I found a Roger Ebert interview with Clint Eastwood, from the 70's, in which Ebert notes that while other male movie stars were working in pairs (Newman/Redford, Newman/McQueen, McQueen/Hoffman)...Eastwood had not chosen to work with a star of equal magnitude since the late 60s.
Eastwood said he was interested. "I talked to McQueen," he noted. And he agreed that a movie with Charles Bronson would be interesting.
He noted that he wanted to make one with John Wayne.
Side-bar:
The movie that never got made with Eastwood and Wayne was from a script called "The Hostiles" by Larry Cohen.
Page 502 of the Scott Eyeman bio of Wayne:
"Shortly after Clint Eastwood made High Plains Drifter in 1973, he optioned ('The Hostiles"), which involved a gambler to be played by Eastwood who wins 50% of ranch owned by an older man(Wayne.) The two men have to become partners , which is complicated by the fact that they can't stand each other. There's a battle coming that will destroy the ranch, so Eastwood, who knows about the situation, sells his half of the ranch back to Wayne, who is innocent of the underlying situation. At the last minute, Eastwood returns to help the older man fight off the hostiles."
Sounds interesting. But Wayne kept turning Eastwood down -- finally throwing a copy of the script off his yacht and into the ocean.
Wayne evidently didn't much like High Plains Drifter and Eastwood's "R-rated" take on the West.
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Interesting: in that interview with Ebert, the one equal star whom Eastwood did NOT mention was: Burt Reynolds. And as it turned out, Eastwood ended up on the cover of Time in 1978 alongside Reynolds ("The Macho Men") and in a movie with him in 1984(City Heat.)
The problem was: by 1984, Eastwood was aging but still bankable(Dirty Harry IV aka Sudden Impact was a 1983 hit), but Reynolds was suddenly a bit of a joke -- the Cannonball Run movies and Stroker Ace had devalued him. And City Heat was neither a very good movie nor a very big hit.
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