Making award winning movies is easy. There are dozens released every year.
Doing IT projects is hard. When was the last time you even heard of a successful one, let alone one that got an award?
Johnny Carson hosted the Tonight Show for just short of 30 years. Retired in 1992, died in 2005. And IIRC, one reason (among several) he retired when he did was because he didn’t want to be that guy. He wanted to have something left in the tank so he could enjoy at least ten years of golf, grandkids, reading War and Peace, whatever. Seems to have been a wise choice.
(I wish he’d lasted a few more years; I would have loved to hear him weigh in on the O’Brien/Leno debacle!)
Bumping because, when the Oscar nominations came out this morning, this thread came to mind — and I can’t help but note that Cry Macho looks to have grossed less than $16 million on a budget of more than $32 million.
As I understand it, that doesn’t include however much got spent on marketing the movie; but, even leaving that aside: did the people who funded it wind up losing money instead of making a profit?
Funding a movie is always a gamble. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I’m sure the investors knew that going in, and if they didn’t, they should have.
I wondered who financed the movie Cry Macho. Perhaps Eastwood arranged it so that he would take the loss if it didn’t make money. Eastwood is very rich. It’s estimated that he’s worth $375 million. Also, the amount a movie made in its first year is not necessarily the amount it eventually makes. Occasionally a film years later becomes a cult one and makes money from other sorts of sales.
“A friend of mine – we’re talking a ninety-five-year-old who looks much younger than his years – when people ask him ‘what’s your secret?’ he says ‘I never let the old man in.’ So it’s a mental attitude thing.”
I can assure you that he didn’t get that rich by spending his own money on his movies.
He didn’t get that rich by spending his own money on his movies. But now he can if he wants to. He has enough money now that he can finance a modestly budgeted movie like Cry Macho and not care if it loses money. And he’s 91 years old. Perhaps he’s decided that he might as well spend a lot of his money on financing movies he personally likes rather than care if he leaves any money to his children (and there are at least eight of them). He doesn’t seem to care a lot about what people close to him think about him. He had relationships with a vast number of women, often with multiple ones at the same time. Perhaps his view is that he spent a fair amount of money on the women from those relationships and on his children over his life and that he doesn’t feel that any of them necessarily deserve to inherit anything more than a modest amount of his money. His view may be that he took care of them for a while and now they have to take care of themselves.
Saw him on a clip during the Pebble Beach tournament last weekend. He did not look well.
But he’s been making only movies he personally likes for the past 25 years or so, and win or lose, people are always giving him money to make more. He’s living exactly the life he wants to live. Why should he change?
What’s your purpose? I don’t think you worded the thread very well. Can a person have a single purpose?
May I say, “The Purpose of Clint Eastwood” sounds like something that could make a double feature with “Being John Malkovich”.