Costco Connection - June 2010

Mr. Eastwood!

I came up later on and stayed there awhile. This was in the ’40s. I always liked Seattle.

CC: In the 55-plus years you’ve worked in the movie business, what have been the biggest changes you’ve witnessed?

CE: The business has changed a lot. It’s become much more independent. That started in the ’60s—people started doing smaller independent productions. Big studios were becoming releasing organizations. I grew up in the ’40s watching Gary Cooper and [Humphrey] Bogart and [James] Cagney and Bette Davis, Rita Hayworth. They were all studio players at that time. The directors all made a lot of movies. When I did a couple of movies last year, everyone said, “How can you do two movies in a year?” You know, in the old days, everybody did that. They’d do two, three, four sometimes. They didn’t play around; they did them and moved on, came back and finished them later.

CC: You were part of the studio contract-player system, but by the time you landed the TV series Rawhide, hadn’t that all changed?

CE: It had changed quite a bit, and Universal, who I was a contract player with in the early ’50s, didn’t even allow television to be thought about. MGM in those days would not even allow a television set on the lot. Everybody was kind of putting their heads in the sand. But I got out and bounced around in television, and got that series. That was a way to get going, and the next thing was to transition into the-ater-exhibited films. There was sort of a prejudice against TV actors, but fortunately I got those three [Sergio] Leone pictures. Those [films] made the cross for me: I came in from a different direction.

CC: I recall you didn’t earn much money for your first spaghetti Western, A Fistful of Dollars?

CE: It wasn’t bad. It was a job, and I had never been to Europe before. I was a big fan of [the Akira Kurosawa film] Yojimbo, and I recognized the material as being based on Yojimbo.

I’d never been to Italy or Spain or Germany, the three producing countries.

CC: Were that movie and For a Few Dollars More made while you were still doing the Rawhide series?

CE: Yes, when we were on hiatus. We would shut down in May and return to work in September. I did the first film and came back to work and forgot about it. Then, the next year, I did For a Few Dollars More. For the third film, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Rawhide had ended, so I was free and clear.

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CC: Your next move was to start your own production company, Malpaso. What inspired you to do that?

CE: I wasn’t tied in with anybody, and I had the three Italian-made Westerns behind me. People were coming around to get me to do films ... United Artists and Universal. I just thought I might as well form a company and control this thing a little bit myself. That started things off, and I signed a deal with Universal to do so many pictures with them through the end of the ’60s and into the ’70s, but not exclusively. I had no exclusive deals after that.

My attorney was one of the guys who took over at Warner Bros. and he was trying to get me to come over there. I did Dirty Harry (1971), which was the transition to working at Warners and Universal, and I finally moved over to Warners in 1976. It’s been a home ever since, but I’ve still done pictures for other companies.

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CC: Was the first Malpaso production Hang ’Em High (1968)?

CE: Yes, we did that with United Artists. They were just a releasing company; they didn’t have any studio, but owned the distribution part of it. They distributed a lot of little films that they would buy after they had been completed, or they’d finance a film like they did with Hang ’Em High and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), the second film I did with them.