Alan Horn, retired president of Warner Bros.read the script for ‘Million Dollar Baby’ (which you can see on Prime Video, Movistar Plus and HBO Max) before a single actor was attached to her. Eastwood showed up “discreetly, in his own way” and gave him the script without an associated cast. Horn admits that his first reaction was that he “just didn’t see it clearly” and responded to her request with an expeditious “no, I’m sorry.” He doubted the public would want to see a woman boxing.
The Girlfight precedent. The fact is that Horn had logical reasons for hesitation in the abstract, but not much practical basis. Four years earlier, ‘Girlfight’ had shown Michelle Rodríguez as a Brooklyn boxer in a film directed by Karyn Kusama with awards at Sundance included, and a critical reading that transcended its status as an independent film. The thesis has been defendedEven that ‘Girlfight’ directly promoted the arrival of female protagonists in the boxing genre, and that films like ‘Million Dollar Baby’ were heirs of that change. It was hard to get there, yes.
Get me money. Eastwood did not argue with Horn and went looking for money outside of Warner. He found it at Lakeshore Entertainment, which agreed to cover half the budget, which was said to be around 25 million dollars. With Lakeshore in, Warner became interested but the obstacles did not change, because Horn kept asking for changes, and these appealed to the very essence of the film.
of whathe goes ‘Million Dollar Baby’ follows a lonely veteran boxing trainer (Clint Eastwood), who runs a run-down gym in Los Angeles with his only friend, a former boxer who is blind in one eye (Morgan Freeman). A young waitress (Hilary Swank) shows up at the gym every day asking for Frankie to train her, something he rejects for weeks, claiming that he doesn’t train women and that she is starting the sport too late. He finally relents, and Maggie quickly rises through the ranks of women’s amateur boxing, earning herself a million-dollar shot in Las Vegas against a champion known for fighting dirty.
More changes. Horn wanted different tragedies that happen to the protagonist (be careful with spoilers: that she died at the end, that she lost her tongue after biting it, that she lost the fight) to be softened. But Eastwood believed that issues like these were the very essence of the film and refused to negotiate the third act. In the interview mentioned above, Horn himself quotes William Goldman, a two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter, acknowledging that he is right in his famous criticism of the film machinery, which includes himself: in Hollywood nobody knows anything about anything.
A success. ‘Million Dollar Baby’ was released on December 15, 2004 and reached the 77th edition of the Oscars with seven nominations. It won four: film, director, leading actress for Hilary Swank and supporting actor for Morgan Freeman. The great favorite that night, ‘The Aviator’ by Martin Scorserse, took home five technical statuettes but was left without the most important one.
Controversy where you least expect it. And finally ‘Million Dollar Baby’ was controversial, yes, but not where Horn thought it would be. It came because of the treatment of euthanasia in the final stretch, with organizations defending people with disabilities questioning the film’s reading of life after a spinal cord injury. Articles were published against the film, rating it of “melodramatic and cheesy assault on people with disabilities” or comparing it to Nazi propaganda. And curiously, Eastwood attacks also came on the opposite side of the political spectrum, accusing her of pro-euthanasia propaganda.
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