Clint Eastwood’s failed attempt at finding a new ‘Dirty Harry’: “He wanted to own his next property”
Since the ‘Golden Age’ drew to a close, very few of Hollywood’s biggest stars have gone through their entire career without appearing in at least one sequel. Clint Eastwood got his out of the way relatively early, but he remained on the hunt for another role that had the potential to carry multiple films.
The four-time Academy Award winner has only reprised three roles during his seven decades in the industry, and there are always going to be a couple of ‘Well, actually’ people who’ll say it’s only two and suggest the ‘Man with No Name’ was more of a concept and a marketing hook than three different people.
Ignoring the dissenters, Eastwood’s Dollars trilogy, the five-film Dirty Harry series, and the orangutan comedies Every Which Way but Loose and Any Which Way You Can are his franchises, and he didn’t feel the need to revisit any of his characters after 1980. He was on the hunt for another during that period, though, and he viewed Elmore Leonard as the perfect entry point.
The novelist and screenwriter had already worked with Eastwood after penning the script for 1972’s Joe Kidd, and he was tasked with developing another of the actor’s star vehicles. It was eventually made, albeit with Charles Bronson in the lead role as a melon farmer and Vietnam veteran who makes enemies with the mob.
“Originally, this story was meant for Clint Eastwood,” Leonard explained to Anthony May. “He had called up and said he wanted something new. I had written Joe Kidd, an original, for him. It was shot but not yet released. And he called up and said, ‘Dirty Harry is making a lot of money everywhere’. But he only had a few points in it, I gathered.”
Using that as a springboard, Leonard lifted the name of a character from his novel The Big Bounce and wrote Mr Majestyk. “Now he wanted to own his next property,” he explained. “What he wanted really was another Dirty Harry, but different. And so I thought of Mr Majestyk, and I called him the next day and told him about a melon grower, just basically the situation, I’d just thought of it that minute.”
Whereas Dirty Harry was owned by Warner Bros and Eastwood was originally brought in as an actor-for-hire, had he agreed to star in Mr Majestyk, he could have been in on the ground floor as not only its leading man but also potentially a producer and director, giving him ownership of the brand.
From the way Leonard tells it, Eastwood wasn’t best pleased that he hadn’t made as much money from Harry Callahan as he would have liked. Hypothetically, Mr Majestyk and any potential sequels would have drastically increased his stake and given him a franchise of his own creation, but it wasn’t to be.
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