The “gimmicky” John Carpenter movie Clint Eastwood turned down: “I was offered that picture”
They may have never worked together, but John Carpenter was massively influenced and inspired by Clint Eastwood throughout his career. As it turns out, though, the pair almost worked on the same film, only for the iconic actor and filmmaker to turn it down.
The brains behind Halloween, The Thing, and The Fog may have become synonymous with horror and fantasy, but his earliest cinematic obsession was westerns. The fingerprints of John Wayne and Howard Hawks are all over his first batch of features, but there was still a healthy dose of Eastwood in his DNA.
Both Carpenter and Kurt Russell have admitted that Snake Plissken was indebted to the ‘Man with No Name’ and its star’s rugged, world-weary charisma, with the video game devotee going so far as to name the four-time Academy Award winner as the one star he “would have given my eyeteeth to work with.”
And to think, he could have accomplished it as far back as the late 1970s. With Dark Star and Assault on Precinct 13, 1978 was Carpenter’s breakthrough year. Halloween turned the horror genre upside down, but it also saw the release of Irvin Kershner’s Eyes of Laura Mars, the first and only theatrically released movie that he wrote but didn’t direct.
Executive producer Jack H Harris, who’d worked on Dark Star, optioned an 11-page treatment from Carpenter titled Eyes. “I wrote two early drafts of the screenplay,” the Big Trouble in Little China director recalled to Justin Beahm. “And then they moved on to David Zelag Goodman, who rewrote me.”
He was less rewritten than, as he once put it, “shat upon.” Originally intended as an independent film, once John Peters came aboard and decided that he wanted to make it a star vehicle for his then-partner, Barbra Streisand, Eyes of Laura Mars became a Columbia Pictures production. When she dropped out, Faye Dunaway was brought in, which necessitated Goodman’s overhaul of Carpenter’s drafts.
Before Kershner was appointed, Eastwood knocked it back. “I was offered that picture to direct and act in,” he revealed. “This was back when Streisand was talking about doing the film and playing a part. It was a model then, who saw all these things, and it was a great excuse to wear a lot of clothing and stuff. But it seemed very much like a gimmicky idea.”
In another world, Eyes of Laura Mars would have been helmed by Eastwood, who would have also played Tommy Lee Jones’ role of police lieutenant John Neville, with a script by Carpenter. It wasn’t to be, and while “gimmicky” may not be the right word, he’s correct that the premise didn’t jive with his sensibilities.
The veteran has almost entirely shied away from the supernatural or fantastical on both fronts, and the tale of a fashion photographer who starts to see through the eyes of a serial killer, and aids the authorities in their investigation to uncover their identity, doesn’t sound like it would be up his street.
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