The TV show Clint Eastwood quit three days before shooting: “Sounds like you guys got it”
Like many actors of his era, Clint Eastwood saw television as a means to an end to get in some reps and catch the attention of film producers. Also, like many actors of his era, he landed his breakthrough role on the small screen and then never returned to episodic storytelling once he’d gained a foothold in cinema.
Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars was released before he’d wrapped up his long-running role as Rowdy Yates on Rawhide, and once he bowed out of the show, he was done with TV forever. In the 60 years since, he’s never acted in another series, and he’s never produced one either.
Eastwood has dabbled in directing for TV, though, albeit only twice. He helmed a 1985 episode of the Steven Spielberg-backed Amazing Stories, and stepped behind the camera to oversee the seventh and final instalment of Martin Scorsese’s docuseries, The Blues, where he focused on the piano.
Since he fulfiled his Rawhide commitments, Eastwood hasn’t acted in a TV show, he’s only directed a solitary episode of a fictional series, and the closest he’s come to lending his name to anything beamed into millions of homes was when he was listed as an executive producer made-for-TV documentaries that followed jazz musicians Dave Brubeck, Johnny Mercer and filmmaker Budd Boetticher.
However, he was supposed to produce the pilot episode for a show that was ultimately never picked up, only to depart three days before the start of production. Not only that, but 1995’s planned reboot of the 19950s favourite 77 Sunset Strip was Timothy Olyphant’s first acting role ever, with the cast rounded out by several other names that would soon be recognisable, including Maria Bello, Jim Caviezel, and Vince Vaughn.
It’s ironic that Olyphant, who would eventually channel Eastwood more than once in productions like Justified, Deadwood, and the animated Rango, almost got the chance to work with one of his heroes, only to discover that the icon who hired him for his onscreen debut had upped sticks and disappeared.
“First job, he hired me, and he quit three days before the pilot, and he quit when I got out there,” Olyphant recalled on the Armchair Expert podcast. “My first acting job of any, any kind was a TV pilot that Clint Eastwood was producing for WB. And Clint had this long-standing relationship with Warner Brothers.”
It was undeniably exciting for someone who’d grown up watching Eastwood to be working with him in any capacity, until he discovered his dreams had been dashed. “I sit down for the table read, and I’m looking for him,” he explained. “I was like, ‘He’s nowhere to be seen’. And then they sit down in front of these scripts, and it doesn’t say Malpaso Productions on it anymore.”
Naturally, Olyphant needed answers. “What’s going on?” he asked, and he didn’t like the response. “They’re like, ‘He quit’. I was like, ‘What?'” Thanks to a miscommunication, with the Alien: Earth star hinting the studio’s “TV division didn’t get the memo,” Warner Bros “gave notes” when Eastwood brought them 77 Sunset Strip, and he didn’t take too kindly to not being given the freedom he was used to at his home studio.
“And he reportedly said, ‘Sounds like you guys got it,'” the actor reflected. “That was my understanding that he was like, ‘You guys got it.'” Off he fucked, Olyphant missed out on working with Eastwood, and the four-time Oscar winner didn’t make personal history by producing his first-ever narrative series, even if the whole thing was a bust anyway.
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