The new edition has those sections deleted or revised according to agreement. The edition that was sued was allowed to be sold until it was sold out. I agreed to take out or rewrite about a dozen points of contention in any future editions. I am not allowed to say we won or lost, but we admitted no wrongdoing, and there was no penalty. The suit was settled without any public disclosure, which if you read my book is one of the ways in which Clint conducts his legal affairs-keeping the results out of the public eye. We sold it in France, and it did very well there and received some very prominent reviews. We did very well in the lawsuit, and we sold several editions, down to the last copy in the UK. Because of the suit, the American release never got wide distribution because the publisher held out and it only had a limited printing.

One of the reasons sued me obviously was an attempt to find out my sources. It is still the best single-volume introduction to his life and career. He’s made major political statements, his appearance at the Republican National Convention, the upheaval in his private life, and also the political controversy over “ American Sniper.” Since the book came out, Clint’s made a lot of major films, some are departures and some are very consistent with everything he’s ever done. I don’t mean to sound boastful about it, though a lot of what came after my book, critics and scholars to adjust their thinking. It was reporting things at the time that now are taken for granted. It’s a great book, a foundational book about Clint. In an interview, McGilligan talked about Clint Eastwood, Orson Welles, sex, politics and the art of the film biography.Īfter everything you went through, the cancelled contracts, the delays, the lawsuit, what compelled you to come back to this material for this revised edition of your Eastwood book?

His new book, “ Young Orson,” about Orson Welles before he made “ Citizen Kane,” is coming out this November. McGilligan, who teaches film at Marquette University, has subsequently published books on Hitchcock, the pioneering black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux and Nicholas Ray. This month, the boutique New York house Or Books is issuing a revised and updated version of the book that examines Eastwood’s life and art since the original publication. That Christmas Eastwood sued McGilligan and the publisher, effectively removing the book from the marketplace. McGilligan persevered, publishing the work originally in 1999 in the UK with an imprint of HarperCollins. The original 1997 publication date was delayed more than five years after the first two houses cancelled the publishing contract. He spent more than four years researching, reporting and writing the book. McGilligan interviewed Eastwood once, in 1972.

Young Orson by Patrick McGilligan