How one rogue actor set Clint Eastwood’s directing career back by 10 years: “It turned out not so swell”
By the time he made his directorial debut on 1971’s Play Misty for Me, Clint Eastwood had more than 20 movies and almost a dozen TV shows under his belt as an actor, so he’d been around the business long enough to know that he fancied stepping behind the camera one day.
There was nothing impulsive about it, either, with the future four-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker having studiously observed the directors he’d been working with since the 1950s. He was confident he had the chops to make a decent fist of it, but he was forced to bide his time a lot longer than he’d liked.
Even when he’d settled on the noir-infused psychological thriller as his first feature, nobody wanted him to make it. However, Eastwood was so confident in both the story and his abilities that he effectively bet his entire career on Play Misty for Me becoming a success. It was, after recouping its budget more than ten times over at the box office and winning strong reviews, and as cliched as it sounds, the rest really was history.
He’s gone on to helm another 39 films, won a quartet of Oscars, and collaborated with the finest actors of multiple generations. And yet, it was one rogue thespian who pushed the start date of his sojourn back by a decade, all because the people running the television networks witnessed the worst of what could happen when an on-camera performer was handed the reins.
Speaking to Metrograph, Eastwood was asked when he first began contemplating his move into filmmaking. “It started out during Rawhide,” he said. “They had let Eric Fleming write a story. I said, ‘You know, I don’t want to write a story, but I’d love to direct one of the episodes’. And everybody, everybody at CBS said, ‘Yes.'”
So far, so good, and with Fleming being credited as the co-writer of the third season’s 29th episode, ‘Incident of the Night on the Town’, that places Eastwood’s initial intentions to direct around the summer of 1961. For context, Play Misty for Me didn’t start production until September 1970, so he faced a hell of a wait.
While he didn’t name names, possibly because he’s not that kind of person and possibly because he can’t remember since he’s in his 90s, Eastwood explained how the opportunity was ripped from his grasp. “Around the same time, some other series let one of the actors direct an episode,” he lamented. “Evidently, they went way, way over budget; way, way over schedule. It turned out not to swell. So upstairs sent an edict saying, ‘No more actors are to direct.'”
Knowing that going even a penny over budget and a day behind schedule is the stuff of Eastwood’s nightmares, there’s a cruel irony in a fellow actor torpedoing his chances of making his directorial debut and making him wait almost ten years to call ‘action’ on his first day on set as the guy wielding the megaphone by doing the two things he’s proven himself completely incapable of doing.
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