Spiking its own guns

Red faces all round at the Sunday Times, which managed to miss out on the Guardian's much publicised interview with the legendary Hollywood actor/director Clint Eastwood. Monkey gathers that the Sunday paper's Culture section commissioned its contracted writer Jeff Dawson to interview the great man. But the Culture piece was then spiked because the Sunday Times Magazine had already bought an interview with Clint by film critic Samuel Blumenfeld, which had already appeared in the French paper Le Monde's weekly magazine Le Monde 2. Only problem was Blumenfeld's piece, which ran in the paper on Sunday didn't say, well... much at all really. Whereas Dawson's story, which ran in the Guardian Film & Music section fully two days before Blumenfeld's ran in the Sunday Times, was followed up by the world's media. This was largely down to the fact that the normally coy and discreet Eastwood opened up with an astonishingly candid attack on fellow director Spike Lee, whom he implored to "shut his face" over the alleged lack of black faces in Eastwood's pictures. Oops.