Eastwood goes the distance

Back in the early 1970s, at the height of their stardom, Clint Eastwood and Paul Newman found themselves hanging out at a hotel in Arizona where Newman was staying while playing the lead in John Huston’s “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean.” The two young stars were in awe of Huston, a Hemingway-esqe figure from mid-century Hollywood whose larger-than-life exploits would later be the subject of one of Eastwood’s most underrated films, “White Hunter, Black Heart.”

Taking a break the other day from his travels on the awards circuit -- the Directors Guild just named him best director of 2004 -- Eastwood recounted that he and Newman had marveled at how Huston, then 65, could carouse all night yet have the energy to make great movies during the daylight hours. “He’d smoke and drink all night, sleep for a few hours and be at work, as good as new,” Eastwood recalled. “You don’t often hear people talk about it, but being in good condition and having a lot of stamina is a prerequisite to being a good director.”

With age comes wisdom, but not always the strength to execute it. From its inception, Hollywood has been unusually cruel to its elder statesmen, putting them out to pasture at the first sign of infirmity or loss of creative power. Most of Eastwood’s heroes, from John Ford to Howard Hawks to Frank Capra, were unceremoniously ushered into retirement by their early 70s. Eastwood remembers bumping into Billy Wilder, who lived into his 90s. “He was still sharp as a tack,” Eastwood says, “but he couldn’t get a job.”

Like Huston, who was nearly 80 when he earned a best picture nomination for “Prizzi’s Honor,” Eastwood has somehow defied time. A few months short of his 75th birthday, sitting in a hotel eatery, he looks as good as ever; lean, craggy and imperturbable -- if a grease fire suddenly erupted in the restaurant, you’d expect him to show the firemen how to put it out. Coming off two critically beloved films, “Million Dollar Baby” and last year’s “Mystic River,” he’s been picking up honors left and right, with even more possible on Oscar night. Though Eastwood has been a filmmaker for nearly 35 years, the plaudits have been late in coming. The raging bulls of the ‘70s -- Coppola, Friedkin, Bogdanovich, Ashby and Hopper -- are in eclipse today, dead or shadows of their former selves. Yet Eastwood, older than them all, is in full bloom and, as critic David Thomson put it, “among the very few Americans admired and respected at home and abroad, almost without qualification or irony.”

What’s especially fascinating, for anyone who grew up in our youth-obsessed culture, is that Eastwood is not alone anymore. Just weeks away from his 80th birthday, Robert Altman still works regularly, earned an Oscar nomination in 2001 for “Gosford Park” and is now directing an opera in Chicago. Roman Polanski and Mike Nichols are in their 70s, as vital as ever, Polanski having made “The Pianist” while Nichols is coming off “Angels in America” and “Closer.” At 74, Jean-Luc Godard is as much of a provocateur as ever, earning glowing reviews for his recent film, “Notre Musique.” When Sony struggled to get “Spider-Man,” the ultimate teen franchise off the ground, it turned to screenwriter Alvin Sargent, now 73, who fixed the original movie and wrote “Spider-Man 2.”

This renaissance is hardly limited to cinema. One of the must-read books of recent months was “The Plot Against America” by Philip Roth, a literary lion in his 70s. Johnny Cash, who died last year at 72, did his most critically praised work in the last years of his life. Bob Dylan, now in his 60s, has not only been musically reinvigorated in recent years but also was just nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Prize for “Chronicles: Vol. 1.” Loretta Lynn, who turns 70 this April, is being celebrated everywhere for her recent “Van Lear Rose” album.

I could go on, but you get the point -- 70 is starting to look like the new 40. “So many people are doing good work into their 70s that we can no longer look at it as astonishing,” says screenwriter and novelist David Freeman. “There are enough people being productive at endeavors we’ve always associated with youth that we have to reconsider our whole attitude about age and aging.”

Clint is the perfect example, especially since he was so underrated as a younger filmmaker. Even though he made compelling films in the 1970s, notably “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” he barely rates a mention in Peter Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” survey of the era. Critics wrote him off as a lightweight. As late as 1988, Pauline Kael airily dismissed his film “Bird,” as well as all the critics who liked it, saying “when a man who isn’t an artist makes an art film it’s just what they expect art to be: earnest and lifeless.”

