The “crazy” 1978 movie Clint Eastwood was warned against making: “You can’t do this”
Whenever someone is told not to do something, it often makes them want to do it more, which is exactly how Clint Eastwood felt when he was advised against making a movie.
This being Clint Eastwood, he couldn’t have given less of a shit, so he made it anyway. While his team was busy chewing their fingernails in fear that their meal ticket had made a disastrous, potentially career-killing decision, the actor and filmmaker had a feeling he’d be laughing all the way to the bank.
Back in his Rawhide days, the show’s Rowdy Yates wanted to direct. Unfortunately, when another cast member on another show had helmed an episode to calamitous effect, that pumped the brakes on those ambitions, so he had to patiently bide his time for another decade and a half.
When the script for Unforgiven hit his desk, Eastwood sat on it for almost ten years, and when he finally pulled it out of a drawer and brought it to the big screen, it became his magnum opus. With that in mind, it goes without saying that if he says he’s going to do something, you can be damn sure he’ll do it.
However, nobody expected that something to be co-starring in a buddy caper with a primate. Sandwiched in between the Dirty Harry sequel, The Gauntlet, and Don Siegel’s atmospheric prison break thriller, Escape from Alcatraz, the star fancied a much lighter change of pace.
“Some people think you’re crazy,” he noted, and you get why the representatives of an actor who was best known and had become a bankable star by headlining a string of gritty thrillers were concerned that yukking it up in a family-friendly frolic where he shared top billing with an orangutan could have gone south.
“Every advisor I had said, ‘Don’t do the orangutan movie,'” Eastwood remembered. “Don’t do Every Which Way but Loose. You can’t do this. This is not you.’ I said, ‘Nothing’s me, I’m just plain.’ I said, ‘There’s something hip about a guy who tells his troubles to an orangutan, loses the girl, goes on, and loses the fight.”
His mind was made up; he’d play the Philo Beddoe to his hirsute cohort Manis’ Clyde, and that was that. His definition of ‘hip’ might have been debatable at best, and the movie was hardly a smash hit with critics, but wouldn’t you know it; audiences couldn’t get enough of their odd-couple antics.
Every Which Way but Loose made over $100million at the box office in the United States alone, and when you adjust that for inflation, it’s the equivalent of over $530m today, which makes it the highest-grossing leading role of Eastwood’s career, and by quite some distance.
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