Credit: Far Out / Beat Albrecht

The “awful” 1986 movie Clint Eastwood threatened to delete from history: “The material sucked”

Fri 8 May 2026 20:15, UK

Nepotism and doing favours for friends always have the potential to backfire in Hollywood, as Clint Eastwood discovered to his horror and astonishment when he threw his weight behind a production that he quickly threatened to disown, destroy, and delete from history.

Thanks to his star power and status in the industry, not to mention the fact that he founded, owned, and operated his own production company, Eastwood never had too much trouble in getting a film off the ground. All he had to do was ask the right people, and his request would inevitably be granted.

That’s fine when he was directing, starring, or both, because he was a known quantity, an A-lister, and a proven box office draw. However, when he pulled those strings to benefit somebody else, he discovered that not every ship is as tight as the one he usually runs, forcing him to lay down the law.

Despite never having directed anything in her life, Sondra Locke fancied becoming a director, and in an entirely expected development, her feature-length debut was 1986’s Ratboy, which made history as the first-ever Malpaso production that didn’t involve Eastwood as either director, star, or producer.

However, his soon-to-be excommunicated friend, Fritz Manes, was the film’s only credited producer, so he wasn’t entirely hands-off. He even populated the crew with some of his most trusted lieutenants, with the production designer, cinematographer, executive producer, first assistant director, and stunt coordinator all Malpaso regulars who’d made multiple pictures with Eastwood.

Despite being his partner for a decade at that point, Locke was still married to Gordon Anderson, whom she’d wed in 1967, and those nuptials would remain intact until she passed away in 2018. It wasn’t until 1996 that she’d disclose he was gay, and it was a marriage of convenience, but when Eastwood read an early draft of Ratboy, he wasn’t amused with how much screentime Anderson was getting.

Locke had asked if she could cast him, and he’d said, “Yeah, if there’s some small part.” When he saw the revised screenplay, though, he remembered it as “a tribute to Gordon Anderson” more than anything else. “All of a sudden, he was like the major lead, besides the rat boy, and I’m going, ‘Wait a second here,'” he recalled. “Besides that, forgetting all of that, the material sucked, it was just awful: very, very bizarre.”

In the end, Anderson voiced the title character, who was played on set by Sharon Baird, and that was the extent of his contributions. Eastwood still felt like he’d been misled, and he didn’t hesitate in furiously confronting Locke. “You showed me a script,” he told her. “You said you liked it. I talked the studio into going on the line with it.” Unfortunately, that wasn’t the same script she was planning to shoot.

Seeing no other option, the ‘Man with No Name’ laid down the law. “Look,” he flatly informed her. “I am not making this script.” With the plug threatening to be pulled, Locke backed down, revised Ratboy into something more palatable to Eastwood, and when it was released, it sank at the box office, took a beating from critics, and earned her a Razzie nomination for ‘Worst Actress’, so maybe he’d have been better off sending it the way of Old Yeller.