Sereda says she pulled quotes from various Eastwood interviews conducted by the HFPA, dating back to 1976.
“Quotes from Mr. Eastwood cited in the story are culled from several of those 14 press conferences I attended and covered,” Sereda writes.
Popular on Variety The Kurier tribute, published in German, was then translated and aggregated by various outlets, including Variety.
Sereda’s statement would indicate that Eastwood did, in fact, give the quotes contained within her article — but they could’ve been spoken at any time over several decades.
One quote, in which Eastwood says he’s “shot sequels three times,” may provide a hint.
The 95-year-old star and director Clint Eastwood has refuted a widely shared interview that went viral over the past week in which he criticized Hollywood’s “era of remakes and franchises,” calling the article “entirely phony.”. However, the journalist who wrote the article asserts that the quotes are genuine and only go back years before they were published. This is a new development.
Journalist and veteran of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Elisabeth Sereda told Variety that she was asked by the Austrian magazine Kurier to write a tribute to Eastwood on May 31, which is her 95th birthday. Sereda claims that she used passages from a number of 1976–1977 Eastwood interviews that were done by the HFPA.
According to Sereda, “quotes from Mr. Dot Eastwood cited in the story are culled from several of those 14 press conferences I attended and covered.”.
well-liked on Variety.
The German-language Kurier tribute was later translated and compiled by a number of publications, including Variety. In a statement to Deadline on Monday, Eastwood “set the record straight” and explained that “the interview is completely fake and I never gave an interview to an Austrian publication called Kurier or any other writer in recent weeks.”. “.”.
Kurier has since removed the article, according to the Guardian, which stated that “the article fell short of its standards.”. “”.
The claim that a Hollywood Foreign Press member drew inspiration for an article from group press conferences is not new. A strange interview with Drew Barrymore that was published by EgyptAir’s in-flight magazine in 2018 was described by former HFPA president Aida Takla O’Reilly as “genuine and far from fake,” despite the possibility that the publication had edited it incorrectly.
According to Sereda, Eastwood did really say the quotes in her article, but they could have been said at any point over a number of decades. A clue might be found in a quote where Eastwood claims to have “shot sequels three times.”. Eastwood produced two “Dirty Harry” sequels by 1980: “Magnum Force” (1973) and “The Enforcer” (1976), in addition to the primate buddy-comedy follow-up “Any Which Way You Can.”. In 1983, his self-directed “Sudden Impact,” another “Dirty Harry” sequel, was released. (This excludes Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, “The Man With No Name,” which were packaged and sold as a trilogy following the release of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”. ”).
After doing the math, the entire Eastwood quote is as follows: “We live in an era of remakes and franchises.”. Although I have three times filmed sequels, I haven’t been interested in them in a long time. The phrase “do something new or stay at home” may have originated in the early 1980s. It’s clear that some things never change, as evidenced by the fact that that possibly decades-old statement was widely taken to be current and still has a strong hold on readers today.
