HOUSTON -- When Clint Eastwood travels to Texas to shoot a film, it doesn't raise any eyebrows.
After all, he ranks up there with John Wayne as the screen's most famous cowboy.
Wait. Eyebrows are twitching.
Space Cowboys, the movie Eastwood shot in Texas last summer, is not a western and Eastwood is not riding the range.
Space Cowboys is the story of four pioneering astronauts who missed their chance to go into space because they were replaced by a chimp.
Now 45 years later, the quartet is summoned to NASA to help correct the antiquated guidance system on a Russian communication satellite before it crashes to Earth.
Eastwood directed Space Cowboys and plays Frank Corvin, the leader of the once- famous Team Daedalus.
The other members of his over-the-hill gang are played by Donald Sutherland, James Garner and Tommy Lee Jones.
"Cowboys were the pioneers of the American frontier. The new frontier is space, so astronauts are the cowboys of space," explains Eastwood.
"When Warner Bros. gave me this script, I could see right away it was a story about four old guys who blackmail their way into getting the chance they missed 40 years earlier."
Sending four guys in their twilight years into space isn't as far-fetched as it might initially seem. In 1998, NASA sent 76-year-old John Glenn back into space. Glenn had made three orbits around Earth back in 1962.
"I actually started working on Space Cowboys before NASA sent Glenn back into space. I like to say that NASA heard we were making this movie and decided to send Glenn up there to give us some credibility.
"It certainly proved convenient for us that he made the trip. It proved a person in decent shape at 77 could go up there and perform."
At 53, Jones is the youngest of Eastwood's crew. Eastwood is 70, Garner 72 and Sutherland 66.
Space Cowboys reunites Eastwood with Garner and Sutherland. He has never worked with Jones. Back in the 1950s when he was a young contract player for Universal Studios, Eastwood made a guest appearance on Garner's Maverick and, in 1969, Eastwood and Sutherland starred together in Kelly's Heroes.
This was the year of the moon landing. Sutherland recalls he and Eastwood watched the historic event on TV in their hotel in Yugoslavia where Kelly's Heroes was shooting.
"It was a little black-and-white TV and we sat watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. Unfortunately, the report was being dubbed in Yugoslavian, so we had to wait until the next day to hear that he'd said: 'One small step for man. One giant step for mankind.' "
Sutherland admits a great deal has changed for both he and Eastwood since their first screen pairing.
"I've become much saner, happier and more peaceful. Clint was riding a motorcycle back then. I'm riding one now."
Eastwood and his co-stars like the fact they are still acting and still in demand.
"When I started out, I never thought too much about it. I just kept working. In the '50s and '60s, I sort of got a bit of the brass ring and I got obsessed by work but that has passed for me now," says Eastwood.
"The best part of aging in this business is losing that obsession about work and being able to spend a little more time with family."
Eastwood, who has been married twice, has five children by four different women: Kimber, 36, with actress Roxanne Tunis; and Kyle, 31, and Alison, 28, with his ex-wife Maggie Johnson. He has a six-year-old daughter Francesca with Frances Fisher, his co-star in Unforgiven, and three-and-a half year old Morgan with his new wife Dina Ruiz.
"I like to joke that since my children weren't giving me any grandchildren, I had two of my own. It's a terrific feeling being a dad again at my age. I am very fortunate. I realize how unfair a thing it is that men can have children at a much older age than women."
More Artists
