The Ballad of Kathy Scruggs
December 11, 2019 8:42 PM   Subscribe

The Ballad of Kathy Scruggs The latest Clint Eastwood movie, "Richard Jewell," depicts the events surrounding the Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta in 1996, and the scrutiny of Jewell, who was initially hailed as a hero but then became the prime suspect. The movie is said to imply that Kathy Scruggs, the real-life journalist who broke the story of the FBI investigation into Jewell, slept with her source. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution denies this and has asked for a disclaimer to be added to the movie. Olivia Wilde, who portrays Scruggs, has defended the depiction.
posted by girlmightlive (57 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
At this point, the only difference between the grandfather that everyone has been handling with kid gloves while he descends further into bitterness, while the racism and sexism that’s been there all along slowly bubbles to the surface and Clint Eastwood is that Eastwood can get people to give him money to make movies out of his bullshit.
posted by Ghidorah at 8:54 PM on December 11, 2019 [41 favorites]


I made the mistake of watching his last movie. That won’t be happening again; I’ll be giving this a miss.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:05 PM on December 11, 2019 [2 favorites]


Well I've lost all respect for Olivia Wilde...
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 9:07 PM on December 11, 2019 [15 favorites]


So they created an entirely fake character and used them for a character assassination of a real person? Jfc 🤦🏻‍♂️
posted by gucci mane at 9:12 PM on December 11, 2019 [2 favorites]


The irony, of course, is that Richard Jewell was falsely strung up and completely exonerated.

A pox of poxes on Clint Eastwood, and all who work and collaborate with him, just like Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:19 PM on December 11, 2019 [9 favorites]


Heard an interview with the authors of the book this movie is based on. The interviewer asked them about the mischaracterization of Scruggs and of course they defended it as artistic license and "she was such a character" in real-life. So fucking infuriating.
posted by longdaysjourney at 9:38 PM on December 11, 2019 [5 favorites]




I think Eastwood showed us where his head's at, when he talked to a chair at the RNC a few years back. I'd be ready to dismiss any crazy shit he does at this point, to figure he's just a cranky old dude who lost it 10 or 15 years ago, only Hollywood is still giving him millions to make these big, Oscar season movies. Wilde is the one who has really shocked and disappointed me. She's always struck me as sharp, witty and feminist (she directed Booksmart, for cryin' out loud) but her response here is just dopey as hell. Either she's being disingenuous or she's not nearly as smart as I thought she was.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 10:03 PM on December 11, 2019 [11 favorites]


Yeah, I am prepared to cut Olivia Wilde a lot of slack after Booksmart, which was just such a joy, but this seems kind of sad and terrible and her attempt at a feminist critique of the criticism falls flat given that she is defending a lie in the first place.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:31 PM on December 11, 2019 [3 favorites]


Let's not forget that Million Dollar Baby was a revenge fantasy. Clint Eastwood hates people with disabilities. The catalyzing incident was simply that a hotel he owned was required to comply with the ADA.

Fuck this guy.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:49 PM on December 11, 2019 [45 favorites]


Yeah, the trailer for this screamed Conservative White Dude Grievance Film even before this news broke, but... honestly the only surprise here is Wilde's utterly disappointing involvement and defense of the whole thing. Eastwood should've been canceled years ago.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 11:16 PM on December 11, 2019


Pauline Kael calls Clint Eastwood "an extremely mediocre director" in 1977 interview

this has long been my take. I remember seeing Unforgiven with a friend who said afterword that it was better than he'd been expecting but it was still a hit of acid short of what it could have been (the Apocalypse Now of westerns). The fact that he's twice won the Academy Award for Best Director while Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock never won speaks embarrassing volumes about the culture in general.

Fuck this guy.

