Conversations with Clint: Paul Nelson's Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood, 1979-1983

by Kevin Avery (Editor)

Overview

Clint Eastwood has forged a remarkable career as a movie star, director, producer and composer. These newly discovered conversations with legendary journalist Paul Nelson return us to a point when, still acting in other people's films, Eastwood was honing his directorial craft on a series of inexpensive films that he brought in under budget and ahead of schedule. Operating largely beneath the critical radar, he made his movies swiftly and inexpensively. Few of his critics then could have predicted that Eastwood the actor and director would ever be taken as seriously as he is today. But Paul Nelson did.

The interviews were conducted from 1979 through 1983. Eastwood talks openly and without illusions about his early career as an actor, old Hollywood, and his formative years as a director, his influence and what he learned along the way as an actor-lessons that helped him become the director he is today. Conversations with Clint provides a fresh and vivid perspective on the life and work of this most American of movie icons.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781441165862
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	10/06/2011
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Kevin Avery's writing has appeared in publications as diverse as Mississippi Review, Penthouse, Weber Studies, and Salt Lake magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and stepdaughter. His first book, Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson, is published by Fantagraphics Books.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Jonathan Lethem - I Never Sat in a Movie Theater with Paul Nelson Filmography Introduction - The Good, the Bad... The Telephone Call - January 1983 The Conversations - October 1979 to October 1983 Flashback - December 1979 Afterword Acknowledgments Source Materials

Editorial Reviews

Kevin Avery has performed a great service to film lovers by bringing to light Paul Nelson's remarkable interviews with Clint Eastwood. Nelson was an appreciator of Eastwood in the seventies, before he had won wide critical recognition. In these fascinating and wide-ranging conversations, the actor-director discusses with complete candor both the art of his films and the realities of filmmaking in Hollywood.

Paul Nelson was the first serious film aficionado who, way back in the early '70s, turned me on to the importance of Clint Eastwood as an actor, filmmaker and American icon. He showed me the S&W Magnum .44 he kept under a pile of sweaters in his closet. 'Same as Dirty Harry, ' he said, explaining that if he was going to write about men with guns he had to know how it felt in his hand. We were both devoted to F. Scott Fitzgerald and hoping that Clint Eastwood would play Gatsby in the upcoming film, which, of course, he didn't. The repartee between these two straight shooters is more revealing of the inner workings of Hollywood and the creative process of Clint Eastwood than anything I've ever read before.

This is a quick read and a fine portrait of a megastar halfway through an iconic career.
Griffintainment

From the Publisher

This collection of previously unpublished, exhaustive interviews from three decades ago has a conversational intimacy that reveals as much about the journalist as they do about an actor-director he obviously worships.

The late Paul Nelson was a prescient critic, from his 1960s advocacy of the evolving Bob Dylan through his championing a decade later of the New York Dolls as pre-punk avatars and his late-'70s assessment of Clint Eastwood: "as imaginative and as different as any American director I can name." This was well before critical acclaim and Oscars started flowing toward Eastwood, who was regarded as a spaghetti western star of limited range (a reactor rather than an actor) and reviled by the left as aDirty Harry fascist. Readers who associate the veteran Rolling Stone editor-critic so strongly with music might be surprised to learn that his first love was film, and that Eastwood matched him reference for reference as their discussion ranges from Bergman to Kurosawa to Pauline Kael (the influential New Yorker critic who was particularly anti-Eastwood). "This book is a miracle," says the introduction by Jonathan Lethem (who based an indelibly obsessive character in Chronic City on Nelson), and it's a miracle that Nelson was unable to perform.Despite 17 hours of interview tape, he never made it past page four in the manuscript for his aborted cover story.Contributing to his writer's block was his admiration for the artist. Editor Avery, who did a yeoman's job of making the transcript flow chronologically, writes that Nelson was "as much a fan as he was an objective journalist"—though, in the case of Eastwood and others, Nelson was plainly much more of a fan than objective. Paralyzed by what his subject might think of the story as well as the daunting prospect of way too much material, he wrote little from this and published nothing, leaving the tapes for posthumous discovery.

There are better books on Eastwood, from a more recent perspective, but these fan's notes reflect extraordinary access and frequent illumination.

Kirkus Reviews