With Clint: The Man and the Movies, Portland author Shawn Levy provides the definitive biography of the iconic yet somehow ineffable Clint Eastwood, the 1950s TV cowboy who became a squinting big-screen megastar and a two-time Oscar-winning director and whose latest, last year’s Juror #2, was released in his 95th year.

The book has received rave reviews from A.O. Scott in The New York Times and Richard Brody in The New Yorker, and is the latest in a series of Levy’s nonfiction books on popular culture that includes biographies of Jerry Lewis, Paul Newman, Robert De Niro, and Porfirio Rubirosa (look him up!), as well as time-capsule portraits of postwar Las Vegas (Rat Pack Confidential), 1950s Rome (Dolce Vita Confidential), and 1960s London (Ready, Steady, Go!). Toss in a book of poetry inspired by New York Times obituaries, a podcast about Hollywood legend Lew Wasserman, and the task of responding to the countless emails he receives from people who think he’s the director/producer Shawn Levy of Stranger Things fame, and it’s been a busy couple of decades for Levy, who served as the film critic for The Oregonian back when that was a job (i.e. from 1997 to 2012). (In full disclosure, it was Levy who offered me my first opportunity to write professionally about movies, so if you want to blame someone, blame him.)

We met at the recently relocated Mother Foucault’s Bookshop, where Levy wrote much of Clint in a small side room and where he has rented space in which to work on his upcoming biography of David Lynch. This is a distillation of that conversation, in which I got to ask him some questions I’d asked him before and others I’d always wanted to.

This is your 12th book all told, so you’ve been through this before, especially with regard to the biographical and nonfiction stuff. But it seems as if the response to Clint has been significantly more effusive and high-profile, including a rave review from Tony Scott in the New York Times Book Review. Did it come as a surprise that this book has been received in a way that the others, while they generally sold well and received critical praise, haven’t?

Levy: It came as a shock. You have to be lucky, and I was lucky with this book in that the timing was such that several writers and publications thought this may be the last chance we’ll have to write about this guy in the present tense. He may not make another movie, so the next time they write about him it’ll be an obituary or a career appreciation. People had a chance to sort of clear certain other things before they paid end-of-life attention to him. It so happened that Tony Scott and Richard Brody in The New Yorker liked the book. There’s no accounting for that, because I sure thought I was about to get hit by a piano falling out of a fourth-story window, but that’s my imposter syndrome. My agent always tells me it’s my problem.

Whenever a book comes out, you always expect the worst, and then you can be pleasantly surprised by whatever does happen.

You go from 100 percent control to 0 percent control. There’s no telling what the world’s going to think of it. Sometimes they just don’t show up. Sometimes the publisher just lets it go. I have a guaranteed income from writing books, and so long as I stay on the positive side of editors and accountants, I get to keep moving forward. But in that moment when you lose all control, it’s just a wonder what happens. Sometimes, nothing, and sometimes you hit closer to the bullseye than you knew you could.

It is unlikely there will be a second, updated edition of this biography in 10 years, right?

I think I got it about as close to the very end as I could. I wrote about Paul Newman after his death. The book was due in November 2008, and he died in September 2008. It was common knowledge that he was very ill with cancer, so a lot of print outlets prepared postmortem pieces. The weekend that he died, I scoured five or six hundred newspaper articles, published in towns where he had made a movie or opened a camp for sick kids or been in a stock car race, that were local-color appreciation stories. That added something like 10,000 words to the book and gave me what I felt was a very touching ending, quoting his last reported words, which were “It’s been a privilege to be here.” With Clint, I didn’t have that moment to report, so the last sentence of the book says that you wouldn’t bet against him making another movie at 95 or 96.

Clint, like your other nonfiction books, draws from a vast array of archival materials and exhaustive research. What’s your method?

With Clint Eastwood, there is so much available in the places where you’d ordinarily look: Variety, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Cahiers du Cinéma. I compiled a document of direct quotes from his lips, starting in 1956 or 1957, which was the first interview with him I could find, and going up to 2024. That document, with just direct quotes, was 90,000 words. It’s half the length of the book. Just imagine if he’d been a talkative guy! Plus there are several books already written about him that I could use to construct timelines — not to do research, but to spot check a date or a place.

There were, in particular, two major biographies previously published, and you’ve mentioned how yours is in some ways a corrective that charts a middle course between them. Has it happened with any of your other biographies that you’ve working in reaction, or at least with awareness of, previous efforts?

No, most everything I’ve written about I was either the first person to write about it in that way, like in the case of the “scene” books. There may be books about Marcello Mastroianni and Mick Jagger, but I didn’t consider them major and they weren’t doing what I did. For Jerry Lewis and Paul Newman and Robert De Niro, all the previous books were pretty sub-par.

For Eastwood, there were two major biographies: Richard Schickel’s authorized, book-length interview with access to his mother, his wives, his children, everyone. And then the Pat McGilligan. McGilligan is a fantastic researcher, but he can be so vituperative. Those books are significant, but they are so diametrically opposed in attitude that I could navigate between them. I will tell you everything I know about his marriages, his affairs, his relationships with his parents and children. I’m just not going to draw a conclusion.

It was also a way to write about Clint Eastwood during a period of culture war. I respect him as an artist, and even sort of as an individual man, but I’m glad I wasn’t a woman in his life or an employee who upset him. Everything else, I think people are grown up enough to make up their own minds. I don’t have to steer them.

Another challenge he presents as a subject is the sheer amount of stuff he’s done over 70 years in show business. How did you prioritize which films, for instance, to dwell on and which to move briskly past, out of what must be more than a hundred?

