“Get me totally, completely out of this”: the movie Clint Eastwood wanted nothing to do with
Almost every actor will know the feeling of signing on for a movie and realising they’ve made a grave mistake, but very few of them will have the power to extricate themselves from their misfortune. Clint Eastwood did, and he asked, but he inexplicably decided to stay the course.
He’s always been a professional, so maybe he didn’t want to leave a cast and crew high and dry, scrambling to find another leading man on short notice, which could have cost them their livelihood at best, and left them out of a job at worst.
The actor and filmmaker took a lot of convincing in the first place, so much so that he even had an out. He wasn’t contractually obliged to go through with what would become one of his career’s most embarrassing ordeals, but in retrospect, he’s as good as admitted that he should.
Before jetting off to Austria to shoot Where Eagles Dare, Eastwood had inked a deal to star in the long-gestating adaptation of the hit Broadway musical, Paint Your Wagon. Having released an album of cowboy songs during his Rawhide days, it was clear that he couldn’t sing, but he signed on anyway.
However, there was a clause in his contract that allowed him to quit the project without facing any financial or legal repercussions if he didn’t approve of the finalised shooting script. Much to his dismay, the screenplay he was presented with bore little resemblance to the one that had piqued his interest in the first place.
“I get this thing, and I start reading it, and it’s now totally different,” he recalled. “It has no relation to the original, except the names of the characters. They had the threesome deal, but it wasn’t a dark story at all. It was all fluffy. Fluffy, and running around and talking, and they’re having Lee [Marvin] do Cat Ballou 2.”
It was Paddy Chayefsky’s script that had lured Eastwood into Paint Your Wagon, but the version he received prior to production had been drastically overhauled and rewritten by Alan Jay Lerner, with the former estimating that only half a dozen or so pages in the screenplay were his original work.
Panicking, he called his manager, Leonard Hirshan. “This has gone really haywire,” Eastwood told him. “Just get me out of this. Get me totally, completely out of this.” In bad news for him, his name had lured so many people into Paint Your Wagon that if he dropped out, the entire thing could collapse like a house of cards, leaving him with little choice but to grit his teeth and persevere.
He could have abandoned ship if he wanted to, since it was written in black and white, but his sense of obligation took over, leading Eastwood directly into one of the most regrettable outings of his seven-decade stint in Hollywood, an abysmal musical that he’s fully aware is one of his worst.
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