If you spend any time around artists on their way up, it’s not so hard to figure out why they so often crash and burn -- either they lose touch with reality, their brash self-confidence congealing into insufferable arrogance, or they self-destruct, derailed by a toxic mix of egomania, drugs or alcohol. How anyone learns what to avoid is something of a mystery. After working with Clint in “Mystic River,” Kevin Bacon was inspired to direct again, following the master’s advice: “Don’t waste time and don’t shoot the same scene again and again.” On the other hand, Michael Cimino made his debut directing “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot,” with the always-economical Eastwood producing and starring -- and then went out and made “Heaven’s Gate.” Go figure.

Most of Eastwood’s filmmaking peers back in the 1970s had the career trajectory of rock stars -- better to burn out than to rust. Both by temperament and taste, Clint is a blues and jazz man who’s built for the long run. Besides “Bird,” he’s made jazz documentaries and happily spent part of our interview assessing the skills of everyone from Lester Young to Thelonious Monk to Wynonie Harris. Growing up in Oakland, he’d listen to an R&B; station that played all the blues shouters. “I also used to get all the new Blue Note 78s,” he recalls. “I drove my mother crazy, trying to figure out the chord changes.”

Richard Schickel, his friend and biographer, says Eastwood has a jazzman’s respect for craft over cashing in. “He wears things lightly,” says Schickel. “His manner is wry and unpretentious, with an emphasis on the work, not the rewards.”

When Clint talks about music, he could just as easily be describing his philosophy about filmmaking. “I have great affection for jazz musicians because I like the spontaneity and creativity,” he says. “I love to see musicians who play well as an ensemble. And if you have that with actors, you often have a good picture.”

For years, studios have tried to get him to do another “Dirty Harry.” He dismisses the idea by saying, “When you get older, you don’t want to repeat yourself. When Coleman Hawkins would play ‘Body and Soul,’ people would be disappointed that it wasn’t the same as it was on the record. But Hawkins didn’t want to imitate himself -- he wanted to play the song the way he felt it that minute, not when he cut it.”

Eastwood tries to emulate the spontaneity of a jazz jam session on his set by always going for the first take. When he worked with Meryl Streep on “The Bridges of Madison County,” the actress suggested he try shooting their rehearsals. She asked the right guy. “Sometimes I’d end up shooting scenes we hadn’t even rehearsed,” he recalls. “On ‘Million Dollar Baby,’ I’d say to the cameraman, ‘Stick with me, we’re just going to go.’ It might not be as easy to do for a younger guy, but if you’ve been doing this for a long time, you have a certain confidence that it’s going to work.” Eastwood doesn’t even have video replay on his sets. He says he can glance over at the camera operator and tell if he’s happy or not.

Eastwood remains at the height of his powers because he has a strong sense of self. Too many directors today crave public approval -- they’d rather have a box-office hit than make a classy movie. Like Altman and Huston before him, Eastwood is a maverick, supremely unconcerned with what anyone in the Hollywood community thinks about anything. “As Schickel says, ‘What can they do to you when you’re 70?’ ” he explains. “I don’t have the need to prove so many things. It probably means you don’t feel the same anxiety about failure, which frees you up to do good work.”

After absorbing some of that soothing self-confidence working on “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” John Cusack nicknamed Clint “the Zen daddy.” When artists get older, they often make things simpler, savoring economy over indulgence. They don’t have to play as many notes to get the point across. Eastwood keeps things uncomplicated, which can be an art in itself. When the filmmaker arrived in Savannah, Ga., to make “Midnight in the Garden,” the film’s screenwriter, John Lee Hancock, asked if he wanted some people to drive him around to look at locations.

Clint eyed Hancock with his trademark squint, that sideways glance we’ve seen for most of our lives on a giant movie screen. “If you know your way around,” he said, “you’ll do.”

The Big Picture appears Tuesdays in Calendar. Comments and suggestions can be emailed to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.