On Sunday, October 27, 2024, Clint Eastwood will premiere his fortieth feature directorial effort, “Juror #2,” at the American Film Institute Festival. This feels like a landmark number. It’s certainly a landmark achievement, given that Eastwood is 94 years old, an age at which most people are interred. So it’s frankly despicable that Warner Bros-Discovery, headed by noted enemy of cinema David Zaslav, has chosen to unceremoniously dump “Juror #2” on 50 screens over its opening weekend, with no plans for expansion or an awards campaign.
While it’s possible the film is not, in the eyes of its studio, an awards contender, it has a commercially viable hook (as evidenced by its compelling trailer) and a killer cast headed up by Nicholas Hoult. Moreover, it’s a film by Clint Eastwood, a man whose films have earned WB loads of money over the last 50-plus years. He’s had an office on the lot for nearly as long, and has essentially had a standing greenlight for any movie he wants to make provided he delivers it at a certain budget (which he always does). It’s a long-standing relationship built on trust, so WB-Discovery’s treatment of what could be his final movie strikes many as abhorrent. They might lose money on a theatrical release of “Juror #2,” but it’d be a pittance compared to the hundreds of millions they threw away giving Todd Phillips final cut on “Joker: Folie à Deux.”
Contrast this with how Universal Pictures treated Alfred Hitchcock as he neared retirement age. He wasn’t knocking out masterpieces like “Psycho” or “Marnie” for the studio anymore in the 1970s, but his films were low-risk endeavors, and, most importantly, he was Alfred Hitchcock. As long as he could withstand the rigors of filmmaking, Universal would greenlight his projects and give them a robust theatrical release.
Considering Hitchcock’s rep for working with the biggest stars in Hollywood (e.g. Cary Grant, James Stewart and Grace Kelly), you might wonder if his path ever came close to crossing with Clint Eastwood’s. It did! But Eastwood turned him down for one wholly understandable reason.
A legendary pairing wasn’t in the stars because it wasn’t on the page
Once Eastwood became a movie megastar with the runaway success of “Dirty Harry,” he rarely loaned himself out to other directors (which is one of several reasons Wolfgang Petersen’s “In the Line of Fire” remains a minor miracle). But he was savvy and respectful enough to at least listen to the Master of Suspense when he inquired after the star’s availability.
If nothing else, Eastwood got a memorable meeting out of it, talking with Hitchcock about a movie that the famed director ultimately never made, and Eastwood didn’t like the script anyway. As the star told Entertainment Weekly:
“Hitchcock wanted me to be in one of his films [which, it turned out, would never be made]. I wasn’t nuts about the script. I had lunch with him in his office. When I walked in, he was sitting there very erect and he didn’t even move. Only his eyes did. They followed you across the room. He had the same thing for lunch every day — a steak and some sliced tomatoes.”
Looking over Hitchcock’s oeuvre, it’s hard to find a movie that would’ve been a good match for Eastwood. “Notorious,” which /Film considers a top-five Hitch, might’ve been a fascinating fit. He could’ve pulled off the romance, and would’ve brought a harder edge to Cary Grant’s manipulative protagonist. He also would’ve been interesting as Tippi Hedren’s psychiatrist in “Marnie,” though he lacked Sean Connery’s suavity.
It would’ve been cool to see Hitch and Clint hook up even if it wasn’t a classic — if only for the potential behind-the-scenes fireworks had the master played his infamous mind games with his star. Alas, we’ll never know.