I haven't seen either Gran Torino or Letters From Iwo Jima, but from what I've heard, both would suggest that just dismissing him as a racist, sexist, bitter grandfather feels sloppily reductive.
posted by philip-random at 12:12 AM on December 12, 2019 [7 favorites]


Perfectly possibly to be a racist, sexist bitter grandfather who’s made a couple of good films. Stopped clocks and all that.
posted by tinkletown at 1:04 AM on December 12, 2019 [4 favorites]


his best 21st century film is Rango
posted by kokaku at 2:39 AM on December 12, 2019 [5 favorites]


Stopped clocks and all that.

I originally read that as, "Stopped cocks and all that," and was about to pass by without comment because it seemed appropriate, then realized my mistake.
posted by clawsoon at 2:40 AM on December 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


Eastwood has more than a couple of good films. His work from the '90s and '00s is solid stuff. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was the first time I saw a Trans character on screen. American Sniper was a great allegory for Americas post-911 military adventures. Flags of Our Fathers about the importance of propaganda. Bridges of Madison County, A Perfect World, Unforgiven, even Space Cowboys is a good film.
posted by WhackyparseThis at 2:45 AM on December 12, 2019 [2 favorites]


Gran Torino

I think that's a movie people can take different things from, but I found it uncomfortable to watch in the he's-very-racist-but-righteously-convinced-he's-not kind of way. It also featured a 'good immigrant' female character being raped purely to give Eastwood an excuse to make a heroic stand against the bad immigrants. Can't recommend it.
posted by trig at 3:47 AM on December 12, 2019 [20 favorites]


Yeah, Gran Torino is a movie where Eastwood portrays "a racist, sexist, bitter grandfather," who never really gives up any of that, beyond a "some of my best friends are Cambodians" level, and he gets to that point with great reluctance.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 3:55 AM on December 12, 2019 [5 favorites]


I haven't seen either Gran Torino or Letters From Iwo Jima, but from what I've heard, both would suggest that just dismissing him as a racist, sexist, bitter grandfather feels sloppily reductive.

I have. You’ve heard wrong.
posted by Etrigan at 4:14 AM on December 12, 2019 [10 favorites]


I can't deny that he's directed some solid films and a couple great ones but he really is a complete asshole.
posted by octothorpe at 4:16 AM on December 12, 2019


Clint Eastwood set up a fake development deal to get his ex Sandra Locke to drop a lawsuit against him after their insanely toxic relationship fell apart. He also allegedly bullied her in to getting a tubal ligation even as he was fathering children with another woman. Genuinely surprised that dickhead hasn't been MeTooed yet.
posted by saladin at 4:16 AM on December 12, 2019 [9 favorites]


Can someone parse Ms. Wilde’s “sexless” comment? I’ve read it twice and it still kinda isn’t making sense in my head. Might be the cold meds or the lack of sleep.
posted by drivingmenuts at 4:23 AM on December 12, 2019


Gran Turino is a fantasy about a racist sexist bitter grandfather martyring himself in the service of his bitter sexist racism. If you think that the self-martyrdom elevates the racism, well, that's on you.
posted by PMdixon at 4:26 AM on December 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


I wonder, does the movie address the fact that the real Olympic Park bomber was Eric Rudolph?

Somehow I doubt it.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 4:28 AM on December 12, 2019 [10 favorites]


One thing about Gran Torino is that the families of the immigrants are portrayed as tightly-bonded while the family of Eastwood's character is a greedy mess. That, along with the fact that Eastwood's character is so damaged and racist, felt honest.

And Pauline Kael in 1977, to be fair, that was the time when Eastwood was directing movies with an orangutan. He's a complex, bitter man who occasionally aspires to talk about complex subjects.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 4:45 AM on December 12, 2019 [5 favorites]


On the plus side, the movie is a good opportunity to tell people to think of Richard Jewell whenever the media tells them a black person murdered by police was "no angel."
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:51 AM on December 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


Full Olivia Wilde quote below. While what she is saying is true in some circumstances, she doesn't seem to acknowledge the specific issue at hand, that she didn't have anything beyond professional relationships with her sources.

