Whose Movie Is It Anyway?

A couple of showings ago in the Moviehouse, we took a look back at the controversy over who really directed “Poltergeist” in 1982. Tobe Hooper, brought on board on the strength of his work on the original “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and the miniseries “Salem’s Lot,” received the screen credit as director, but it’s no secret that producer Steven Spielberg, who conceived the project in the first place and co-wrote the screenplay, was a daily visitor on the set.

 

"Creative producer" Steven Spielberg "visits" James Karen
and Craig T. Nelson on the set of "Poltergeist."

Since Spielberg was preparing to shoot “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” he was contractually prevented from directing another movie, but that didn’t prevent him from influencing Hooper as, in his own words, a “creative producer.” “Tobe was very much involved,” a studio supervisor recalled, “but Steven was the creative force…his stamp is on the film.” “This film was his baby,” “Poltergeist” costar JoBeth Williams said of Spielberg.

 

Tobe Hooper (far left) directs Oliver Robins and the tree monster in "Poltergeist"

Just whose baby a motion picture is has been a frequently asked question in the Moviehouse, especially when the credited director is suspected of being a shadow or a puppet of a more domineering presence on the set.

The 1949 thriller “The Third Man” has often been thought of as being directed by Orson Welles, onetime Hollywood boy wonder who, in 1941, directed and starred in “Citizen Kane,” deemed by many critics and film buffs the greatest movie ever made.

“The Third Man” was, in fact, directed by Carol Reed, a British filmmaker who later won an Academy Award for directing “Oliver!” Much ado about nothing and virtually plotless, “The Third Man” is set in post-World War II Vienna, Austria, a black market hotbed precariously policed by an international force representing the occupying American, British, French, and Russian allies. The threadbare script (penned by the acclaimed novelist Graham Greene) has something to do with an American author of cowboy pulp summoned to Vienna by a childhood friend named Harry Lime, who turns out to be a suspected criminal, presumed to have been killed in a car accident.

A textbook example of style over substance, “The Third Man” has somehow been long regarded as a classic of film noir. There is no denying Orson Welles’ cinematic influence on the film: the wide-angle, deep-focus black-and-white photography, the off-kilter camera angles, the presence of Joseph Cotten (an original member of Welles’ storied Mercury Theatre company), and the surprise appearance, more than halfway into the picture, of Welles himself as Harry Lime.

 

Orson Welles makes his celebrated first appearance in "The Third Man."

One internet reviewer observed that “it’s not really surprising to see Welles-inspired shots in ‘The Third Man’…After all, isn’t ‘Citizen Kane’ supposed to be the film that inspired more people to become film directors than any other movie? Therefore…any director having Welles acting in their film would be prone to pay homage to Welles’ style of directing.”

 

Joseph Cotten stands before Vienna's world-famous Riesenrad Ferris wheel in
"The Third Man." The movie was criticized for its overuse of  distracting, tilted
camera angles. American director William Wyler, Carol Reed's close friend,
sent Reed a carpenter's level with a note reading, "Carol, next time you make
a picture, just put it on top of the camera, will you?"

One contribution Orson Welles did make to “The Third Man” was Harry Lime’s “cuckoo clock” speech, head-scratchingly inconsequential, with nothing to do with anything else in the movie, but that hasn’t stopped it from being a fan favorite. Lime tells his friend, “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” In the 1992 book This Is Orson Welles, co-written by Peter Bogdanovich, Welles admitted, “When the picture came out, the Swiss very nicely pointed out to me that they’ve never made any cuckoo clocks.” The cuckoo clock originated in Germany’s Black Forest region.

For a film not directed by Orson Welles that nonetheless cast his inimitable shadow, one need to only go back six years prior to “Third Man” for a screening of “Journey Into Fear” (1943), a spy thriller featuring Joseph Cotten as an American armaments engineer caught up in wartime intrigue in Istanbul. Welles, who portrays the imposing colonel of the Turkish secret police, produced the film and co-wrote the screenplay (with Cotten) but never intended to direct it.

In a contract he signed with RKO Pictures after “Citizen Kane,” Welles was allowed to direct a considerable expensive production in which he would not act (resulting in “The Magnificent Ambersons,” featuring Joseph Cotten) in exchange for a bread-and-butter picture that he would not direct but in which he and his stock company of Mercury Theatre actors could appear.

