Saturday May 31 marked the 95th birthday of legendary and indefatigable actor and director Clint Eastwood. So, it initially made sense that on the day before, entertainment sites were abuzz with clickbait stories that pulled quotes from a just-published and apparently exclusive interview with Eastwood in Austrian newspaper Kurier. The grizzled Hollywood veteran, in production on a new film, had given the paper some suitably tough, juicy opinions on getting better with age and the sorry state of the current film industry, in an era that, according to Kurier, Eastwood bemoaned as one of “remakes and franchises. I’ve shot sequels three times, but I haven’t been interested in that for a long while. My philosophy is: do something new or stay at home.”
That Eastwood had taken time out of his busy shooting schedule to give an interview to a small paper in Austria didn’t seem to give any of the mainstream outlets, from entertainment sites like The Hollywood Reporter and Variety to news agencies like Reuters, any pause. In an age when online news needs to feed the hunger for clicks as quickly and as often as possible, and in an otherwise slow week for movie news, Kurier’s Eastwood interview provided just another source for the production of content and eye-catching headlines to increase traffic.
The interview spread far beyond Austria as it became that weekend’s viral movie-related news — a smackdown from one of Hollywood’s undeniable icons to the new generation of franchise-flogging directors and executives. It should have, like most of these things, been forgotten about by this week as a new cycle of “so-and-so says such-and-such about whatshisname and thingamajigs” resumed. Instead, the Eastwood interview set off a chain of events that have raised questions about the dubious ways that entertainment content is created in the digital era and how the insatiable need for content has trumped basic journalistic methods and ethics.
The first person to cry foul about Kurier’s piece wasn’t a sharp-eyed rival entertainment reporter or online media expert but rather it’s 95-year-old subject who, having been alerted to all the online noise his opinions were making, was forced to come out and tell Deadline.com that he’d never given an interview to the Kurier story’s author, Elisabeth Sereda, a US-based Austrian journalist and member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) who votes for the annual Golden Globe Awards.
The original article, presented as an exclusive sit-down Q&A with the director ahead of his birthday, turned out to be a collation of much older statements made by Eastwood at various round-table press conferences at film festivals and PR events over the past decade. Sereda, who was present at some of these events, used her interviews and the HFPA’s archive of Eastwood interviews going back as far as 1976 to cobble together some questions and cherry-pick old quotes for her “new answers”, and a new exclusive Eastwood interview was let loose on the world.
Eastwood’s quotes bemoaning the era of remakes and franchises and pointing out that he’d shot sequels three times? Well, as Variety — which initially ran a story quoting Eastwood’s “exclusive” Kurier interview — helpfully pointed out that the quotes probably came from an interview from the 1980s after Eastwood come off his run in the Dirty Harry franchise. Of course, Variety didn’t offer a mea culpa for not having checked the quote before running its initial story about Eastwood’s opinions on the state of the business. Instead, it made a weak argument in its follow-up that what Eastwood had said in the 1980s still resonated, meekly offering that this proved that the more things changed, the more they remained the same.
The brouhaha caused by Eastwood’s denial of the Kurier interview now became a second viral story about the original story as all the outlets that had reported on the original with straight faces now reported on its questionable creation. The editor of the Kurier pulled the Q&A from the paper’s website and replaced it with a statement in which he apologised for misguiding readers by labelling the piece as an “interview”, when really the paper should have labelled it a “birthday profile”, and assured readers that the publication had cut all ties with the guilty party: Sereda who had deceived Kurier about her access to Eastwood and the piece that she delivered. Once again, there was no mention of the fact that the paper made no attempts to check or verify the quotes or their source because they had an exclusive scoop interview with Hollywood legend just in time for his 95th birthday.
Millennia after Aesop warned us all that slow and steady wins the race, the voracious appetite for current content demanded by the digital age have meant that we’re still not listening. Better to have thousands of new visitors clicking on your “95-year-old Clint Eastwood said what now?” piece and deal with any fallout later, than stop, check and double-check before pushing the publish button.
The Eastwood story is not just a lesson about how entertainment content is produced online but also about how, in an age when what everyone from the conspiracy-obsessed far right to the equally suspicious far left is dismissing as dubious, agenda-led, fake news “legacy media”, the one thing that’s supposed to separate old-school traditional media from its click-baiting younger cousins — basic fact-checking, source verification and so on — can’t be relied on any more. It’s getting so bad that you can’t even trust Eastwood to tell it like is.
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