THE BALLAST OF SUCCESS

I've enjoyed Clint Eastwood movies. A superhero with the answers, double cool, self-sufficient, existing without society, without anyone's help, quiet, a man of few words, few ideas, but lots of action: this was the Eastwood persona. It was partly the real person too. Such was the character of Dirty Harry in the 1973 movie Magnum Force. With this movie Eastwood had become "the undisputed top movie star in the world."1 As I read the book(1) I came to appreciate a man with some fine qualities and a man with his own particular weaknesses. He certainly did not enjoy his celebrity status. It made him uncomfortable.

In 1973 I had moved into a type of celebrity status in my own little world as a high school teacher in South Australia. It was a status I enjoyed as a teacher, off and on, until 1999. If a biography was ever to be written about my life it would reveal, as it did of Eastwood, a man of strengths and weaknesses. I found the celebrity status, the endless talking and listening both in schools and in my private life--as well as other factors--wore me out by century's end. My persona, my personality, my road to success, was the opposite to Eastwood's: people in community, ideas and words, wall to wall for years. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Michael Munn, Clint Eastwood: Hollywood's Loner, Robson Books, London, 1992, p.142.

You made your millions, Clint,

while I got through my career

after a somewhat shakey start.


Your quiet self, superhero persona,

man of action par excellence

took you to the top of the movie tree,

while this man of ideas and words,

endless words, produced poetry

and print with millions of phrases

and sentences on pages

and in relationships

enough to sink a ship.


My ship's ballast,

the ballast of my creativity,

was not the great Hollywood engine,

but an emerging world religion,

the centre of a psych-intellectual life

which drove me, eventually, it seems,

to find poetry everywhere.

Ron Price
16 November 2001
Updated For: Metacritic
18/8/07

More on Clint Eastwood.....Ron Price
FALLING INTO LIFE
What A Run It’s All Been, Eh Clint?

Several days ago I watched a documentary Clint Eastwood: A Life in Film with its special emphasis on the movies he made and his philosophy of life and of making films. This French doco was screened on SBS in Australia on 6 October 2007 at 1:55 to 3:20 p.m. I made a few notes because I have seen many of Eastwood’s films as an actor and as a director; I had also seen one or two docos about him in previous years and this was a new one for me. I printed out a Wikipedia(internet encyclopedia) outline of his life, gathered my notes from the TV program and after 80+ hours of quasi and semi-gestation I set about to write following prose-poem. -Ron Price, “Section VIII Poetry,” Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 10 October 2007.

As you say, Clint, there is a certain
falling into life, fate if you like and
trying to make the parts of life come
together may be, as you said in your
last lines, impossible. And yet we try.

We both got our first big breaks in ’59:
you in the TV series Rawhide and me
in the early stages of an emerging world
religion that had been in Canada for just
on 60 years with only 700 members then.

While you were becoming one of those
instant international stars back in the ‘60s
I was going to uni and trying to work out
the enigmas of a bipolar disorder which
had no name then—just a lot of trouble,
angst and a series of crises that threatened
to arrest my life’s unfoldment and blast
all hopes which my progress engendered.

I was finishing my career teaching in high
schools when Dirty Harry appeared and
was settling down into Perth Western
Australia when that series of four films
finished in 1988.....and what a run those
years were for me, too, Clint, me too....

You had your Escape from Alcatraz
in ’79 about a real escape back in ’62
when I began my pioneering life and
my escape from the normalities of a
middle class life. In ’79 I began my
escape from BPD, a lifelong journey.

You were redefining yourself as director
and I was redefining myself as a writer
and poet little by little beginning in the
early 1970s. You achieved so much,
Clint. I’ve got to take my hat off to you.

Way back to your first marriage in 1953
when the Kingdom of God was getting
its kick-start in Chicago, I was in grade
four and in love with Susan Gregory:
what a run it’s all been, eh Clint, eh?

Ron Price 10 October 2007

Here my fave Clint Eastwood movies.


5. Dirty Harry - He's mad as hell & he's not gonna take it anymore, punk.

4. Bridges Of Madison County - He's lonely as hell & he's not gonna take it anymore, punk.

3. The Man With No Name series - It's hard to believe that there once a time when the cinematic world did not have a Man With No Name from which all other badass cowboy characters could be measured by, huh?

2. Unforgiven - The man, his gun & his regret.


1. Million Dollar Baby - I genuinely believed that after Unforgiven, there wouldn't be any other films that could top the list of fave Clint Eastwood movies.
By the time Eastwood's character in this film tells Hillary Swank's character what the Gaelic "Mo Cuishle" phrase means, I knew that this movie had.

I like that quote about criticism and it is partly true, but, in some ways, criticism can be life-giving. A kindly tongue does help when giving it--so spoke Baha'u'llah a 19th century Iranian and Founder of the Baha'i Faith. I wish you well.-Ron Price, Tasmania