From his days with the Mercury Theatre in New York City, Welles intended to nurture directors, and for “Journey Into Fear,” he selected Norman Foster, a journeyman filmmakers with a number of “Mr. Moto” and “Charlie Chan” cheapies to his credit (pictured above). Foster never again came close to the stylistic look of “Journey Into Fear,” subsequently finding his niche in 1950s and 1960s television. Turner Classic Movies’ Paul Tatara noted, “Anyone who’s familiar with Welles’ expressionistic shooting style will see his fingerprints all over ‘Journey Into Fear.’”

In what could be called a directors’ hybrid, Norman Foster was nominally in charge of “Journey Into Fear” while Welles would make improvements as he saw fit. According to Paul Tatara, “One memorable sequence…on a building ledge in a rainstorm, is almost certainly (Welles’) handiwork. Welles argued this away, however, by saying that the actors and crew were all standing on a cramped, dangerously high ledge, so the scene was directed by ‘whoever was nearest the camera.’”

Orson Welles portrays Col. Haki of the Turkish secret police in "Journey into Fear."

“Welles,” Tatara observed, “had a propensity toward re-inventing his own past, so that might explain his insistence that he was mostly a producer and screenwriter on ‘Journey Into Fear.’” Welles maintained, “My influence on ‘Journey Into Fear’ is so exaggerated.” He recalled when Norman Foster had him removed from the set when he and costar Joseph Cotten couldn’t stop cracking up during a scene.

Welles later said, “For the first five sequences, I was on the set and deciding angles. From then on, I often said where to put the camera, described the framings, made light tests.” In other words, “I designed the film but can’t properly be called the director.”

RKO promptly re-edited “Journey Into Fear” in Welles’ absence before releasing it in the summer of 1942. Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that the film was “ruined by the cutting. It was horrible what they did with what should have been a very decent picture. Good cast and everything.”

"Journey Into Fear" reunited Orson Welles (far right) with his Mercury Theatre
players and "Citizen Kane" costars Joseph Cotten and Everett Sloane.

Welles and Cotten wrote the screenplay as “the opposite of an action picture,” but the studio “took out everything that made it interesting except the action, trying desperately to turn it into an action” film, making, in the end, “quite a lot of nothing about it.” Welles threatened to sue RKO but conceded to re-cutting the last reel, shooting a new ending, and adding narration by Cotten. The revised version, all 69 minutes of it, was released without fanfare in February 1943.

“’Journey Into Fear’ may be a misfire,” TCM’s Paul Tatara remarked, “but it’s quite unlike anything else that was released in 1942. And we have Orson Welles to thank for that…even if he was loathe to admit it.”

By all rights, Howard Hawks should have been given the screen credit for directing “The Thing from Another World,” a 1951 science-fiction scare fest about a bloodthirsty alien terrorizing a remote Arctic scientific outpost. Based on John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There? – a verbose 1938 novella told mostly through dialogue – the story was more faithfully adhered to, including its Antarctic setting, in director John Carpenter’s 1982 remake “The Thing.” The 1951 film played on the post-atom bomb skepticism about science meddling in matters best left alone.

Howard Hawks was a multi-talented filmmaker, equally adept at directing Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in the film noir classics “To Have and Have Not” and “The Big Sleep,” Cary Grant in such screwball comedies as “Bringing Up Baby,” “His Girl Friday,” and “Monkey Business,” and John Wayne in the westerns “Red River,” “Rio Bravo,” and “El Dorado.” In the 1950s, however, science fiction wasn’t exactly a respected genre for a director of Hawks’ renown, so the story goes that he hired Christian Nyby (an editor who worked with Hawks on “To Have and Have Not,” “The Big Sleep,” and “Red River”) so the latter could receive membership in the Directors Guild of America. RKO Pictures director’s salary was $50,000. Hawks paid Nyby $5,460 and kept the rest, but Hawks always denied directing the film.

No matter who got the credit, "The Thing from Another World" bears a number
of director Howard Hawks' unmistakable trademarks, inluding: an ensemble of
disparate characters (predominantly male) trapped in an isolated situation who
unite to fend off a common foe; female characters who are treated as just one of
the guys (typified as "Hawksian women"); and snappy, overlapping dialogue.

