Eventually, however, came "Unforgiven." Released 25 years ago this week, on August 7, 1992, Eastwood's final western would, of course, win a wagonload of Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director for Eastwood. At the time, it seemed like a career summation for the then-62-year-old legend; a quarter-century later, it looks like just the beginning of Eastwood's prestige period, one that would see him rewarded with many more Oscar trophies and nominations.
An instant classic, "Unforgiven" has never been far from TV screens for long. Still as many times as you've watched Eastwood's William Munny unleash righteous fury upon the townsfolk of Big Whiskey, there's plenty you may not know about the movie. Here are the unabridged, undisclosed secrets of "Unforgiven."
2. One reason the screenplay may have been a hard sell was its title, alternately "The William Munny Killings" or "The Cut-Whore Killings."
4. Longtime Eastwood collaborator Sonia Chernus (who co-wrote his western "The Outlaw Josey Wales") thought Peoples' script was "trash" and urged Eastwood to walk away from it. But while Eastwood was looking for someone to rewrite another project, he read "The Cut-Whore Killings," unaware that it was the same script Chernus had hated.
6. Peoples recalled that Frances Fisher, who played Strawberry Alice in "Unforgiven," told him the film marked the first time she'd ever seen an entirely white-paged shooting script, without the color-coded pages indicating revisions.
8. Eastwood had never directed a movie in Canada before because of labor rules that would have barred him from bringing in most of his regular crew. But Canadian authorities were so eager to lure the filmmaker that they granted him a waiver -- they allowed him to bring anyone who'd made five or more films with him. That amounted to about 50 Eastwood regulars.
10. Frequent Eastwood composer Lennie Niehaus wrote most of the score, but the sweet, haunting main theme was composed by Eastwood himself.
12. Despite the A-list cast and the town built from scratch, "Unforgiven" cost just $14 million to make. It earned back $15 million on its opening weekend, a record at the time for an Eastwood movie. In total, it earned $101 million in North America and another $58 million abroad.
14. Ken Watanabe starred in a Japanese remake of "Unforgiven" in 2013, in which the story was retold as a samurai drama. That was a fitting treatment for Eastwood's final western, since Watanabe had starred in Eastwood's "Letters From Iwo Jima," and since the first western Eastwood starred in, "A Fistful of Dollars," was itself a remake of a classic Japanese samurai film, Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo."