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So why take such a plunge? For the chance of surfacing with the next Quentin Tarantino between your teeth. Because Producing Man does not live by Mel Gibson and Batman sequels alone. And because on Oscar night it's nice to have some long shots you're actually proud of rooting for--the Bullets over Broadway gang, maybe, or The Shawshank Redemption crowd. Or Winona Ryder's luminous performance in Little Women. Or Paul Newman's in Nobody's Fool. Or Jessica Lange's in Blue Sky, a film that lay unattended in a studio vault for three years before being made semipublic last fall. They were made, some of these movies, precisely because someone perceived Oscar possibilities in them. And Oscar nominations mean more than prestige. They mean dollars, a last shot at recoupment.
In recent years, it's fair to say, the Academy Awards, so often scorned by the smart set back East, have become a true balancing force in the industry. Without the hope they hold out, a lot of good movies just wouldn't get made. Face it: producers who combine sufficient clout and sufficient nerve to trust their own uncalculating impulses have always been in short supply and are now almost extinct. For that reason, the Academy's most instructive award this year may be the Irving Thalberg trophy. Sometimes it's a consolation prize for someone the Academy has unaccountably overlooked (Alfred Hitchcock, for example). Sometimes it's a reward for longevity and inoffensiveness. Occasionally it goes to a producer who comes as close as humanly possible to grasping that elusive equation of Fitzgerald's. This is one of those times, because the winner is ... Clint Eastwood.
I have to confess an interest here; I happen to be writing a book about him that's turning out to be more admiring than I imagined it would. (I also produced the film tribute to him for the Oscar show.) But facts are facts: for close to three decades he's averaged better than a movie a year as a producer. Not one of them has cost the kind of money that keeps studio executives awake at night. All of them have come in on schedule, on budget. And the majority of them were not the sure shots--Dirty Harry sequels and clones, for instance, or easy-riding westerns.
Tucked into Eastwood's filmography are a Capraesque comedy about a hapless Wild West show, two dramas about self-destructive musicians, a couple of explorations of sexual obsession, the best prison picture of our era, a gothic horror story and a pair of funny, nobrow epics in which, against everyone's better judgment but his own, he co-starred with an orangutan named Clyde. And-almost forgot--a haunted western called Unforgiven. That, friends, is producing--achieving a balance between commercial exigencies and the dictates of your heart, following your own best instincts, not somebody else's audience survey. Or last year's box-office figures.
That's all there is to it, according to Clint, who's probably oversimplifying. Knowing your craft, staying grounded, having at your command a certain stubborn willfulness-these help too. But, yes, it all begins with instinct, that indefinable, unquantifiable quality. That is the only reliable power source for a dream factory. Or a DreamWorks.