Clint Eastwood

"I used TO know Frank Capra," Clint Eastwood says, watching the ocean in a quiet corner of the legendary Eden Roc in what he calls "beautiful downtown Antibes" and thinking about the past. Eastwood met the great Hollywood director back in 1973 when he was shooting "High Plains Drifter" and Capra was in his mid-70s. "He seemed like such a vital guy, his brain cooking on all eight cylinders. You could tell the same story about Billy Wilder, you could go on and on.

In Hollywood, filmmakers generally fall into one of two camps. Commercial directors such as Michael Bay appeal to the masses, while indie film specialists like Mike Leigh create more positive reviews than long lines in front of theaters. Clint Eastwood is among the few exceptions to that show business rule.

Now that he's directed a Japanese-language film, could French be next for Clint Eastwood? The 76-year-old American raised that possibility over the weekend after French President Jacques Chirac inducted the actor-director into the French Legion of Honor, saying he represents "the best of Hollywood." "You show the complexity of America, in all its grandeur and fragility, with its enthusiastic dreams and its worried questioning," Chirac said during the ceremony in Paris.

The setting was the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum, the scene was the Los Angeles Film Festival awards, intended to honor independent filmmaking as well as Clint Eastwood, an icon who manages to represent both A-list talent as well as movie-making underdogs. But Dustin Hoffman had other ideas when he took the podium Thursday night and began berating one of Hollywood's biggest directors: "You never used me."

We are passing the most spectacular stretch of 17-Mile Drive, where the waves crash on Seal Rock and the seals loll on Bird Rock, when David Dilworth brings up the man who died after licking his golf ball, or some such thing. Dilworth has not been having the best of days in his bid to convince a golf lover--me--that we are treading on habitat so endangered that it's time to stop building new courses here.

Growing up, Alison Eastwood says, she saw her dad mostly on sets. When she was 11, her father, Clint, put her in one of his movies, a substantial part as his daughter in the seedily gripping "Tightrope," in which Clint was a New Orleans cop and single dad with a taste for working girls who's on the trail of a serial killer who rapes and murders them. The cop is both drawn to the sex trade in the French Quarter and a doting father at home.

Clint Eastwood is a man of action, and not just on the screen. That was clear to songwriter Carole Bayer Sager when she picked up the phone a few months ago and Eastwood was on the line, calling from his car. After some chitchat, he explained that he was scoring a new independent film, "Grace Is Gone," and wanted to know if Sager would consider collaborating on a song. "He said he wanted to come by and play it for me and I said yes, of course, I would be honored," Sager said.

Margaret Ruth Wood, mother of actor and director Clint Eastwood, died Saturday in Carmel Valley, the Monterey Herald reported Wednesday. She was 97.