Not every tried and tested stage musical would make a good film, Clint Eastwood knows. But Jersey Boys, the subject of his new, acclaimed big-screen adaption, made the grade because the director felt it "lent itself to a movie". The only problem was "some people didn't see it that way because it's been a hit for a long time and no one did much with it".
The same might be said of Eastwood himself, and perhaps of many other veteran creative titans who, given the chance to flex their aged muscles again, repeatedly prove that the fact they have been around for a long while is no impediment to success. At 84, Eastwood is still more than capable of marshalling a film crew and catering to the tastes of a modern audience.
His film, hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "old-school entertainment with more edge than you may expect", tells the same rags-to-riches story as the stage show, which opened on Broadway in 2005 and has pleased crowds in London and all over North America since. It charts the progress of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, from their rough Newark, New Jersey beginnings to the star status established by songs such as Oh, What a Night and Working My Way Back to You.
Although the screenplay comes from the writers of the stage show, Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, a seasoned and confident Eastwood has focused on the gritty backstory rather than the front-of-house glitter of the musical. "I approached this as a drama about guys and just what they do is sing, rather than a singing picture that has some drama to it," Eastwood has explained. "They did jail time; they came from a rough place. These were very interesting people."
This weekend in Bradford, a long way from Hollywood, it was announced that the city is to host an arts festival devoted to celebrating the contributions of those over 65. The Bold festival in September will feature photography, street theatre and pop-up opera, and will be held in a variety of public venues, including libraries and old peoples' homes. The painter David Hockney, 76, a starry native of Bradford, could be adopted as the wrinkled figurehead for this initiative.
The festival is a sensible response to recent research showing that older brains do not necessarily decline in power. Film directors such as Eastwood and Woody Allen, 78, actors such as Maggie Smith, 79, Robert Redford, 77, or Derek Jacobi, 75, all make the case for old age as an enhancement to creative sensibility. And in some artistic trades seniority is seen as a positive boon. The Proms season, opening next month at the Royal Albert Hall, will feature three of Britain's most revered conductors, each celebrating a significant birthday. The baby with the baton will be Sir Andrew Davis at 70, but there will also be appearances from Sir Roger Norrington, 80, and from the granddaddy of them all, Sir Neville Marriner, 90.
Twenty years ago the phenomenon of long-living conductors was studied in a book by Steven Rochlitz, The Longevity Guide – Why Do Music Conductors Live into Their 90s? Rochlitz argued that because these musicians were allowed to keep working and to enjoy status late into their ninth decade or longer, they reciprocated by staying on form. Pablo Casals, for instance, lived to the age of 96, while Arturo Toscanini made it to 89 when the average life expectancy for a man was 50. The trend for leading conductors to live longer has also been put down to the upper body exercise involved, increasing circulation to the brain, and to the result of an artistic concentration on harmony.
Recent research also underlined flaws in previous attempts to show that older brains were less effective. The truth may be, scientists now suggest, that the elderly are simply handling more information in their neural archives. A team at Tübingen University in Germany asked computers to read a certain amount each day and learn new words and commands. Those computers that were given less to read performed better in cognitive tests, just as a young adult would, but if the same computer was exposed to the levels of information that might be received over several decades, its performance slowed down. Dr Michael Ramscar, who led the team, said: "The brains of older people do not get weak. On the contrary, they simply know more."
The researchers also argued that common tests used to study mental capacity were unintentionally biased in favour of the young. One such cognitive test invites participants to recall a pair of unrelated words and often shows that young people are more reliable. But if older people struggle to remember such pairings, it may be because over time they have built up associations and connections with a wider range of vocabulary.
For Mark Walton, author of self-help book Boundless Potential: Transform Your Brain, Unleash Your Talents, Reinvent Your Work in Midlife and Beyond, the interesting finding for neuroscience has been that creativity is in our "hard-wiring" and that humans are good at it as long as we keep at it, with the proviso that nothing else bad happens to our brain health. Science also suggests the elderly are well placed to work on epic projects, rather than on radical innovation. "Large creative breakthroughs are more likely to occur with younger scientists and mathematicians, and with lyric poets, than with individuals who create longer forms," said Howard Gardner, professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This may explain the brilliant productivity spurts of youthful rock stars working in the three-minute lyric form (although there is, happily, Leonard Cohen, still composing at 79).
Louise Bourgeois, the French experimental sculptor who died in 2010 at 98, certainly felt age helped. She made her greatest work after the age of 80 and once declared: "I am a long-distance runner. It takes me years and years and years to produce what I do." At 84 Bourgeois was asked if she could have made her work earlier in her career: "Absolutely not," she replied. "I was not sophisticated enough."
Her countryman, the post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, had a similar outlook, believing his creativity grew: "I attain it more every day, although a bit laboriously," he wrote. "Because if the strong feeling for nature – and certainly I have that vividly – is the necessary basis for all artistic conception, the knowledge of the means of expressing our emotion is no less essential, and is only to be acquired through very long experience."
When it comes to writing books in later life, the jury is still out. Doris Lessing, who had suffered a stroke, frequently complained she found ideas harder to come by as she aged and this question of fading talent comes up whenever a big literary name threatens to call it a day. When American novelist Philip Roth and the Canadian short story writer Alice Munro recently both announced they had stopped writing at the ages of 79 and 81 respectively, the news was met with annoyance from other novelists hoping to be taken seriously right up until the moment, as the 81-year-old comedian Joan Rivers puts it in the title of her current tour, "they close the lid".
Crime novelist PD James, 93, has attempted to semi-retire herself and her detective Adam Dalgleish, but Fay Weldon, author of 34 novels so far at the age of 82, is still firing out imaginative and well-crafted salvos to her waiting readers. The front page of her website is headed "Fay Weldon – novelist and writer 1931–20??". Underneath she wonders when "the two question marks above will be filled in".
Popular prejudice against art produced by the old was bolstered in 1953 by an influential study into the relationship between age and achievement by psychologist Harvey Lehman. He said: "Superior creativity rises relatively rapidly to a maximum which occurs usually in the thirties and then falls off slowly." He did concede the elderly might get wiser and more fluent, but felt these qualities were not creative.
Yet for the young actors working on Jersey Boys the sure hand of Eastwood as director was welcome. They have said he brought the themes of his early films, such as masculinity, loyalty, the plight of the outsider, to the story, eventually making it "a Clint Eastwood film". What is more, because of his great age, Eastwood was well placed to handle the real Valli, who was regularly on set. "He and me and Elvis and James Dean, we'd all run into each other because we were the same generation," Eastwood said.