George Fenneman (best known as Groucho Marx’s sidekick on the comedy quiz show “You Bet Your Life”), who played one of the Arctic scientists, recalled, “Hawks would once in a while direct, if he had an idea, but it was Chris’ show.” Actor Robert O. Cornthwaite said that “Chris always deferred to Hawks…Maybe because he did defer to him, people misinterpreted it.” Costar William Self maintained, “Hawks was directing the picture from the sidelines…Chris would stage each scene, how to play it. But then he would go over to Howard and ask him for advice, which the actors did not hear…Even though I was there every day, I don’t think any of us can answer the question. Only Chris and Howard can answer the question.”

(Left) director Howard Hawks; (right) "The Thing" director (sort of) Christian Nyby

At a reunion of “The Thing from Another World” cast and crew members in 1982, Christian Nyby said, “Did Hawks direct it? That’s one of the most inane and ridiculous questions I’ve ever heard, and people keep asking. That it was Hawks’ style. Of course it was. This is a man I studied and wanted to be like. You would certainly emulate and copy the master you’re sitting under, which I did. Anyway, if you’re taking painting lessons from Rembrandt, you don’t take the brush out of the master’s hands.” Incidentally, after “The Thing from Another World,” Nyby’s output as a director amounted to several episodes of numerous TV series.

James Arness (pictured above as the titular "Thing from Another World") said that
while Hawks spent a lot of time on the set, it was Nyby who actually directed the film.

William Self summed up, “Chris was the director in our eyes, but Howard was the boss in our eyes.”

Speaking of bosses, actor David Janssen once said, “Nobody runs roughshod over John Wayne.” If there was one person who could run roughshod over John Wayne, it was John Ford. The only director the actor allowed himself to be pushed around by, Ford transformed the Duke from the hero of routine matinee westerns into a bona fide movie star. Ford directed Wayne in 24 motion pictures and a handful of television programs, so it only seemed natural that when Wayne decided to take the giant step and direct his first big-budget movie, 1960’s “The Alamo,” his old mentor would visit the production.

Inspired by the legendary defense of the Alamo Mission in what would become San Antonio by 260 or so “Texians” against a 13-day siege by a force of 1,800 Mexican troops, the epic saga (which involved the construction of an authentic, three quarter-scale replica of the Alamo in Bracketville, Texas, 125 miles west of San Antonio) would feature Wayne as Tennessee frontiersman Davy Crockett, movie tough guy Richard Widmark as folk hero Jim Bowie, and Laurence Harvey (best known as “poor friendless, friendless Raymond” in the original “The Manchurian Candidate”) as Col. William Travis.

Richard Widmark, Linda Cristal, Laurence Harvey,
and John Wayne relax on the set of "The Alamo."

According to several of those involved with the film, John Wayne was an intelligent and talented director, despite a weakness for screenwriter James Edward Grant’s long-winded, patriotic dialogue. Even on the screen, Col. Travis grows weary of Davy’s rambling “speechifyin’,” admonishing, “Please, Crockett, no homespun wisdom, no cracker-barrel philosophy, none of your backwoods wit for which you are famous.”

Randy Roberts and James S. Olson, authors of A Line in the Sand: The Alamo in Blood and Memory, described Wayne’s directing as “competent but not outstanding.” Richard Widmark carped that Wayne tried to tell him how to play his part which often went against his interpretation of the character. Wayne would refer to Widmark as “Dick” until the latter icily said, “It’s Richard.” Wayne went on to sarcastically emphasize the name: “Are you ready for the next take, Richard?” Costar Ken Curtis (a member of John Ford’s stock company of players who also happened to be Ford’s son-in-law) remarked that Wayne had no ability to motivate an actor for a scene.

When the student is ready the teacher will appear: John Wayne demonstrates
to his mentor, John Ford, how to aim a musket on the set of "The Alamo."
(Not pictured: Ol' Betsy)

John Ford arrived uninvited on the set of “The Alamo” and attempted to exert unasked for influence on the production. John Wayne felt sorry for the old director nicknamed “Pappy” and sent him off to film second-unit photography of the Mexican cavalry riding through the countryside as they approached the Alamo. Virtually none of Ford’s footage was used. It was re-filmed by a second unit director, but Wayne didn’t have the heart to tell Ford. Nevertheless, John Ford has often been erroneously described as an uncredited co-director of “The Alamo.”

