Paul Newman: Search & Destroy (now also RIP)

I've never had any Newman's Own products! And now you all say they're delicious. I guess I'll try some.

Newman's Own isn't extraordinary stuff or anything, but it's generally superior to the other products sitting on the shelf next to it.

NO >>> Ragus
NO >>> Tostitos
NO >>> Hidden Valley

Is my general impression.

The sleeve notes on his salad dressings are great!

Dargis' obit.

this deserves a posting
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9800E2DD1030F93AA2575BC0A9659C8B63

The sleeve notes on his salad dressings are great!

― Ward Fowler, Sunday, September 28, 2008 12:21 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

BITCH CASSADINI

I saw him a couple of times at the Monterey Historic Car races years ago.

My most favorite movie star crush is all about PN. I was 18 it was late summer early fall in so cal. probably about now on the calendar really, but so many years ago. I went late (about 11pm) to the local grocery store, Westward Ho (now a Whole Foods) and there he was! The blue eyes and I was GONE!

At the time he and his lovely wife either lived here or had a home here and he was in jeans & t-shirt, wearing "house or bedroom" slippers and just being an ordinary guy shopping up and down the aisles. I'm an LA girl, born & raised and have seen celebrities here, there and everywhere. Pfft. Not moved or stunned or struck by them in anyway.

PN was the one; the single exception to my blase attitude. He is one of the last Hollywood big stars and I will never forget that evening in the market where I was star struck. The first, last and only time ever. RIP Pauly.

Sad news :(
RIP

You got the feeling from this guy that if he needed to tie a knot or fix a leaky boat he could probably do it, or least have fun flirting with you while he was trying.

I always loved how he held his beer bottle in a napkin at premiere parties, so as not to be caught inadvertently advertising for the beer company if he was photographed.

gbx's momma OTM. lol at Paul Newman is HUD editorial

Slapshot was the first DVD I bought when I got a DVD player. Loved him in Verdict and, most of all, in Absence of Malice.

No one is tearing him apart and Mr. Newman doesn’t try to plumb the depths with the role, which makes the character and the performance feel more contemporary than many of the head cases of the previous decade.
!!

blaze!
Yeah, he was really good in that one.

Dahlia Lithwick remembers

Totally weird seeing Melissa Newman on TV wearing his Old Guys Rule hat yesterday. Will remember graduation day handshake with slightly more poignancy. My mom was super-upset.

'fix a leaky boat'!

Newman flirting with Hand!

this is a nice obit: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=845223

Apparently short, old, shockingly good-looking Jewish men are unusual.

I used to see Paul Newman from time to time in New York concert halls. I remember the first time, very well. There was this old man — old, short Jewish man — who was shockingly good-looking. I stared at him, because the sight was so unusual. And only after I stared at him for a bit did I realize it was Paul Newman.

He glared at me, hard. I didn’t care — I stared at him anyway. Screw him. He had to be used to it, and his shocking appearance garnered him worldwide fame and many millions of dollars. Pay a price, bub.

I once read a story about him. He was somewhere wearing sunglasses, and a woman said, “Would you mind taking off your sunglasses, so I can see your eyes?” And he said, “Would you mind taking off your shirt, so I can see your t**s?” Hardly the most gracious thing ever (and hardly the most logical).

Anyway, it was true: He had freaky electric blue eyes. Barely human.

I realize he was no friend of the likes of us — of conservatives. And about his acting skills, I really can’t comment, although they seemed above average to me. When I was a kid, I watched Butch Cassidy, The Sting, and the others. And was completely entertained. Would I still be entertained? I think probably. And I was glad to have encountered him, a handful of times, in the aisles.

wtf?

I love Wiggy Woo's supermarket story, btw

Apparently he was once spied sitting with Joanne in the back row of a movie screening, pounding down a complete six of beer.

