‘Cry Macho’ Sounds Like a Clint Eastwood Parody, But It’s Actually A Book

Believe it or not, “Cry Macho: A New Movie from Clint Eastwood” is not the title of a Saturday Night Live sketch, but is, in fact, a mere statement that there is new movie from Clint Eastwood called Cry Macho, which is now playing in theaters and on HBO Max.

If you know anything about Clint Eastwood, who first rose to fame in the American Western TV series Rawhide in the 1960s, maybe you can understand why a title like Cry Macho is so extremely on brand, so precisely on the nose, that it almost sounds like a joke. Now 91 years old, it seems Eastwood isn’t yet done being somber, manly, and maybe even crying a little bit on horses.

You can actually thank a 1975 novel by N. Richard Nash for the title Cry Macho, and for the somewhat old-school storyline: a Texas rodeo star named Mike Milo (played by Eastwood in the movie) travels to Mexico to rescue a young boy named Rafael (Eduardo Minett) from a criminal life of cockfighting.

Nash, who wrote the Broadway play The Rainmaker and who died in the year 2000, originally wrote Cry Macho as a movie. When Nash couldn’t get it made, he turned the script into a book—a process, which, according to Nash in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel, only took two weeks—and found it was much more successful. Soon, Nash claimed, three different studios were approaching him with the rights for the Cry Macho movie. “I sold the rights to one. When they asked me to do the screenplay, I gave them what they had rejected—didn’t change a word—and they loved it!”

Eastwood first expressed interest in adapting Cry Macho back in 1988, but when scheduling conflicts got in the way, the script got passed around to many different hands, including Roy Schneider, and then Brad Furman, with Arnold Schwarzenegger attached to star. When those, too, fell through, Eastwood finally circled back to the film in 2020, coming on to direct, star, and produce the movie.

Screenwriter Nick Schenk, who worked with Eastwood on Gran Torino and The Mule, came on to spruce up the script to better suit the actor—like aging up the lead character to be 91 years old, now a retired rodeo star. But if you’re interested in checking out the novel that’s had a 46-year-long journey to the big screen, you can order the paperback directly from the Penguin Random House website.

You should know, though, that Nash himself did not speak highly of his own book. “It got surprisingly good reviews and the instant they appeared, three studios, all of which had rejected the screenplay, started to bid for this awful, little thing,” Nash told the Orlando Sentinel back in 1985. It wasn’t until after Cry Macho that Nash, primarily a playwright, began writing what he called “real novels.” Hey, you can’t control your legacy—no need to cry macho about it.

Watch Cry Macho on HBO Max