America's national epic is reflected poetically in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1938, and it was described by Edward Albee as "the greatest American play ever written." Our Town contains the snapshots of bygone days, cracker-barrel philosophies, homespun homilies, good-natured ironies, the hints of pain caused by epiphanies, and that climax which brings a welling to your eyes despite yourself. It contains us. The Stage Manager is knowing and vigilant. With his spectacles perched on the tip of his nose and a vaguely distracted air, he stills looks imposing. He appears to have lived every vicissitude of life. Such is his air of decency and authority that you find yourself hoping he deems you worthy. George Gibbs, the youthful hero, is an all-American boy. His heart is in the right place, even if he must occasionally be reminded of just where that place is. He’s handsome, and when caught up in the spell of love, he croons; you wouldn’t tune a piano to it, but he’s sincere. Later, when George escorts his sweetheart, Emily, to the drugstore for an ice cream soda, the Stage Manager takes on the persona of Mr. Morgan, who crafts the fountain treats for the youngsters. When it turns out that George has forgotten his pocket money at home, he refuses to accept the boy’s gold watch as collateral for the debt: “I’ll trust you ten years, George—not a day over.” You sense affection in the older man and, equally, respect in the younger; the mutuality is warming. The old man has acted for Michael Curtiz, Robert Wise, Richard Brooks, Robert Rossen, Sidney Lumet, Martin Scorsese. He has lent his voice to Doc Hudson in the Pixar movie "Cars," teaching Lightning McQueen that "life isn't about the destination but about the journey."
You could think of him in the company of legends as Humphrey Bogart and James Stewart. The young man is making a name for himself, but he keeps getting compared to Marlon Brando and James Dean. The young man has just turned thirty, has been married for six years, and has three children. The older man is seventy-eight, with his forty-fifth anniversary coming up and five grown daughters and a pair of grandkids with whom to celebrate it. The old guy is serious, a World War II vet who attended Kenyon College and the Yale School of Drama on the GI Bill; he’s raised hundreds of millions of dollars for charity and served as president of the Actors Studio. The older man is Paul Newman, playing the Stage Manager in the Westport County Playhouse production of Our Town, at the Booth Theater on Broadway in October 2003. And the younger man, you know him too: Paul Newman, playing George Gibbs in the same play for NBC in September 1955.
For fifty years, on-screen and off, Paul Newman vividly embodied certain tendencies in the American male character: earnest and roguish, sly and determined, brave and vulnerable. He was equally at home on Hollywood soundstages, in theatrical workshops, in the pits of racetracks, and especially on the blessedly raucous fields and in the log cabins and swimming holes of the camps he built and maintained for seriously ill children. The world was his for the claiming—and he claimed only the bit that he felt was reasonably due to him, and he gave back more, by far, than he ever took. Newman had an intense discipline that demanded he earned, through sheer perseverance, a place alongside the Method gods Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and James Dean. He was ultimately the one true superstar to emerge from the original Actors Studio generation, the most popular Stanislavskyan actor in American screen history.
Pauline Kael on her review of Hud (1963): "Paul Newman's range isn’t enormous; he can’t do classics. But when a role is right for him, he’s peerless. Newman imparts a simplicity and a boyish eagerness to his characters. We like them but we don’t look up to them. Even when he plays a bastard, he’s not a big bastard—only a callow selfish one, like Hud. He can play what he’s not—a dumb lout. But you don’t believe it when he plays someone more perverse or vicious, and the older he gets and the better you know him, the less you believe it. In his personal life, his likableness seems infectious and it's difficult not to like Paul Newman. But Hud is just possibly the most completely schizoid movie produced anywhere anytime. Hud is much of an anti-Western and I think it's also an anti-American film, yet so astutely made and such a mess that it is redeemed by its fundamental dishonesty."