And he was in 217 episodes of Rawhide, which is more hours than his entire movie career combined.

And you at least mention every one of those movie roles, if only to provide a brief summary of the production, a recap of its release and reception, and then your own critical assessment. Did that tight, efficient style take you back to the days of deadline- and word count-driven reviews for The Oregonian?

I have all my old Oregonian articles, except one or two, on hard drives. And I was very pleased that my take on the movies, in some cases seeing them for the first time since I reviewed them 30-odd years ago, was still in the ballpark of what I originally thought. I called it Clint: The Man and the Movies because I wanted to give the films equal weight. If it’s informative and thorough, it feels as much a reference book as a read. And for someone who’s made movies for 70 years as an actor, 50-plus as a director, and is working into his 90s, movies are who he is. Paying attention to the movies is appropriate to the way he has spent his life.

What was the most surprising thing you learned about Eastwood while writing the book?

In 2016, he directed Sully, about the forced water landing of an airliner in the Hudson River. A story we all know. Great film. It’s brief, it’s tense, it’s moving. It’s got people who were on the scene re-enacting what they did. And Clint Eastwood, as a GI at Fort Ord in 1952, survived the forced water landing of a military transport plane and had to swim a mile or two to shore in the Pacific Ocean. So, 60 years later, Hollywood assigns Sully to a guy who’s actually lived through the experience.

Most of your subjects, from Jerry Lewis and the Rat Pack to Paul Newman, Robert De Niro, and now Clint Eastwood, are icons to one degree or another of some variety of postwar American masculinity, each of them complex in their own way. What draws you to those topics, those figures?

I grew up on a lot of these characters. My parents were Rat Pack Era consumers of a certain flavor of popular culture. My dad was a movie buff, so Newman, and later De Niro, would have been in the household conversation. The Beatles broke up when I was 8, so I remember Swinging London. My eyes were always on these things from the time I was a boy.

That said, I wrote a book [In on the Joke] about 12 remarkable women, pioneers of standup comedy. It got really strong reviews and it was the worst-selling book I’ve ever done with a New York publisher and the only one that didn’t get a paperback release. And many times over the years, I’ve proposed books on Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep, and was told no. But I do have a feel for this era, and I think at this point my brand in publishing is “Oh, mid-century dudes. Is Levy available?”

You do have the ability to acknowledge the ambiguity of these men, both in their professional and personal lives, without being a gossipmonger, a scold, or an apologist.

Part of the reason to write about each of these guys, especially in some senses Jerry Lewis, is that they actually did things for people other than themselves. Lewis’ telethons, Paul Newman’s philanthropy, De Niro’s development of lower Manhattan after 9/11, Eastwood the conservationist. So, there are aspects of that, but it’s the art that recommends them as subjects. If all they did was fuck and piss people off, that might be interesting to talk about, but it’s not interesting to write a book about. But if you lay out the life and you lay out the work, talk about how they converse with one another, you can see the arc of their story.

Before we wrap, I wanted to give you a chance to talk about your next project, which is a biography of David Lynch. Where are you in that process and what have you learned so far?

I literally started on it the day he died. I was in negotiation with my publisher. They wanted another book, but we couldn’t agree on the subject. I’d written three proposals and while I was literally on the phone with my editor, gnashing over the third proposal, I went to Amazon and the Academy [of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences] library to see David Lynch bios, and there really isn’t a proper one. There are many good books on David Lynch, including a memoir-ish demi-biography, Room to Dream. It’s a lovely book.

So they agreed to do it right away, and I immediately made some connections and did some interviews, but then I got sidetracked into finishing publication and launching Clint, and now I’m back. I’ve spoken to childhood friends, people from the American Film Institute, actors from Twin Peaks, and I’ve got connections to many other people. I’ve still not received the blessing of the family. It’s a delicate thing. I’m reading every published interview I can get my hands on; there’s a lot of material.

Is it fair to say that his work, more than Eastwood’s or Newman’s or certainly Jerry Lewis’, presents opportunities for deeper analysis, both because there is less of it and because it invites that sort of attention?

The surprising thing about Lynch is how active he is in so many different media. There are like 10 feature films and one long TV series, but there are also so many paintings he produced, comic strips, web series, weather reports… During Covid, he would pick a magic number and there would be an 8-second clip on davidlynch.com: “Today’s number is eight!” He did it for like nine months straight. And there were three other series he produced that made it to air around the time of Twin Peaks: On the Air, about a radio station in the 1950s; Hotel Room, a trilogy of one-act plays written by Barry Gifford and directed by Lynch; and American Chronicles, which were these verité-style documentaries with almost no talk that aired on Fox. The three things together did not have 15 episodes total.

One unlikely connection between Eastwood and Lynch is that they were both practitioners of Transcendental Meditation. Lynch was very public about his enthusiasm, but I didn’t know Eastwood was into TM until I read your book.

In 1974 or 1975, Merv Griffin had Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on his show. Merv had introduced Clint Eastwood to TM, and he was on the show that night to say what benefits he’d gotten from the Maharishi’s teachings. David Lynch, who was making Eraserhead at the AFI, and his girlfriend dressed up nice and showed up at The Merv Griffin Show. The audience wrangler saw this young, nice-looking couple and put them right up front. And so, when the Maharishi comes out, and Clint Eastwood is on stage, the camera pans the audience for a standing ovation, and right there, as clear as I’m seeing you, there is David Lynch. So, there’s your crossover, your nexus.