1984 - CITY HEAT, Eastwood and Reynolds together in a classic Hollywood disaster

 The director Blake Edwards wrote the story for City Heat which apparently was going to be a tribute to hard boiled crime films of the 1930's and 40's. Edwards was also going to direct and Warner Brothers persuaded Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds to team up together.  It seemed like easy money in the bank for the studio with those two stars.  The end result was a big flop which did additional harm to Burt Reynolds now fading movie career.

Apparently Eastwood was immediately disenchanted with Blake Edwards and had him removed during pre-production on the film.  Eastwood's production company took over the film and hired actor turned director Richard Benjamin a man who was fairly good with comedies but clearly didn't know anything about shooting an action film with lots of fights and gun battles.

 

Blake Edwards had his name removed for the screenplay and used a pseudo name " Sam O Brown," aka SOB which was the name of the film Edwards made that was a fairly nasty view of Hollywood studios.  Edwards claimed that his dealings with Warner Brothers and Clint Eastwood inspired SOB.  This seems very unlikely as SOB came out in 1981 and City Heat was released in 1984.

 

As you may have guessed this hasn't been a post about the actual film, frankly the film is just not good.  Audiences sniffed out a turkey and the studio deservedly lost money considering the mess that was made of it during the production phase of the film.

The running time of City Heat is 97 minutes.  Besides Blake Edwards the film lists an additional writer Joseph Stinson who wrote a couple of mediocre Clint Eastwood movies, (Sudden Impact and Heartbreak Ridge).