A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : THE YIPPIE-TI-YO-TI-YAY! FILE : Clint Eastwood Saddles Up Again--How Do You Say ‘Make My Day’ in Cowboy?

Clint Eastwood, one of Hollywood’s most enduring stars, has taken a couple of falls at the box office recently, but he’s getting right back up on the horse. The former Man With No Name, who had to play cowboys in Italy before he became a star here, is returning to the Western genre directing and starring in “The William Munny Killings,” which begins shooting late this month in Alberta, Canada.

The movie will not be ready for release until next year, making 1991 only the third year in the last 15 that Warner Bros. has not had an Eastwood picture on its summer or Christmas schedule.

Eastwood will play William Munny, a reformed outlaw who takes a break from family and farming life to pursue the $1,000 bounty put on the head of a man who cut up a high plains hooker. Morgan Freeman will play Munny’s buddy, another reformed gunman, and Gene Hackman will be the no-nonsense sheriff who comes between the bounty hunters and their quarry.

It will be Eastwood’s first project after poor turnouts for last year’s “White Hunter, Black Heart” and “The Rookie.” “You get into a rut if you feel you have to deliver product on a deadline,” Eastwood said of his hiatus between projects. “If you’re pushing to make schedules, it’s like a TV series. It doesn’t give you time to take advantage of what you want to do.”

“The William Munny Killings” is a script that’s been around for 15 years. Writer David Peoples says he finished it in 1976, when Westerns were about as commercial as movies about leprosy. “There had just been some great Westerns made--’The Culpepper Cattle Company’ and ‘The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid’--but nobody wanted to see them,” says Peoples, whose first screen credit showed up on “Blade Runner.” “I didn’t write this as a smart move, but it’s working out now.”

His script, originally titled “The Cut-Whore Killings,” was optioned by Francis Ford Coppola during the early ‘80s, but no one was interested in making it. Eastwood, who starred in the Sergio Leone “spaghetti Westerns,” picked it up after Coppola’s option ran out, but only recently moved it to his front burner. Eastwood says he had planned to do “The William Munny Killings” before “Dances With Wolves” came out, and he doubts that Kevin Costner’s film will help his. But he agrees that “Wolves” has finally proven to stubborn Hollywood naysayers that there is a market for good Westerns.

“Everyone wants to pronounce genres dead, then somebody comes along with a new one and changes everything,” said Eastwood, whose last Western--”Pale Rider”--was a modest hit in 1985. “The audience changes. There’s a whole new generation out there.”