“Tightrope” was slickly positioned as more of the same from Eastwood. Warner Bros. cut a trailer that led with the misleading implication that it was a serial killer thriller wherein everyone from Eastwood’s character to the mayor are under suspicion. They’re not (the film makes this very plain by showing the perpetrator’s face, thinly masked in shadow, in its opening scene), but this bait-and-switch didn’t bother moviegoers. “Tightrope” was a critical and commercial success. It topped the box office on August 17, 1984, and remained at number one for the next three weeks (fending off challenges from “Red Dawn,” “Ghostbusters” and “The Karate Kid”). It was Clint as a cop, and audiences seemed generally unfazed by the film’s highly provocative content because, if nothing else, it was properly rated R (unlike “Red Dawn,” which some media watchdogs felt exploited the laxness of the then new PG-13 rating).
40 years later, the film’s screenwriter Richard Tuggle thinks its treatment of forensics as a novel investigative tool might seem dated, but its depiction of a cop whose personal kinks intersect with the m.o. of the murderer still resonates. As he told me in an interview, he was inspired to write the script after reading about a string of rape-murders in the Bay Area. Given that he’d worked with Eastwood, he initially saw it as a standard cop thriller. “I’ll have some cop, some Dirty Harry guy chasing a rapist,” said Tuggle. “And it just didn’t seem very interesting.”
Tuggle then thought it would be more interesting if the cop character, named Wes Block, worked on the vice squad and seemed to have some kind of connection with the murderer. Over lunch with a man and a woman from the Los Angeles vice squad, he found his movie. According to Tuggle:
“I said [to the male cop], ‘How does being in vice squad and seeing all this sexual stuff all the time affect you?’ And this cop said, ‘It’s made me treat my wife more tenderly in bed.’ And it hit me very strongly. I realized that the movie had to be about the connection between the vice squad cop and the serial killer. The cop had some of the same sexual weirdness and desires that the killer did, and the two would mirror each other.”
Upon completing his screenplay, Tuggle brought it to “Dirty Harry” director Don Siegel, with whom he’d worked, along with Eastwood, on the hit “Escape from Alcatraz.” Siegel told Tuggle to take it to Eastwood, which he did with the stipulation that he would direct the movie. Eastwood acquiesced, but he did have a few requests, the most significant being that Tuggle move the film out of San Francisco, which was too closely associated with the “Dirty Harry” films. Having worked and reveled in New Orleans before, Tuggle thought the Louisiana metropolis would be perfect. Again, Eastwood agreed, so they eventually found themselves in the Big Easy making a cop flick unlike any the star had attempted before.
