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In the early 1980s, Warner Bros. had two major in-house artists who could do anything they wanted. One was a movie star, the other a filmmaking genius, and they couldn’t be more different in beauty or temperament.
Clint Eastwood was a television star who found success on the big screen by making Spaghetti Westerns in Europe with a newcomer named Sergio Leone before becoming the incarnation of an angry, Miranda rights-burdened American police officer as “Dirty Harry” . Stanley Kubrick was a Bronx-born and raised autodidact who found his love for filmmaking through photography; After a series of critical successes with “Paths of Glory,” “Loilita” and “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” he was considered a visionary for the groundbreaking “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Honored as. ,” on which he became famous for his perfectionism and pushing his technical limits.
We love to play the “what if” game with famous director and actor pairings around here, but there’s almost certainly No An alternate universe where Eastwood and Kubrick were related. Unlike Kubrick, Eastwood liked to work fast, shooting very few takes and moving on, whereas the meticulous writer might shoot as many as 100 takes to achieve what he envisioned. These people were not sympathetic.
So it’s no surprise that Clint Eastwood hated “The Shining” and had no qualms saying so on the record.
Eastwood did not consider The Shining a masterpiece of modern horror
Reprinted in a conversation “Conversations with Clint: Paul Nelson’s Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood, 1979-1983,” Eastwood criticized Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Shining” — and though you may disagree with the guy, you have to at least admit that he was entertainingly wrong.
Here’s what Clint said about cheating:
“I was joking the other day because Kubrick had written that line on the movie poster: ‘A masterpiece of modern horror.’ Even some studio executives said, ‘Stanley, you’d better wait and let a reviewer stick that byline on the film, because that might be considered a little forward on your part.’ Obviously it was rejected and they went ahead and did it. We were talking about commercials for ‘Any Which Way You Can.’ Should be called ‘Kriti’.
Eastwood shared his experience watching the film on the WB lot, where it went down like Lead Zeppelin, mainly because no one found it scary. As Eastwood said, “If it had been a new director, he would have bombed me out of the building.” How can anyone find “The Shining” anything less than visceral And How psychologically horrifying (the film actually takes a toll on the human body) is beyond my comprehension, but Eastwood was adamant that he thought the film was based on ice. “It was just a huge failure. The biggest example in the picture is that there was nothing scary about it. That ax scene, coming in with an ax to kill Scat [Crothers]It’s as dead as advertising***.”
Kubrick never responded to Eastwood’s criticism, nor did he address Stephen King’s displeasure over his adaptation. why bother? He could always call his friend Steven Spielberg, who was so obsessed with the film that he watched it 25 times after it came out (and later inserted it into “Ready Player One”). And Eastwood could satisfy himself that “Any Which Way You Can” was the fifth-highest-grossing film of 1980, surpassing “The Shining” by $26 million at the US box office. Somehow, everyone won.
