to play dumb, ignoble or vulnerable – or all three at once. Check out his 1971 directing debut, Play Misty for Me, in which, 16 years before Fatal Attraction, he played a Californian DJ terrorized by a psychotic female fan.
Clint went on to direct 37 films, though he handed the reins to other directors for two of his highest-grossing hits: the rambunctious redneck comedies Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can, in which he shared the screen with an orangutan named Clyde.
But he also gained the critics’ respect for thoughtful Westerns like The Outlaw Josey Wales for directing the sophisticated biopic Bird (starring Forest Whitaker as Charlie Parker — Clint is a jazz fan), or for directing and co-starring with Meryl Streep in the The Bridges of Madison County, which everyone agreed was better than the romantic novel on which it was based.
His place in the Hollywood pantheon was assured when he won two Academy Awards for Best Director — for the revisionist western Unforgiven (1992), and the boxing melodrama Million Dollar Baby (2004) — and was nominated for his performances in both films. His fans appreciate that, unlike some of his peers, he has allowed himself to age truthfully rather than try to cling to invincible hero status, allowing his characters to show natural signs of physical weakness in action pics such as In the Line of Fire (1993) and Blood Work (2002).
In modern Hollywood, Clint’s phenomenal work-rate as an actor-director is perhaps comparable only to that of Woody Allen. But Eastwood’s films, unlike most of Allen’s, have been large-scale productions featuring large casts and special effects. His latest Sully is the first major release to have been shot almost entirely with IMAX cameras, yet he never allows spectacle to dominate the human drama. Like the other films Clint has directed, it’s all about the character.
Scott has some big cowboy boots to fill…
#NYC pic.twitter.com/n8Yw7X6LMa
— Scott Eastwood (@ScottEastwood) September 12, 2016