Eight years later, John Wayne did share the directing credit for his second time behind the camera, on “The Green Berets,” an overblown, anti-communist, flag-waving paean to U.S. Army Special Forces in the Vietnam War. In John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth, author Michael Munn noted, “There’s one particularly curious thing about the film’s behind-the-scenes personnel. The credits say that the film was directed by John Wayne and Ray Kellogg.” When the writer asked Jim Hutton (the comic relief in the film as a light-fingered Army specialist) who Ray Kellogg was, the actor replied, “Ah, the director of great classics such as ‘The Killer Shrews’ and ‘The Giant Gila Monster.’ What rare additions to the art of motion picture making they are.”

Whenever Munn asked other cast and crew members what Kellogg’s contribution to the movie was, the response was, “Who’s Ray Kellogg?” Munn wrote, “Nobody has been able to convince me so far that Ray Kellogg actually had any hand in the making of ‘The Green Berets.’” Nonetheless, John Wayne commented, “What can I say about Ray Kellogg and ‘The Green Berets’? Without him, my career would not be what it is today.”

John Wayne directs "The Green Berets." (Not pictured: Ray Kellogg)

As a matter of fact, Warner Bros. dispatched a third director to work on “The Green Berets,” which, according to Jim Hutton, “caused problems for Duke.” The new director was Mervyn LeRoy, who had directed John Wayne in the 1946 romantic comedy “Without Reservations.” (In 1955, LeRoy was brought on board to finish “Mister Roberts” when original director John Ford was fired after butting heads with stars Henry Fonda and James Cagney.) Even though LeRoy was retired, studio head Jack Warner told him, “We’ve got six million dollars riding on this picture, and I don’t think Wayne is coping well.”

David Janssen, who portrayed a skeptical newspaper reporter accompanying the Special Forces, recalled, “Duke tried to forget he had another director there and he’d get on with giving the orders…Mervyn LeRoy would walk over and make some suggestion…and Duke would nod his head, but I could see he wasn’t paying any attention, and then Duke would get the scene the way he wanted it. I think Mervyn LeRoy just went through the motions to keep Warner happy…he didn’t want his name on the credits.”

Mervyn LeRoy (on the ground) checks out the camera
angle while John Wayne oversees the action
on the set of "The Green Berets."

At the end of what LeRoy described as “a very tough production for both of us,” he told Wayne, “Take my advice. Forget directing and give your fans what they want – John Wayne on the screen beating the shit out of the bad guy.” And that’s just what Duke did the next year in “True Grit,” garnering the sole acting Oscar of his career.

The closest Steve McQueen came to a Best Actor Academy Award was a nomination for his intense performance as a U.S. Navy machinist’s mate aboard a gunboat in 1920s China in “The Sand Pebbles” (1966). Like Clint Eastwood on the ‘60s western series “Rawhide,” Steve McQueen embarked on the path to big-screen superstardom as the star of a TV western, “Wanted: Dead or Alive” (1959-1961). And not unlike Eastwood, McQueen warily paid close attention to what went on behind the camera, hoping, as Clint did on “Rawhide,” for an opportunity to direct an episode.

Flash-forward nearly two decades: “Tom Horn” was initially written by William Goldman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “All the President’s Men,” for Robert Redford, who would be directed by Don Siegel (“Dirty Harry”).

One of the last of the Old West’s legendary gunfighters, the real-life Tom Horn (pictured below) was a former cavalryman and scout, a fluent Indian interpreter and peerless tracker during the Apache campaign who was among the handful of men who captured Geronimo in 1886. Near the turn of the century, Horn became a “stock detective” on behalf of ranchers in Wyoming, bringing harsh frontier justice to rustlers with his crack marksmanship. In 1903, he was hanged for the shooting of a rancher’s teenage son, a crime he most likely did not commit.