(Also, I haven't seen the movie so I don't know what is exactly portrayed. Most reviews have said that it's at least implied or inferred that Scruggs has or had a relationship with the fictional Jon Hamm character, the one who gives her the tip.)

“She was incredibly successful as a cop reporter. She had a very close relationship with the cops and the FBI helping to tell their story, and yes, by all accounts she had relationships with different people in that field,” Wilde told Deadline. “But what I resented was this character being boiled down to one inferred scene and I don’t hear anyone complaining about Jon Hamm’s character as being inferred that he also had a relationship with a reporter. It feels unfair that Kathy has been minimized in this way.

“I think that we are still struggling with allowing for female characters who aren’t entirely quote-unquote likable,” she said. “If there’s anything slightly questionable about a female character, we often use that in relation to condemn that character or to condemn the project for allowing for a woman to be impure in a way. It’s a misunderstanding of feminism to assume that all women have to be sexless. I resent the character being minimized to that point,” the Booksmart filmmaker added.

posted by girlmightlive at 4:57 AM on December 12, 2019 [2 favorites]


Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was the first time I saw a Trans character on screen.

Having The Lady Chablis play herself on screen was probably the one good thing about the movie, which was otherwise a critical and commercial failure. I think that at least part if not most of the credit goes to TLC herself.

American Sniper was a great allegory for Americas post-911 military adventures.

Allegory? It was taken from Chris Kyle's autobiographical book of the same name; Kyle was a compulsive liar who lied about everything from his military awards to his number of "confirmed kills" (the American military does not "confirm" the number of people killed by individual personnel as if military operations were a contest or videogame) to his antics in the United States; the elevation of Kyle as some sort of right-wing saint, which arguably led to stuff such as what this guy did, can be traced back to Kyle's self-promotion, and Eastwood's movie contributed to that.

I'm not completely down on Eastwood as a director--I liked Unforgiven quite a lot--but I'll skip this one, which might have been a good film save for the objection at hand. (Wilde's quote above makes some interesting points, but it's telling that she repeatedly refers to Scruggs as a "character" rather than someone who lived.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:27 AM on December 12, 2019 [13 favorites]


One thing about Gran Torino is that the families of the immigrants are portrayed as tightly-bonded while the family of Eastwood's character is a greedy mess. That, along with the fact that Eastwood's character is so damaged and racist, felt honest.

Gran Torino was a classic White Man's Burden fantasy wank; like, "See, even this bitter old racist asshole grudgingly accepts the mantle of being a surrogate father figure to a brown kid, and confronts the bad elements in a marginalised immigrant community because they can't do it themselves." I was frankly shocked by all the praise heaped on a film that would have made Rudyard Kipling blush.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 5:28 AM on December 12, 2019 [18 favorites]


Did anyone else see The Mule? It was so hilariously bad.
posted by backlikeclap at 5:28 AM on December 12, 2019


I found myself watching Jersey Boys the other day, without knowing it was an Eastwood film. Something seemed really off about the movie's glorification of the mob; it made the mafia don central to the plot seem like a genial, genteel, slightly off-kilter Santa Claus.

It's almost as if Eastwood was trying to give people the impression that having a crime boss run their lives was a good thing.
posted by MrVisible at 5:52 AM on December 12, 2019 [2 favorites]


I haven't seen this, and probably won't, but for my money, the most accurate depiction of an FBI agent in any kind of recent movie was by Scott Bakula in The Informant. He completely, 100% nailed it. The look, manners, and general exasperation when dealing with an off-his-rocker snitch were pitch-perfect.
posted by jquinby at 5:57 AM on December 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


Did anyone else see The Mule? It was so hilariously bad.

That was the one I made the mistake of watching the other week. I was expecting something more like Gran Torino -- ie, with angry bitter white guy fantasy elements, but well-made and acted. Nope, it is just amateur-level bad and was a total waste of time.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:30 AM on December 12, 2019


American Sniper was a great allegory for Americas post-911 military adventures.

