ABSTRACT
By 1968, due to the huge popular success of the spaghetti westerns, Clint Eastwood had become a major star and box-office draw, and he has, of course, remained so to the present. His films-certainly nearly all those in which he has performed and most of those which he has directed-are simply and phenomenally successful in industry terms. As of January 1988 (up to and including the release of Heartbreak Ridge), no fewer than twenty-eight of the pictures in which Eastwood has appeared were included on Variety’s list of alltime domestic hits. According to Variety’s figures, those films made returns of almost $457 million in the United States and Canada, beginning in 1964 with, appropriately enough, A Fistful of Dollars, and even many of the older ones continue to bring in significant profits: for instance, Every Which Way but Loose, after having netted $48 million in the first three years of its release, added almost another $4 million between 1981 and 1988. It is hard to think of another Hollywood figure of the last quarter of a century who could be the catalyst for such consistent box-office earnings. And these earnings are all the more astounding when set against the cost of most of Eastwood’s movies. His directorial debut, Play Misty for Me, was budgeted at less than $1 million and has brought in about five or six times that amount in domestic returns since 1971. This is a ratio that is probably about the norm for his work-although the earnings for his most successful movie, Every Which Way but Loose (1978), relatively expensive to make at $3-5 million, come in at about $87 million worldwide, a staggering 2500 percent return.1 Even the more expensive movies in which he has been involved, like Firefox and its $18 million budget, turn significant profits.2
