Until quite late in the process of crafting “The Last Movie Stars” — a six-hour deep dive into the on- and off-screen lives of Hollywood golden couple Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, now streaming…
“I don’t like episodic. I don’t like the nature of false cliffhangers. My brain is allergic to that,” admits Hawke, who unveiled an hour of the project at the South by Southwest film festival in March, then two more segments at the Cannes Film Festival in May. “When I started, I really wanted it to be short enough that you could watch it in one sitting. I wanted to lasso it into the size of ‘No Direction Home’ or something like that.
It all started with a phone call from the couple’s youngest daughter, Clea Newman. Years earlier, “Rebel Without a Cause” screenwriter Stewart Stern had conducted a series of interviews with practically all the key parties for a biography about their father. But at a certain point, Paul had changed his mind and destroyed the tapes.
In any case, the more Hawke thought about it, the more impressed and intrigued he was with the couple, who met each other early in their career and left an incredible legacy as activists, parents and first-class movie stars — two of the last surviving members of the Lee Strasberg-trained generation that propelled acting into the modern era.
“They spent their life listening to people hyperbolize their father, and felt that the world diminished the most amazing person in their life, their mother. And if it were entirely up to them, they would have this whole thing be about their mom, but you can’t tell Joanne’s story and not include Paul. Their lives were inextricably entwined together.”
Plus, it brought another key dimension to the film: one in which actors could share their insights into the couple’s craft. In an early Zoom clip, Vincent D’Onofrio demonstrates Method acting. Several episodes later, Sally Field recalls how Woodward was instrumental in her being cast in the career-making miniseries “Sybil.”
“She says Darryl Zanuck ruined it. Did he? Was it really so much better? I don’t know. The cut doesn’t exist, so we can’t know,” Hawke says. “We know that the play is a lot better, and I can tell by watching it scene by scene, that Joanne is amazing in the movie. Warren Beatty played the part originally on Broadway. If they got him, it might have been more looked after. But for our movie, it sure became the perfect metaphor.
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