Allegory? It was taken from Chris Kyle's autobiographical book of the same name


lol at poe's law
posted by PMdixon at 6:37 AM on December 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


I haven't seen The Mule but I liked Pete Davidson and John Mulaney's review of it.
posted by entropone at 6:51 AM on December 12, 2019 [15 favorites]


I am ashamed to have based my Metafilter username on a character that was, roughly anyway, based on the character portrayed by Eastwood in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I'm not the type to retcon my choices (well, the ones in name only I mean) and that extra degree or so of removal is ok enough for me but, well, yea, I'd have preferred he not be a piece of shit if I'd have had my 'druthers.
posted by RolandOfEld at 7:01 AM on December 12, 2019


@girlmightlive - thanks. Still not completely registering in my head. Hamm’s character is completely made up, he flat-out did not exist, apparently, so of course, he can do whatever.

But it sounds like Ms. Wilde is just making stuff up about Ms. Scruggs, who did exist, because ... I dunno. Sounds like she didn’t even play footsie with the police. I don’t see why Wilde has to go inventing something like that, that did not happen and likely wouldn’t happen, from the sound of it.
posted by drivingmenuts at 7:32 AM on December 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


Where Ms. Wilde’s criticism falls flat is on the presumption that in order to be an interesting or well-rounded character in film, a woman should be sexual. You don’t hear that kind of critique leveled at male characters whose point in a movie is to demonstrate them doing their job — “well, we thought Ben Affleck’s character in ARGO was flat so we needed to sex him up.”

Also: Wilde deflects from two entirely legitimate critiques — this is impugning a real person’s professional reputation and that person isn’t there to defend herself — by what-abouting another film issue. And that, to me, suggests she’s a classic white corporate feminist. She’s smart enough to create a persona where she’ll complain about her obstacles to getting the career she thinks she deserves and she won’t take responsibility for the real privilege she uses while she gets there. This is Sheryl Sandberg with an acting hobby.
posted by sobell at 7:54 AM on December 12, 2019 [21 favorites]


Did anyone else see The Mule? It was so hilariously bad.

No, and I can't really say I want to, but a buddy of mine did and I loved hearing about it. It does sound unintentionally hilarious. It was described to me like a movie that was just an excuse for Clint Eastwood to be a self insert fantasy of an old dude who is naturally just some badass who gets to say and do everything and people put up with it. It also sounds like a hefty serving of juvenile fantasy, I was told he gets into multiple threesomes in the movie, somehow. Sounds nuts but I suspect I've had my best laughs from hearing about it so I'm not really tempted to spend the time watching it.
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:09 AM on December 12, 2019


Adding a token disclaimer of "Some events and portrayals have been fictionalized" would take minimal effort, and go a long way to address these concerns.

But even when doing the decent thing costs Eastwood nothing, he refuses to do it. Swell guy.
posted by Capt. Renault at 8:33 AM on December 12, 2019 [5 favorites]


I clicked Big Al 8000's link to the Wikipedia article about Eric Rudloph - the real Olympic Park bomber - and read this "On March 7, 1998, Rudolph's older brother, Daniel, videotaped himself cutting off his left hand with a radial arm saw in order to, in his words, "send a message to the FBI and the media." JFC!
posted by PatchesPal at 9:27 AM on December 12, 2019 [2 favorites]


To be fair, the fact that it's called a "radial arm saw" is pretty confusing.
posted by Atom Eyes at 10:22 AM on December 12, 2019 [7 favorites]


I am ashamed to have based my Metafilter username on a character that was, roughly anyway, based on the character portrayed by Eastwood in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

FWIW, Stephen King seems not to have become ultraconservative in his old age.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:43 AM on December 12, 2019 [5 favorites]


The brain is dead but the body keeps moving
posted by scruss at 1:04 PM on December 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


Did anyone else see The Mule? It was so hilariously bad.

