Giving the Public What It Wants . . . : Movies: Clint Eastwood’s ‘Unforgiven’ defies conventional wisdom, playing big in urban and rural areas as well as crossing age and gender lines.

Hollywood is talking about the success of “Unforgiven,” the movie that defies contemporary wisdom by casting four leading actors over 55 and dares to offer moviegoers something other than cops, drugs, teen lovers or comic-book characters.

In its $15-million opening weekend, Clint Eastwood’s Western drama “Unforgiven” led all other films in the market by a wide margin and according to statistics, it played as well in big cities as in rural areas. It tapped into the maturing moviegoing audience while still attracting younger customers.

Before it opened, skeptics wondered if anyone could pull off a revival of the moribund Western genre. But Eastwood in a Western appears to be the exception--or, perhaps validation of an old Hollywood axiom: Give the public what it wants.

“No Western has ever done as well in its opening,” said Barry Reardon, president of distribution for Warner Bros., the movie’s distributor.

He acknowledged the film is a rarity since most major studio movies released are “made for young people.”

In “Unforgiven,” the male stars are not what usually constitutes box office for the young audience. Eastwood is 62, Gene Hackman and Richard Harris are 61, while Morgan Freeman is the “baby” of the bunch at age 55.

And the Western itself, like musicals and a few other genres, remains a point of apprehension in Hollywood, due to escalating production costs and the growing difficulty in recouping investments.

“To make one goes against the grain,” Reardon said. That remains the thinking despite the enormous success of the 1990 Oscar-winning “Dances With Wolves,” which starred Kevin Costner in an epic about the American Indian and the settling of the American frontier. The last traditional--cowboy and outlaw--Westerns were Eastwood’s own moderately successful “Pale Rider” in 1985 and the more recent “Young Guns” and “Young Guns II,” which were marketed largely by images of its youthful matinee-idol cast and a rock music score, rather than its identification as a Western.

But, insisted Tom Sherak, executive vice president of rival 20th Century Fox Film Corp., “ ‘Unforgiven’ is the grain. It turns out to be exactly what the public wants to see. Just go back to the trailer they ran in theaters. It brings back every recollection of how people remember Eastwood.”

The trailer, which Warner Bros. began distributing in the spring, simply showed a Western-clad Eastwood from the back, turning to the camera, followed by the movie’s title and the opening date. It played on an estimated 15,000 screens and was shown with Warners’ “Batman Returns” and “Lethal Weapon 3.” By the time “Unforgiven” opened last Friday, there was an unusually high 50% audience awareness of movie, Reardon said.

“Thanks to that trailer, before you know anything about the movie you already form an affection for it,” Sherak said. “He’s part of Americana. He’s a cowboy. You add in the rest of the cast, put that together with a story about the Old West, give the audience Clint as they want to see him and that pushed the movie right over the top.”

Others in the exhibition business echoed those sentiments. “It was Eastwood in the right role. If it hadn’t been Eastwood, it might never have worked,” said one.

Those points were crucial to put across for the actor-director’s longstanding team at his Malpaso Productions, which is based at Warner Bros.

“An actor like Eastwood has an advantage and awareness. That’s why we went with a direct and simple approach in the campaign,” said Marco Barla, a 14-year Eastwood associate who is a project coordinator for special publicity.

“With a comedy you have to be confrontational. You have to let people know hard and fast that it is a funny film. But it’s a different piece of business with Clint in this context. Here we have an audience identification with the subject matter and the person that goes back to 1966,” Barla said. “I’d be very surprised if someone in the key market of 25 or 26 years of age have not seen one Clint Eastwood Western.”

Barla was not swayed by conventional Hollywood thinking about Westerns. “I think it’s an advantage to be a Western, not a disadvantage. Not everyone may like them, but everyone knows what they are.” Younger audiences know the genre from TV’s “Lonesome Dove” and from what they learn in school, he said.

As early as February, Malpaso and Warner Bros. kicked off the campaign with a sneak of the trailer to theater exhibitors at their ShoWest convention in Las Vegas, where the sight of Eastwood in person and on the screen sent a buzz through the audience.

Then, in the weeks before the film opened, Eastwood actively promoted the film by giving interviews to newspapers and magazines. The visibility continued Monday night with an appearance on “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno.

The appeal of the film after the first weekend became obvious in statistics gathered by L.A.-based Entertainment Data Inc., which showed the movie playing strong in urban areas such as New York, the Bay Area and New England, where Eastwood films have met with a lukewarm reception in the past.

Warners’ Reardon said the movie showed strength in upscale neighborhoods as well as at theaters where the crowds are usually action-oriented.

The Las Vegas-based CinemaScore audience polling service found that the movie’s opening night in three cities surveyed--Los Angeles, St. Louis and Las Vegas--brought out the over-25 audience and an almost equal number of men and women. Of those surveyed, 84% said they were drawn to the theater by Eastwood, and only 22% by the Western subject matter. Overall, they gave the film a B+ grade, which CinemaScore said is slightly higher than most films receive.

Reardon said “Unforgiven” was positioned to open at a time when there were few “male-oriented” movies in the market. He predicted that by Thursday, the end of the film’s first week in more than 2,000 theaters, its gross will surpass $22 million.

Comparing the movie to the performance of other films, however, is difficult. Next to the huge opening weekend grosses for two other Warner Bros. hit films this summer, “Batman Returns” and “Lethal Weapon 3” ($46.8 million and $33 million, respectively), the box office for “Unforgiven” would have all but been unnoticed.

But in the dog days of August, when the summer’s big movie business is played out, the gross is considered exceptional.

‘Unforgiven’

Following is a survey of 457 respondents at the Friday, Aug. 7 opening of Clint Eastwood’s new film in Los Angeles, St. Louis and Las Vegas. The results are valid only for the specific audiences surveyed.

% of Opening Night Audience Description of those attending 52% Males 48 Females 17 Under 25 83 25 and older 49 Couldn’t wait to see movie 13 Just came along with others 84 Were drawn by Clint Eastwood 22 Were drawn by subject matter

Source: CinemaScore