<\/p>\n
There was a good decade-long stretch, from the 1970s into the 1980s, when Clint Eastwood was the most sought-after movie star in Hollywood. His name at the top of the cast sheet triggered an instant greenlight. There was just one catch: Eastwood developed his own material and made his movies through The Malpaso Company. The only time Eastwood loaned himself out after he’d become a cinema icon was for Wolfgang Petersen’s crackerjack thriller “In the Line of Fire”<\/a> \u2014 which paid off for everyone, as the movie was a box office smash and featured one of the star’s finest performances.<\/p>\n As the 1980s approached, Eastwood was growing more and more interested in directing himself, but he still had a crowd-pleasing instinct that led him to make low-aiming comedies and actioners that he could entrust to one of his assistant directors. Eastwood’s redneck hoots, “Every Which Way But Loose”<\/a> and “Any Which Way You Can” were handed off, respectively, to longtime assistant director James Fargo and stunt coordinator Buddy Van Horn. The latter also called the shots on the last Dirty Harry movie, “The Dead Pool,” and the skip-tracer romp “Pink Cadillac.” Further down the road, Eastwood let Malpaso producer\/AD Robert Lorenz direct the very bad baseball movie “Trouble with the Curve.”<\/p>\n To be fair to Lorenz, “Trouble with the Curve” stinks on ice because it misunderstands the game of baseball. Technically, it’s a sturdy piece of filmmaking. So when Lorenz departed Malpaso after 2014’s “American Sniper,” it’s not surprising that he found career traction by making Eastwood-esque action programmers with Liam Neeson.<\/p>\n