The star-legends...who is left of "Classical Hollywood," ? Only Bacall now

Uh, Mickey Rooney (whatever you think of him, he was the #1 box-office star for years), Liz, Kirk Douglas, Eastwood (still an old-style star although he didn't hit til the mid '60s).

Newman was just one year younger, but look at Brando's physicality by the time of the Godfather

You're aware he was wearing makeup in that, right? He made Last Tango right after and was still in decent enough shape to be discreetly nude.

Anyway, I'll stay alert for any lists of the men Paul fucked.

Well. I guess it's all a matter of taste then. I wouldn't out Sting-era Newman in the same league as Tango-era Brando, physically speaking. Also I don't know, I don't think of Clint Eastwood as a "classical Hollywood movie star," since his stardom continued unabated long after that era was over. Maybe i'm alone there. I forgot Kirk Douglas was even alive

“Would you mind taking off your shirt, so I can see your t**s?” Hardly the most gracious thing ever (and hardly the most logical).

Stars have their own logic!

After seeing Altman's The Player, Newman complimented him for not letting the audience "see the tits they wanna see" (Greta Scacchi's) and showing them the ones they DIDN'T want to see (Cynthia Stevenson's).

I wouldn't out Sting-era Newman

lol typo

I only have two contributions to this thread:

1) "Cool Hand Luke" is such a great movie. RIP.
2) I have been hearing the name "Dahlia Lithwick" for years from a friend of mine talking about people he with whom he to college and it was very, very jarring to see Ned link it on this thread.

Just trying to scare ya!

classic body of work, but still, the first thing I think of when I think of Paul Newman is Scott Walker's "Time Operator"...

Now I wouldn't care if you're ugly
'Cos here with the lights out I couldn't see
Just picture Paul Newman
He looks a lot like me

Ebert remembers some more

"I'm Paul Newman, and first off I want to apologize for making 'The Silver Chalice'."

You'll never hear Jim Caviezel say the equivalent.

REDFORD: There were a lot of times we played these gags on each other and they were great fun. And one of them was that he used to -- when he went into racing, he just drove me crazy talking about racing, because he was obsessed with it, and, obviously, great at it -- by the way, great at it.

And I said, "Geez, can't we talk about something else?" He said, "Well, I want to take you up to the track and we'll do this and we'll do that." So for his 50th birthday, I happened [to be], in Connecticut, to find a trashed Porsche and it was just totally demolished and I had them wrap it up and leave it on his kitchen back step, wrapped in paper with a ribbon around it, that said "Happy 50th."

And so a couple weeks went by and I didn't hear anything, and then I went up to my house a couple weeks later and walked in the living room and there was this gigantic box in the living room, and it was so heavy you couldn't lift it.

In fact, it was so heavy, it had created an imprint on the floor, and this was a rented house. Well, by the time I crobarred it out, there was just this block of metal that had been taken down.

The [towing service] came and took it away, and they said, "This is great." I said, "OK, look, hang on." And I called a friend of mine who was a sculptor in Westport.

I said, "If I give you some material, can you create a sculpture." He said, "That's great, absolutely." So these guys come take the thing over to her, and she did a sculpture. I said, "Make it a garden sculpture."

So she did. Had the towing guys take it to Newman's garden and just plump it there. Now, to this day, neither of us had ever spoken about that, never even -- that was -- there were many other situations like that, but that was ...

QUESTION: No one ever says "gotcha?"

REDFORD: No, no. That would diminish it. No. The idea was you just never acknowledged it.

Does anybody remember that Academy Awards thing where they had a bunch of actors and comedians trying to sell you a monkey one after the other and the last of all was Paul Newman who pwned everyone who had gone before?

that was Letterman's year.

The cameos on Letterman were great... "where the hell are the singing cats?"

I haven't seen any of his directorial efforts in years, but remember Woodward being good in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.

Rachel, Rachel unavailable on DVD. Worth watching?

