When Hollywood did a drive-by — with Paul Newman at the wheel
Wisconsin doesn’t get too many visits from Hollywood film crews. But in 1968, it had two.
The first was in May, when the cast and crew of “Winning,” a racing drama starring Paul Newman, parked for a brief stretch at Road America in Elkhart Lake. (The second Hollywood production, a period comedy called “Gaily, Gaily,” filmed for nearly a month in Milwaukee; look for a story about that movie later this summer.)
In “Winning,” Newman was to play a driver who, intent on winning the big one, the Indianapolis 500, risks losing his new wife — played by Newman’s wife in real life, Joanne Woodward — to one of his racing rivals, played by Robert Wagner.
Newman had already spent a fair amount of time in Wisconsin in 1968, campaigning for Eugene McCarthy during the Democratic Primary. This time, however, it was all work. The Milwaukee Journal reported on May 15, the day Newman arrived for filming, that the cast and crew of “Winning” included 150 people. Extras for the crowd scenes, The Journal reported, were recruited by the state employment office in Sheboygan, with pay of $15 a day. “However, that office could not supply members of minority groups — wanted by the producers to form a representative crowd — and about 25 of these were supplied by the (agency’s) Milwaukee office,” The Journal wrote.
Before coming to Elkhart Lake, Newman and Wagner trained with veteran racer Bob Bondurant. According to Newman biographer Shawn Levy, the actor was an “apt student,” quickly looking comfortable behind the wheel.
Filming at Road America began May 20. The Milwaukee Sentinel’s Quincy Dadisman reported in a May 21 story that about 250 paid extras were joined at the track by members of the Chicago regional chapter of the Sports Car Club of America. George A. “Bud” Seaverons III, who often worked as the starter for races at Road America, wielded the checkered flag in one scene.
According to The Journal’s Wade H. Mosby, the mid-May weather was as bad in 1968 as it’s been in 2018. It was sunny only one day of the crew’s stay at the Elkhart Lake track; two days of filming were lost to bad weather.
Road America wasn’t the only Wisconsin location for “Winning.” The crew filmed in the parking lot outside Kohler Co., with the Sheboygan County manufacturer standing in for a car company; in Kettle Moraine State Park; and in the dining room at the Fountain Park Motel in Sheboygan.
From Wisconsin, Newman and company went to Indianapolis, to film scenes during the running of the 500, including some to take the place of scenes that were rained out at Road America. Reports in The Journal and Sentinel don’t mention it, but a wire service report in the June 19 Journal says Newman was seen at the Indy track with his arm in a cast after tearing a tendon after yanking his race car out of the path of a deer that had wandered onto the Road America track.
For all the attention “Winning” got when it was filming in Wisconsin, the movie sort of faded in the stretch upon its release in 1969. In his review in the May 29, 1969, Journal, Mosby wrote: “… For those who aren’t (fascinated) by eyes and engines, what’s left is a vapid and totally predictable exercise in tedium.”
For Newman, however, “Winning” and his experience at Elkhart Lake paid a different dividend. As much as anything, the movie is credited with accelerating Newman’s love of racing, a second career he pursued for more than a quarter of a century.
And besides, he had other things on his plate. The next movie Newman made was “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”