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Credit: Far Out \/ Beat Albrecht<\/p>\n
Sun 26 July 2026 17:45, UK <\/p>\n
Whenever someone is told not to do something, it often makes them want to do it more, which is exactly how Clint Eastwood<\/a> felt when he was advised against making a movie.<\/p>\n This being Clint Eastwood, he couldn\u2019t have given less of a shit, so he made it anyway. While his team was busy chewing their fingernails in fear that their meal ticket had made a disastrous, potentially career-killing decision, the actor and filmmaker had a feeling he\u2019d be laughing all the way to the bank.<\/p>\n Back in his Rawhide days, the show\u2019s Rowdy Yates wanted to direct. Unfortunately, when another cast member on another show<\/a> had helmed an episode to calamitous effect, that pumped the brakes on those ambitions, so he had to patiently bide his time for another decade and a half.<\/p>\n When the script for Unforgiven hit his desk, Eastwood sat on it for almost ten years, and when he finally pulled it out of a drawer and brought it to the big screen, it became his magnum opus<\/a>. With that in mind, it goes without saying that if he says he\u2019s going to do something, you can be damn sure he\u2019ll do it.<\/p>\n However, nobody expected that something to be co-starring in a buddy caper with a primate. Sandwiched in between the Dirty Harry sequel, The Gauntlet, and Don Siegel\u2019s atmospheric prison break thriller, Escape from Alcatraz, the star fancied a much lighter change of pace.<\/p>\n \u201cSome people think you\u2019re crazy,\u201d he noted, and you get why the representatives of an actor who was best known and had become a bankable star by headlining a string of gritty thrillers were concerned that yukking it up in a family-friendly frolic where he shared top billing with an orangutan could have gone south.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery advisor I had said, \u2018Don\u2019t do the orangutan movie,’\u201d Eastwood remembered. \u201cDon\u2019t do Every Which Way but Loose. You can\u2019t do this. This is not you.\u2019 I said, \u2018Nothing\u2019s me, I\u2019m just plain.\u2019 I said, \u2018There\u2019s something hip about a guy who tells his troubles to an orangutan, loses the girl, goes on, and loses the fight.\u201d<\/p>\n Further reading: Cutting Room Floor<\/p>\n His mind was made up; he\u2019d play the Philo Beddoe to his hirsute cohort Manis\u2019 Clyde, and that was that. His definition of \u2018hip\u2019 might have been debatable at best, and the movie was hardly a smash hit with critics, but wouldn\u2019t you know it; audiences couldn\u2019t get enough<\/a> of their odd-couple antics.<\/p>\n Every Which Way but Loose made over $100million at the box office in the United States alone, and when you adjust that for inflation, it\u2019s the equivalent of over $530m today, which makes it the highest-grossing leading role of Eastwood\u2019s career, and by quite some distance.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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<\/a> The Far Out Clint Eastwood Newsletter<\/p>\n