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Hollywood Spin
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Hometown Scoop
Former Los Angeles TV anchorwoman Kirstie Wilde scores an exclusive interview with Clint Eastwood about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s run for Governor in The Carmel Pine Cone.
Wednesday, August 20, 2003
By Richard Horgan
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Although Clint Eastwood was quick to agree to an interview with Kirstie Wilde following Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision to run for Governor of California, the comments that appear in this week’s edition of The Carmel Pine Conemay well turn out to be his first and last official pronouncements on the matter.
Eastwood has turned down subsequent interview requests from The San Jose Mercury News for a follow-up story and will likely sidestep the issue during any upcoming publicity duties for his latest directorial effort Mystic River, which is scheduled to be released the day after the historic recall vote on October 7th. It’s even possible the marketing folks at Warner Bros. will instruct entertainment journalists not to ask Eastwood any questions about Schwarzenegger’s political aspirations.
“Be careful what you wish for,” Eastwood tells Schwarzenegger in Wilde’s 1,000-word article. “When all the excitement dies down, Arnold may decide this is a horrible time to be Governor of California. Huge deficits, the Senate and Assembly dominated by Democrats - it's a very tough time to take over."
Nevertheless, Eastwood is confident that Schwarzenegger will attack the campaign trail with as much confidence as he has brought to his other pursuits, something the actor says he did himself in Carmel back in 1986 when he ran in the face of polls predicting his certain defeat. This, says Eastwood, is the natural byproduct of having a winner’s mentality.
But perhaps the most interesting point Eastwood makes in the article is that, in this post-Clinton tabloid era, people are likely to be fed up with the steady diet of scandalous tales about a candidate’s past.
“If the tabloids say Arnold had an affair with a German shepherd or something, I don't know if people will pay much attention,” says Eastwood, whose legal battles with former girlfriend Sondra Locke once kept American Media’s Florida-based supermarket rags humming. “The tabloids will be all over his past, but the majority of the people who read the tabloids probably don't vote.”
In reading the piece in the August 15th-21st issue of The Carmel Pine Cone, one can almost hear the wheels turning in Eastwood’s mind as he realizes the more he talks about Schwarzenegger’s candidacy, the more complicated it all becomes. For example, Eastwood mentions that while he is personally against the idea of a recall vote, he refuses to take sides in the matter, partly because he is currently serving on the state’s Parks and Recreations board, to which he was appointed by Gray Davis in 2000.
| Sure enough, Eastwood continues to think out loud in the piece, suggesting that "nobody has asked me about this (recall) thing and I'm not going to volunteer. I think I will just stay out of it."
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Like Schwarzenegger, Eastwood waited until the very last minute before announcing his intention in 1986 to run for mayor of Carmel and gave no interviews to the national press, something Schwarzenegger will be hard pressed to duplicate but which so far matches the general tenor of his own approach to the media.
Eastwood was 55 when he beat out incumbent Charlotte Townsend 2,166 votes to 799. Schwarzenegger is currently 56 years old. Eastwood’s famous Dirty Harry movie catchphrase "Make my day" was put to good use on bumper stickers and T-shirts urging voters to back him. Schwarzenegger of course has already resurrected punch lines such as “I’ll be back” and “Hasta la vista, baby.”
| Meanwhile, in a September 2001 speech at the Sacramento Chamber of Commerce’s annual Perspectives Conference, Schwarzenegger extended the parallels between himself and Eastwood to the personal arena as well.
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“You know, even Maria's parents didn't think I could make it,” Schwarzenegger recalled. “I told the Shrivers that I was going to be a number-one box office star some day, like Clint Eastwood. They said that was very, very lovely, but didn't I think I should have a fallback - like a nice Master's Degree in nutrition? They were worried about their daughter's security.”
“Of course, as soon as the first movie started taking off, they said: ‘Way to go!’ And they've been behind me 100% ever since!” Schwarzenegger continued.
Wilde and her husband Paul Miller, who worked closely with Maria Shriver back in the 1980s during his days as a TV producer at NBC’s headquarters in Burbank, moved from Los Angeles to Carmel in 1989 to escape the hubbub of the big city. From 1980 to 1988, Wilde appeared as a newscaster on KBNC TV’s Channel 4 alongside John Beard, Fred Roggin, Fritz Coleman and others.
| Miller says Shriver’s familiarity with the dynamics of a full blown media circus and her ability to urge Democrats to put aside party lines, as she did from the steps of the County Registrar’s office when Schwarzenegger was submitting his official paperwork, are both formidable advantages.
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“Basically, after Arnold announced his intention to run on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Kirstie called up Clint’s office for an interview and he returned the call shortly thereafter,” says Miller. “Since we bought the paper in 1997, we’ve developed a pretty good relationship with him and he spoke to us I think mainly from the point of view of the local paper of record.”
Eastwood also somewhat fortuitously happened to be in Carmel at the time. Not long after the interview, he was involved in a decision to pull Mystic River from its official screening at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in Scotland for some post-production fine-tuning. Chances are that had he not been reached by Wilde in the immediate aftermath of Schwarzenegger’s announcement, his schedule or even his desire not to address the issue would have taken precedence.
| When reached by Hollywood Spin, Steve Wright, Deputy Managing Editor of The San Jose Mercury News, confirmed that although Eastwood has done interviews with the newspaper in the past, he made it clear to them in this instance that he would be offering no further comment on the Schwarzenegger candidacy.
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“I’m not sure why he decided to talk to The Carmel Pine Cone and why he then decided to stop talking,” says Wright. “Maybe he realized that anything more he said would risk being perceived as more about him than about Arnold, and that he doesn’t want to detract from his friend’s efforts right now.”
As Schwarzenegger’s first TV ads debut on August 20th, it’s likely he will summon Eastwood at some point to the Sacramento mansion if elected. Let’s just hope it’s not to discuss how he can make movies while being Governor. After all, Eastwood managed that trick back in the day not once but twice, taking time away from the mayor’s office to make Heartbreak Ridge and Bird.
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