Robert Redford dropped out of the “Tom Horn” project (more than likely opting instead to star opposite Jane Fonda in “The Electric Horseman”), and when Steve McQueen was signed to star, Don Siegel was replaced by director Elliott Silverstein (best known for directing Richard Harris in “A Man Called Horse”). McQueen also scrapped William Goldman’s script, which was promptly used for the two-part made-for-television movie “Mr. Horn,” starring David Carradine, Richard Widmark, and Karen Black, and broadcast prior to the theatrical release of “Tom Horn.” (In his 2001 memoir Which Lie Did I Tell?  William Goldman admitted he “couldn’t bring himself” to ever seeing “Mr. Horn,” writing, “This was one of my bad experiences.”)

David Carradine played Tom Horn in "Mr. Horn," costarring Karen Black.

Director Elliott Silverstein was replaced by James William Guercio, a music producer noted for promoting Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago who dabbled in the film industry as the producer-director of 1973’s “Electra Glide in Blue,” which could be described as the flipside of “Easy Rider,” with Robert Blake as an Arizona motorcycle cop. After three days of filming, Guercio was summarily fired by McQueen, who, by this time, wanted to direct himself, but Directors Guild of America regulations forbade actors from taking over directing once a film had begun production. William Wiard, a journeyman television director, was brought in to, at least for appearances sake, finish the film. A co-producer recalled, “We started thinking it was going to be a $10 million epic, and it ended up being a $3 million TV movie.”

During the filming of “Tom Horn,” McQueen (pictured above) became aware of a persistent cough. After the production wrapped, he learned he was dying of malignant mesothelioma. A reviewer for the website dvdverdict.com observed, “The sight of a dying McQueen playing the doomed Horn is both ironic and poignant.” The actor had earlier told director of photography John Alonzo (a former actor who played a Mexican peasant in “The Magnificent Seven,” Steve McQueen’s breakout movie) that it was his destiny to tell the story of Horn. One wonders if he knew something was very wrong with him and was fashioning the film into an epitaph for himself.

Steve McQueen calls the shots on the set of "Tom Horn."

There is little question about who was really directing “Tom Horn” – Steve McQueen - a man, in the words of Western Films author Brian Garfield, “deaf and ill and hardly competent to direct a major film.” The movie was a box office and critical disappointment. Garfield noted, “It was largely (McQueen’s) meddling that caused the picture to be such a botch.”

In her 1986 memoir My Husband, My Friend, McQueen’s former wife, Neile Toffel, wrote, “Steve’s biggest problem was his inability to trust someone else’s judgment. He’d relegate responsibility and then he would take it away.” When he worked with strong directors, the likes of John Sturges (“The Magnificent Seven,” “The Great Escape”), Robert Wise (“The Sand Pebbles”), and Peter Yates (“Bulitt”), Neile said “his contributions to the success of his movies could be enormous.” When he was left to fend for himself, “charged with making all the final decisions,” Neile pointed out, “his 360s were in great part to blame for his failures.”

“’Tom Horn’ suffered from too many writers and too many directors,” Neile summed up. “Steve was a stickler for details in all his movies. Unfortunately, he carried it to such an extreme” that the film “suffered under the weight of all that detail.”

On the other hand, James Coburn, who costarred with Steve McQueen in three films (“The Magnificent Seven,” “Hell Is for Heroes,” “The Great Escape”), as well as in three episodes of “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” noted, “I thought ‘Tom Horn’ was McQueen’s best film. He was loose and free…I always felt that Steve would really be a good actor if he ever grew up…I think he finally did on ‘Tom Horn.’ That was him finding his adulthood.”

After Clint Eastwood fired director Philip Kaufman and took over directing “The Outlaw Josey Wales” himself - in Eastwood’s words, he “didn’t want it to be done the way (Kaufman) was going to interpret it, and (Kaufman) didn’t want to do it the way I wanted to do it” – the Directors Guild of America instituted a rule, which became known as the “Eastwood Rule,” forbidding the replacement of a guild member engaged for a film by anyone working in any capacity on the same picture.

Presumably, this was the rule that prevented Steve McQueen from officially taking over as the director of “Tom Horn,” and in 1983, the rule would prevent Clint Eastwood from formally replacing first-time director Richard Tuggle during the filming of “Tightrope.” The film, not unlike “The Gauntlet” a few years earlier (which found Clint playing a down-and-on-his-way-out alcoholic cop), cast Eastwood as a tarnished detective, a divorced father of two daughters with a dark obsession for kinky diversions, tracking down a serial killer with a penchant for sex club prostitutes.

