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A Defamer operative was on high alert during Sunday night's closing presentation of The Cherry Orchard at the Mark Taper Forum, a celebrity-target-rich environment begging for some low-grade eavesdropping:

As I was taking in the final performance of The Cherry Orchard Sunday night, I scanned the crowd looking for my StreetWars assassin when I spotted pure Hollywood royalty. Clint Eastwood walked in with his wife and sat a few rows away. He was munching popcorn (I didn't see any concessions, maybe he brought his own) and was very friendly to the adolescent girls sitting next to him. Class act. Then he starts waving and I see on the other side of his row is Warren Beatty. (I wonder how many times he got roped into this performance by his wife.) They mimed at each other over the crowd as only fellow mega-star/Academy Award-winning directors can do. At intermission they were chatting it up like a couple of school girls. Maybe about a joining forces on a new project. Maybe about a bi-partisan run in '08. I lingered by them and heard Eastwood say, "Now this is how you do Chekhov!" (Since Annette Bening was the star, I'm assuming Clint was talking about that performance.) I liked how adamant he was with his review—it's possible there was a "punk" on the end of that sentence that I missed.

If Clint says that how's Chekhov is done, dammit, who are we to argue? After six thoroughly grizzled decades in show business, a veteran like Eastwood is hardly going to bother with the air-kiss nicety of an insincere review of the performance, even if he's temporarily distracted by Warren Beatty's impossibly lush head of hair.