The Film Club by David Gilmour

was.
    3. I love the fact that when Clint directs a movie, he never says “Action.” He says calmly, quietly, “When you’re ready.”
    4. I love watching Clint fall off his horse in Unfor-given .
    5. I love the image of Clint as Dirty Harry walking down a San Francisco street, gun in one hand, a hot dog in the other.
    I mention to Jesse a brief junket-chat I had once with William Goldman, who did the screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and later wrote Absolute Power (1997) for Eastwood. Goldman adored him. “Clint is the best,” he told me. “A complete professional in a world dominated by ego. On an Eastwood set,” he said, “you come to work, you do your job, you go home; usually you go home early because he wants to play golf. And he eats lunch in the cafeteria along with everyone else.”
    When Clint was offered the script for A Fistful of Dollars in 1964, it had already been around for a while. Charles Bronson said no, it was the worst script he’d ever seen. James Coburn didn’t want to do it because it was going to be shot in Italy and he’d heard bad things about Italian directors. Clint took it for a fee of fifteen thousand dollars, but—and I emphasized this for Jesse—insisted on cutting down the script, thought it would be more interesting if the guy didn’t talk.
    â€œCan you guess why he did that?” I said.
    â€œSure. You imagine all sorts of things about a guy who doesn’t talk,” Jesse said. “The minute he opens his mouth, he shrinks a couple of sizes.”
    â€œExactly.”
    After a few distracted seconds, he added, “It’d be nice to be like that in real life.”
    â€œUh?”
    â€œNot talk so much. Be more mysterious. Girls like that.”
    â€œSome do, some don’t,” I said. “You’re a talker. Women love talkers, too.”
    Three years went by before Eastwood saw the finished film. By then he’d pretty much forgotten about it. He invited some pals to a private screening room and said, “This is probably going to be a real piece of shit, but let’s have a look.”
    A few minutes in, one of his pals said, “Ah, Clint, this is pretty good stuff.” A Fistful of Dollars revitalized the western, which had become, at this point, a kind of rest home for aging movie stars.
    After the film, I asked Jesse to indulge me, to allow us to revisit the rope scene with James Dean in Giant . Dean surrounded by slick businessmen trying to cut him a deal; Rock Hudson laying twelve hundred dollars on the table, “What’re you gonna do with all that money, Jed?” Everyone moving, talking, except Dean. Dean just sitting there. “Who steals the scene?” I asked. “Who steals the whole movie?”
    I even made a foray into television, Edward James Olmos as the black-suited police chief in Miami Vice (1984–89). I said, “This is a stupid, implausible show, but watch Olmos, it’s almost sleight of hand. By not moving, he appears to be in possession of a secret.”
    â€œWhat secret?”
    â€œThat’s the illusion of stillness. There is no secret. Only the implication of a possessor,” I said. I was starting to sound like a wine writer.
    I clicked off the DVD.
    â€œI wouldn’t mind seeing the rest of the show,” Jesse said. “Would that be okay?”
    So while the contractors banged and sawed and blow-torched the second floor of the condo (getting bigger every day) across the street, Jesse and I watched three consecutive episodes of Miami Vice . At one point, our neighbour Eleanor clomped past the window and glanced inside. I wondered what she was thinking, the two of us watching television day after day. I experienced a kind of cretinous desire to run after her, to say, But it’s not television, it’s movies . There was, I noticed in myself, an occasional, unattractive hurry toward