As he would bemoan for the rest of his life, director Martin Ritt—along with screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., adapting Larry McMurtry’s 1961 debut novel Horseman, Pass By—had intended to make a film taking the side of Homer Bannon and the impressionable Lon (Brandon De Wilde), Homer’s grandson and Hud’s nephew. “Hud was meant to be the ultimate heel, condemned to a life of loneliness and alcoholism for his harsh arrogance,” Ritt said at the American Film Institute in 1974. “If I’d been near as smart as I thought I was,” Ritt added, “I would have seen that Haight-Abshbury was right around the corner. The kids were very cynical; they were committed to their own appetites, and that was it.” “Little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire,” Homer says in decrying Hud, and the same is true of our cinema. Shades of gray were on their way in, and with Hud, Paul Newman’s cold blue eyes served as the headlights on the dark road to come. Source: online.ucpress.edu
Paul Newman was visiting Maynard Morris, the MCA agent who got him a role for “Ice from Space” TV episode in 1952 (from the sci-fi show Tales of Tomorrow) and the agent’s next appointment was already waiting for him in the reception area, a young alluring actress named Joanne Woodward. Morris introduced the two by way of apologizing to her for running late. As Woodward later remembered it, “I had been making the rounds, and I was hot, sweaty, and my hair was all stringy. Morris introduced me to a pretty-looking young man in a seersucker suit, all pretty like an Arrow collar ad, and said, ‘This is Paul Newman,’ and I hated him at first sight, but he was so funny, he disarmed me.” Newman said his first reaction to her was to think: “Jeez, what an extraordinarily pretty girl.” Woodward had been spotted by a scout for MCA in a Neighborhood Playhouse showcase and brought into the agency as a client of a young agent named John Foreman, who was handling the television careers of new actors. He got her a series of roles on TV—in episodes of Robert Montgomery Presents, and Goodyear Television Playhouse; she played Ann Rutledge in a five-part series about Abraham Lincoln on Omnibus that required that she travel to Hollywood. “I didn’t have enough money to rent a car,” she later boasted. “Can you imagine being in California with no car?” In New York, Joanne had reportedly dated a lot of young men, even if she wasn’t exactly the type that was in vogue.
As they got to know each other during the rehearsals and downtime on Picnic, she came to seem to him an ideal girl. “I was shy, a bit conservative. It took me a long time to persuade her that I wasn’t as dull as I looked.” “Joanne and I have had difficult, mind-bending confrontations,” Newman told columnist Maureen Dowd many years later in The New York Times Magazine. “But we haven’t surrendered. I’ve packed up and left a few times, and then I realize I have no place to go, and I’m back in ten minutes.” “Being Mrs. Paul Newman has its good and bad days,” Joanne confessed to Good Housekeeping. “Obviously, since we’re still together, most of them have been good. But it hasn’t been easy, and I don’t think any valid relationship is.” Joan Collins (co-star of Newman and Woodward in Rally Around the Flag) once weighed in on their marriage. "I believe he was totally faithful to Joanne in the many years of their relationship in spite of the fact that many starlets, and even some stars were interested in more than just staring into his blue eyes." By "stars," she may have been referring to Marilyn Monroe, Piper Laurie or Sandra Dee.
As with Rachel Rachel (1968), Paul Newman demonstrated his loyalty by committing himself to Joanne Woodward’s work. Almost everything he would produce or direct going forward would include her. And he learned to accommodate her interests and moods, encouraging her love of ballet by giving her gifts of ballet-inspired artworks, and by helping her to fund a dance/theatre company of her own. Theirs would often be praised as a fairy-tale marriage. And perhaps because it contained and overcame some dark and perilous episodes, it was worthy of the name. Playwright A. E. Hotchner, who knew Paul Newman longer and better than almost anybody, assesed: “Paul was an unadorned man. He was simple and direct and honest and off-center and mischievous and romantic and very smart… He was the same man in 2008 that he was in 1956—unchanged, despite all the honors and the movie stardom.” —Paul Newman: A Life (2009) by Shawn Levy
The researcher Susan Shimanoff of San Francisco State University discovered that regret was the most common negative emotion, and the second most common emotion of any kind – after love. However instructive past regrets may be toward making better decisions in the future, imagining that we could be happier with someone else can burden an otherwise reasonable life or romantic relationship. As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes in Monogamy (1996): ‘We are prone to think, erroneously, there should be someone else who could love us more, understand us better, or make me feel more sexually alive.’ Looking for someone ‘better’ may be particularly tempting today: with Internet and advertising finding its way into every nook and cranny of our consciousness, we are invited to hate what we love, and envy that which is not worth pursuing.
‘I don’t think individuals in the 1950s and ’60s tended to imagine a happier life with another romantic partner, at least in the sense that they could build a happier life with someone else,’ explained the historian Stephanie Coontz, author of A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (2011): ‘I think they imagined that everyone else was happy with their lives, and that there was something wrong with them not being happy. Because the sitcoms and magazine articles of that era portrayed successful families as ones that followed a formula, and it looked easy to replicate.’ Yet, the idea of pursuing happiness, however compelling, can have a very high costs for parents and children. In a follow-up study I did with Philip Cowan – professor of psychology at the University of Berkeley – we found that estranged parents who didn’t divorce were more likely to eventually reconcile with their children than those who did. In my clinical experience, divorce can increase the risk of a more conflicted or distant parent-adult child relationship in multiple ways. As Deborah Levy writes in her memoir, The Cost of Living (2018): ‘Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear but I have come to believe it might be what we most want.’
The sociologist Allison Pugh found that first marriages of ‘moderately educated’ women (those with some college education) are twice as likely to break up in the first five years as those of women with college degrees. Sometimes we are in the midst of depression and have gotten feedback from a therapist or others that our mood is distorting our view of our relationship. Alternatively, it's good to make attempts to communicate more effectively with your partner, and those attempts probably will be well-received and will be able to change the perceived problems. Sadly, some relationships have to be brought to the brink of a breakup to get the attention of the other person. E Mavis Hetherington’s study of divorce For Better or For Worse (2002) found that 25 per cent of men were completely surprised when their wives served them with divorce papers.
