
Conversations with Clint: Paul Nelson's Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood, 1979-1983
Author(s): Kevin Avery (Author), Jonathan Lethem (Foreword)
- Publisher: Continuum
- Publication Date: September 22, 2011
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 288 pages
- ISBN-10: 144116586X
- ISBN-13: 9781441165862
Book Description
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.
Editorial Reviews
Review
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
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