Detective Wes Block (Clint Eastwood) flirts with rape prevention advocate
Beryl Thibodeaux (Genevieve Bujold) in "Tightrope."

Richard Tuggle, a film buff and Florida native living in San Francisco had been working as an editor of a professional health magazine while entertaining ambitions to become a screenwriter. “ Escape from Alcatraz” was the first screenplay he attempted. It was filmed in 1979 by director Don Siegel, starring Clint Eastwood.  Tuggle, who scripted “Tightrope,” purportedly came to the production uncertain of what he wanted and equally unprepared for the technical demands of filmmaking, both of which were cardinal sins in the eyes of the ever-efficient Eastwood.

An apprehensive Richard Tuggle attempts to direct Clint Eastwood in "Tightrope."

As noted by author Richard Schickel, in Clint Eastwood, “A compromise was worked out. The writer would stay on, contribute what he could in a collaboration and receive directorial credit, while (Eastwood), literally, called most of the shots.”

Tuggle, who viewed Eastwood as “a very complex person who had many different facets,” understood that he was an untried director serving under Eastwood’s good will, and that “his clout far out-equaled mine.” Tuggle admitted, “The politics on the set made me uneasy, but artistically, I liked working with Clint. He was smart, accessible and open to ideas.” According to Tuggle, “Some scenes were done kind of by me. Some scenes were done kind of by him, and most of them were done together…We’d have ideas together, but it was his crew and they would basically be listening more to him, than to me.”

Clint Eastwood's 11-year-old daughter, Alison Eastwood, portrayed his onscreen
daughter in "Tightrope." Richard Tuggle willingly surrendered to Eastwood's
control, especially in scenes involving Alison. Tuggle recalled, "I basically withdrew
because I could sense the nervousness Cllint had with her. I did not particularly
want to get in the middle of that."

Tuggle recalled, “This movie was walking a tightrope of its own. It’s trying to appeal to a wide commercial Clint audience, and at the same time do something different and take chances.”

Richard Tuggle, incidentally, would direct only one other feature, “Out of Bounds,” a 1986 action thriller featuring former Brat Packer and original Rusty Griswold from “National Lampoon’s Vacation” Anthony Michael Hall as an Iowa farm boy mixed up with a drug kingpin in Los Angeles. In 1990, Tuggle co-wrote the teleplay for an episode of the HBO series “Tales from the Crypt” (directed by, of all people, Arnold Schwarzenegger) before dropping off the show business radar.

After hinting that his role in 2008’s “Gran Torino” would be his last performance in front of the camera, Clint Eastwood surprised fans by returning to acting four years later in the modest drama “Trouble with the Curve,” portraying a grizzled Major League Baseball scout who attempts to reconnect with his estranged daughter, played by Amy Adams.

John Goodman, Amy Adams, and Clint Eastwood star in "Trouble with the Curve."

The film was also notable for the fact that Eastwood didn’t direct it – the first time he let someone else direct him since 1993’s “In the Line of Fire,” which was directed by Wolfgang Petersen (“Troy”). The task fell to Eastwood’s longtime producing partner Robert Lorenz, making his debut as a director. (Most recently, Lorenz co-produced "Jersey Boys" and "American Sniper" with Eastwood.)

Unlike Richard Tuggle’s experience with Eastwood on “Tightrope,” Lorenz told the Chicago Tribune, “I want to set myself apart and set up my own style. He’s let other people in his organization direct before and some had their own vision. In other cases it felt like, we’ll just let someone else drive for a while. I didn’t want to be locked into that category. And there was also the concern that he might want to – or insist on – imposing his own style.”

Lorenz commented in the Chicago Tribune interview, “Clint is very much his own man, his own artist…We don’t agree on everything. We don’t agree entirely on film styles or politics…But we both love moviemaking, that’s where we bond. I knew exactly how I wanted to shoot this. If I had shown any uncertainty, he might have felt compelled to step in…There were a couple moments where he had an idea and I had a different idea and everybody was sort of looking back and forth at us. But we worked it out. We did it my way.”

Robert Lorenz directs Clint Eastwood his way in "Trouble with the Curve." 

Lorenz said of Eastwood, “He’s a fun guy to work with, but I often say, it’s not that there’s no ego on Clint’s set, it’s just that everybody knows who’s at the top, you know?”