Some executive knew that it would be a cash cow, and the movie adaptation entered pre-production almost immediately after Amblin scooped it up. The story goes that Clint Eastwood was asked to direct "Bridges," almost on a whim, by Warner Bros. chair Terry Semel. He also tends to put the camera down by instinct, doing one or two takes and then moving on. His no-frills approach to filmmaking even caught Meryl Streep off-guard. In Shawn Levy's biography "Clint," as covered by The Times, Streep went on record saying that Eastwood unexpectedly included all her "mistakes."