Event

I was fortunate enough to be invited to an event at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) last night, where Warner Bros put on a celebration for their thirty-five year filmmaking partners, Clint Eastwood. The occasion was the release of an incredible DVD box set, Clint Eastwood: 35 Films 35 Years at Warner Bros., which Amazon is currently selling for the steal of $129.99 -- basically three dollars and change per movie. A screening of the new documentary by Richard Schickel covering Clint's career at Warner Bros, The Eastwood Factor, was the centerpiece of the evening, followed by Schickel and Eastwood in a relatively brief Q&A.

While I did not get a chance to talk with Mr. Eastwood -- there were both former and current studio chiefs surrounding him most of the time, I did get a sense that he was enjoying himself, that he has a certain modesty as well as the twinkle of the artist in his eye. Soft-spoken but charismatic, his height and shock of white hair made it easy to spot him even with the crowds swarming around him.

I did, however, get a chance to speak for a minute or two with Morgan Freeman, who narrates the documentary, and whom Schickel introduced as "The Voice of America." Well-said. I used my moment to mention that I had, twenty-four years ago, driven Mr. Freeman home from the set of the movie Street Smart, on which I was a Production Assistant. While he did not remember our time in the car, I mentioned that he had been telling me about a recent workshop experience he had enjoyed at the Sundance Institute and he said he remembered Sundance. He also remembered the movie, of course, since it was his breakout role, bringing him his first Oscar nomination, in the Supporting Actor category -- one he would win two decades later thanks to Clint's direction of Million Dollar Baby.

This was actually the third time I was in the same place at the same time as Mr. Freeman, the first being on my first job after college, working at a music-for-television company. I spent a few days on the set of our client show, Another World, for which the company was handling music supervision, and noticed Morgan Freeman in his scenes because I remembered him having replaced Bill Cosby (as the tall black guy?) on PBS' The Electric Company somewhere in the mid-1970's.

(Yes, I was a little old to be watching it at the time, but that show was so darned entertaining!)

In any case, what struck me was all these elderly men at the event, many of whom have had great careers, some who surely have had their regrets, almost all of them retired -- save for Eastwood, Freeman and Schickel. Of their generation, those attendees are still a community unto themselves, still practicing their craft(s) with vitality and relevance, at ages to which others have not even survived.

I imagine these guys trust each other more than they do the young whippersnappers of 50 and even 60, and that they know as well as us how lucky they are to still be around and doing what they are doing.

Director/actor John Huston made his last film, the aptly named The Dead, while in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank at age 80, dying at 81 just a few months before the movie's release. French director Eric Rohmer just passed away at age 89, having released his final film (unless there's another in the vault) in 2007. And Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira released a movie last year and is in pre-production on another -- at age 101.

Clint Eastwood turns 80 on May 31st. If he has another ten, even twenty years left in him...another twenty films?