The link above by entropone to Pete Davidson and John Mulaney on SNL talking about the movie is great:
"Fulfilling another elderly grandpa fantasy that a 90-year-old white man can do any job better than a Mexican, even when the job is Mexican drug trafficking."
posted by numaner at 2:16 PM on December 12, 2019 [5 favorites]


I am ashamed to have based my Metafilter username on a character that was, roughly anyway, based on the character portrayed by Eastwood in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

I had thought that Roland was a reference to The Song of Roland. Or perhaps to The Madness Of Roland, an early interactive multimedia novel for Macintosh.
posted by hippybear at 6:20 PM on December 12, 2019


If anyone is region blocked from the Pete and John review The Mule link above, I found a Daily Motion link that might be better.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:24 PM on December 12, 2019


hippybear: King's proximate inspiration for Roland Deschain and the Dark Tower was the Robert Browning poem, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," as well as the aforementioned The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Lord of the Rings, and Arthurian legend. Browning's poem has resonance both back in time (it's based on an old fairy tale that is also referenced in King Lear) and forward (see the above link). I don't think that either of the things that you mention are an influence, although that computer game seems fascinating; "Durandal" is one of the dramatis personae in the later Macintosh game series Marathon.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:27 PM on December 12, 2019


Oh, Dark Tower. Wow, that never even occurred to me, and I've even read like the first 2 or 3 of the series. It obviously left a deep impression.

Interesting how a name from, like, 800 A.D. can have lengthy echoes.
posted by hippybear at 8:40 PM on December 12, 2019


You know, there is a good story to be told about Richard Jewell. And now he has been victimized by media, again.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 5:20 AM on December 13, 2019 [2 favorites]


Getting back to the subject of the FPP, this is a pretty good critique of the problems with the movie that puts it in the context of Eastwood's latter-day career.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:09 AM on December 13, 2019


dances_with_sneetches: “You know, there is a good story to be told about Richard Jewell. And now he has been victimized by media, again.”
I thought this was pretty good.

“Judging Jewell”30 for 30 Shorts, ESPN, 29 January 2014
posted by ob1quixote at 8:37 AM on December 13, 2019


What did Eastwood have to do with Rango?

Looking at his filmography, I don't see a film I truly enjoyed since Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil 22 years ago. I heard good things about the Iwo Jima films, but I have intense Greatest Generation Veneration fatigue so I skipped them.

OTOH, the existence of The Mule is probably justified by the John Mulaney / Pete Davidson review bit, which was brilliant.

Connecting Wilde's words and actions around Booksmart to this is just heartbreaking. WTF, Oliva?

(Confidential to Roland: the Gunslinger is miles deeper than TMWNN. You're cool.)
posted by uberchet at 10:01 AM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


Thank you for giving me another excuse to rewatch the Mulaney-Davidson review of The Mule. I think I'm responsible for about a thousand of those hits, and I just love rewatching it. I laugh till I choke.

I was actually, probably pretty naively, hoping this might be different from the other Eastwood stuff. I thought Hauser was pretty good in I, Tonya, and there was the Hamm, and Sam Rockwell and Wilde, plus Bates, but this just sounds like the worst kind of Clint being back on his bullshit. He's always been gross.
posted by kitten kaboodle at 12:59 PM on December 13, 2019


Olivia Wilde has now said this: Contrary to a swath of recent headlines, I do not believe that Kathy ‘traded sex for tips.’ Nothing in my research suggested she did so, and it was never my intention to suggest she had. That would be an appalling and misogynistic dismissal of the difficult work she did….My previous comments about female sexuality were lost in translation, so let me be clear: I do not believe sex-positivity and professionalism are mutually exclusive. Kathy Scruggs was a modern, independent woman whose personal life should not detract from her accomplishments.”
posted by girlmightlive at 10:25 AM on December 15, 2019 [2 favorites]




(Just because I've been geeking out about this lately, statues of Roland are found in many German cities, several in the northern and eastern Germany They represent the freedom and autonomy these cities experienced under Charlemagne and refused to relinquish as church and local secular authorities attempted to enforce control.)
posted by BrashTech at 7:32 PM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]


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