In 1954, Eastwood signed on to become one of the last contract players at Universal. He received $75 a week and turned up in a handful of B-movies like Tarantula. But that was only half of the attraction.
''It was a great deal for a young guy. You'd go there and they'd have a speech professor from UCLA and they'd have acting coaches and then you'd go out and ride horseback. My first role was in a picture called Revenge of the Creature. I played a lab assistant. It was a dumb scene, but they needed to fill time in the story. I did maybe 12 or 14 bits like that, and then they threw me out after about a year and a half. They were dropping the contract program. There was a year or two there that I didn't work as an actor at all. I dug swimming pools. But then I went out and did a couple of television shows [like Rawhide, pictured]. Most of us from that era — Steve McQueen, James Garner, and Burt Reynolds — we all ended up doing television series.''
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