I so hope this anecdote is true:

In Newman's Connecticut home, he had a letter framed in his bathroom, from a rancher in a remote Western state. The rancher's letter said his family grew all their own food, but recently had won a jar of Newman's spaghetti sauce at a church raffle. The rancher wrote how much they liked the product, and also wrote that he'd mentioned it to a friend, and the friend told the rancher that Newman was also an actor. The rancher wrote that if his acting was as good as his sauce, they'd be on the lookout for some of his movies.

This one is great:

http://images.plumgoodfood.com/images/Kristin/aphotos/treeoflife/tol2/200lg/200020662000224.jpg

Didn't know that Nobody's Fool is oop on dvd :>( Wonder how long it'll stay that way.

I saw Rachel, Rachel tonight for the first time. Much better than I expected. That may have something to do with just having seen The Swimmer (same year), where just about everybody is an ugly caricature, but other than the requisite overkill in the Elmer Gantry scene, I thought Newman's pacing was just right. Woodward's excellent--the doctor in Sybil is pretty much all I'd ever seen her in before this. The Estelle Parsons subplot is handled well, and the aging-parent stuff rings very true. Teacher films always interest me. I laughed at the one kid, maybe 10, who romps into the school with a couple of toy six-shooters on his belt. He'd be jailed coming off the bus today.

Excellent print, too. Too excellent--I suspect they were screening a DVD.

you can't tell?

Well...a perfect print matched to a DVD? Probably not--I'm a really poor audiophile, too. But if it's a normal print, with the normal imperfections, of course. Which is why I think it was a DVD tonight, unless Rachel, Rachel underwent a major restoration.

New print of his second directorial effort in Brooklyn for a week:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-11-02/film/deserved-second-act-for-paul-newman-s-sometimes-a-great-notion/

From Michael Ontkean's intro/reminiscence to Jonathon Jackson's The Making of Slap Shot: Behind The Scenes of The Greatest Hockey Movie:

One Saturday night I coaxed my teammate Reg Dunlop (51 years young) into Lower Manhattan and CBGB's to see and hear some brand new music. As the Ramones rattled the walls, Reggie grinned from ear to ear and shouted "This is what we're doing every day on the ice!"

Newman. Ultimate Punk with a heart of rowdy, unbounded generosity. Lead singer and gang leader with giving hands of perpetual cool, Paul never wavered in his delight with "Slap Shot", maintaining his experience was "The most fun I ever had making a movie - absolutely!"

"Rescreened" Nobody's Fool last night, first time since mid nineties. Its amiability is its drawback; it has a TV movie all's-well-that-ends-well attitude that results in facile resolutions (and the film composer should've been shot). But, boy, Newman's at the peak of let's-make-it-look easy, and, yeah, he should've won his overdue Oscar for this instead of TCOM.

This time 'round Melanie Griffith less impressive than Jessica Tandy.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the loser cop.

Bruce Willis asked to be uncredited because he felt his action film reputation would hurt the film.

Michael Koresky on queerness and sexual freedom in Newman's Rachel, Rachel

https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/queer-now-1968/

it'll take more than Koresky and jumper cables to turn RR's engine

Really enjoyed the Last Movie Stars documentary series. (Good job Ethan Hawke!)

Made me realize I don't think I've ever seen a Joanne Woodward movie. And there are a shit-ton of Paul Newman movies I haven't seen, although not that many that seem like I need to — he made a good number of clunkers and middlebrow fare. Fascinating in particular how much he seemed to lack confidence in his own acting. He knew that he knew how to look good on camera, but he had a hard time opening up as an actor.

There's also a shit-ton of Woodward movies, but maybe try one of her first big hits, The Three Faces of Eve, a rather hokey tale of "multiple personalities," but yep she acted her ass off, won won Oscar, Golden Globes, other---also let fly in The Fugitive Kind, which is Tennessee Williams as Hail, and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds,one of the many she did produced and directed by Newman (their daughter Nell Potts is also real good in that). She can be more low-key and subtle, but those are the ones that come first to my unsubtle mind.