‘The Last Movie Stars’ plays out as irresistible hours of TV
Long before the line “Who are those guys?” became a running gag in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” the public wondered the same thing about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.
Millions knew them, especially him, without knowing anything about the inner workings of their partnership. Defined by the 15 films they made together, several with Newman directing his wife, they became the industry benchmark for relationship success. Other famous couples fell apart. They stayed coupled. “But it hasn’t been easy,” Woodward once told an interviewer. “I don’t think any valid relationship is.”
“The Last Movie Stars,” available on HBO Max, does an extraordinary job of revealing the other side of the facade, without fawning or tidy summaries of judgment. It’s six of the most irresistible hours of TV I’ve seen this year.
Here’s the origin story. In the late 1980s, Newman began work on a memoir with screenwriter Stewart Stern. They recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with Newman and Woodward, their friends, co-workers and family members. They talked to directors (Elia Kazan, Sidney Lumet, Martin Ritt, George Roy Hill), famous actors and writers, non-famous peowhile
ple. A high school beau of Woodward’s, for example.
Newman soured on the book project. One day, he lit a match and burned the tapes – though not before they’d been transcribed on paper. Once Ethan Hawke looked at the transcripts, he knew he had a movie. He hired actors he knew to read some of the excerpts, in character.
Early on and then throughout “The Last Movie Stars,” we see Hawke in Zoom calls, mid-pandemic, explaining his approach to Laura Linney (who voices Woodward’s material), George Clooney (Newman) and a deep bench of an ensemble including Sally Field, Sam Rockwell, Oscar
Isaac and on and on. There’s enough of Hawke talking about the project,
we’re watching the project, to court disaster. The director wants “The Last Movie Stars” to be a real-time account of his own filmmaking process, in addition to doing right by Newman and Woodward.
Inevitably there are moments when you think: OK, how about getting back to the subjects at hand? Miraculously, though, the six parts coalesce and build in wonderful ways. The episodes are expansive enough to accommodate everything Hawke (whose previous directorial work includes the beautiful “Seymour: An Introduction”) has on his mind. And foremost on his mind is his fascination with two fascinating enigmas, here – gratifyingly – made a little less enigmatic.
Amplifying the treasure trove of audio transcripts, “The Last Movie Stars” draws from a wealth of existing film and still footage of Newman and Woodward, across the decades. (Woodward is still with us; Newman died in 2008.) At the formidable training ground the Actors Studio, Newman, from Shaker Heights, Ohio, felt utterly outclassed by wild hares such as Marlon Brando, James Dean, Ben Gazzara, Rip Torn. They were all “confidence and energy … without oratory, without ‘acting.’ ”
Woodward, hailing from Thomasville, Georgia, was accepted into the Actors Studio ranks soon enough. They both got hired for William Inge’s demurely
sultry drama “Picnic,” premiering on Broadway in 1953. Newman played the milquetoast country club denizen Alan, though he yearned to play the studly Hal and eventually replaced Ralph Meeker in the leading role.
Understudying Hal, he’d practice the sexy dance duet with his fellow understudy, Woodward, in the wings during performances. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Newman’s wife and three kids eventually found out what was going on, years later. In the documentary, Newman’s daughter, Stephanie, says she felt “disgusted” by her father. But she adds: disgust was “not the only feeling.”