One of Émile Durkheim’s central insights in the late 19th century: that in removing the rituals, traditions, roles and expectations that had guided desire for centuries, we also removed the ability to know that we had arrived and could stop trying. ‘As soon as there is nothing to stop us, we cannot stop ourselves,’ he wrote. ‘Beyond the pleasures that we have experienced, we imagine and yearn for others, and if one should happen to have more or less exhausted the possible, one dreams of the impossible – one thirsts for what is not.’ However constraining and outdated are social roles, they at least provided clarity of whether we should stop and smell the roses – or exhaust ourselves in the pursuit of the sweeter ones that might be just over the hill. So the endless pursuit of happiness can produce the opposite result: rather than leading us to a deeper, more meaningful life, we just end up getting one more thing we don’t really need. Source: aeon.co
"Joanne gave him his confidence," says Ethan Hawke in The Last Movie Stars (2022). "Joanne taught him to believe in himself. Joanne taught him to love himself. When somebody asks her why their marriage worked, she said, 'There's my ego, and there's his ego, and there's our ego. And when we're both in service of our ego, we can do anything.'" "Their relationship never stopped growing," said their daughter Clea. "Their art never stopped growing. They never stopped pushing themselves, finding new things that were interesting to them." Paul Newman won several national championships as a driver in Sports car racing while Joanne Woodward teached theater classes. And together they were exceedingly generous philanthropists. According to Clea, they gave away "between $700,000,000 and a billion dollars. I don't really know. It's a lot. And the funny thing is, is that they probably wouldn't want anybody to know."
Hawke says, "I feel like we all need heroes that show the end of our life as a possibility of being the best part of our life." What Hawke is getting at in this documentary isn’t how to act but how to live as a Hollywood actor—how to remain artistically substantial and socially responsible, and how to sustain family relationships and friendships, all the while taking part in the machine and existing relentlessly in the public eye. For this, as the documentary reveals, there is no method. "I'm running out of steam," Newman said in 1968. "Wherever I look, I find parts reminiscent of Cool Hand Luke or Hud or Fast Eddie. Christ, I played those parts more than once. It's not only dangerous to repeat yourself, it's damned tiresome."
Besides, he had discovered racing and turned pro in 1977. He was fifty-two years old, and acting was now something he did on the side. Being a car racer he could use it to become the actor he'd always wanted to be, free of all the smirking boyo stuff and freeze-framed machismo. If he ain't Hud, ain't Fast Eddie, ain't Cool Hand Luke, ain't Butch Cassidy, who is he? Who is Paul Newman? "I don't know," he says. "You can't not absorb some of those character traits. You try to separate those little fragments you've created. The toughest role is playing Paul Newman. My own personality is so vapid and bland, I have to go steal the personalities of other people to be effective."
Nominated eight times for Academy Awards in the best-actor category, Newman won only once, for "The Color of Money" (1986), in which he reprised the role of "Fast" Eddie Felson that he originated in 1961's "The Hustler." When Newman finally won an Oscar in 1986 for "The Color of Money," it was neither his nor director Martin Scorsese's best effort and was seen by some observers as compensation for having been overlooked in "The Hustler." However, Newman didn't hide his disappointment that filmmaking in Hollywood had abandoned the "theater of the mind" for the "theater of the senses."
A new book, “Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man,” will be published in October. Ben Brusey, publishing director, bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Suzanne Smith, vice-president and director of foreign rights at Knopf Doubleday, for publication on 27th October. Knopf will simultaneously publish in the US. The publisher describes The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man as the “insightful, revealing and surprising memoir of perhaps the greatest movie star of the past 75 years”. Its synopsis reads: “Before he died in 2008, Newman had been at work on this project for five years. Newman recounts in detail his often traumatic childhood, his teenage insecurities, his youthful failures with women, his rise to stardom, his early rivals – Marlon Brando and James Dean – his first marriage, his greatest film roles, his drinking, his philanthropy, his professional racing car career, the death of his son Scott, and his desire for his daughters to understand the truth about their father.
“Perhaps the most moving material in the book centres on Newman’s relationship with Joanne Woodward and their deep love for each other. Additional voices that run throughout the book include Newman’s childhood friends, Navy buddies, family members and film and theater collaborators. The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man provides a new understanding of a man many admired but few really knew – from the perspective of the man himself. Newman died of lung cancer in 2008 at the age of eighty-three. Out of all his achievements, he valued his charity work the most. In his later years, Newman said: “I’d like to be remembered as a guy who tried to be a part of his times, tried to help people communicate with one another, tried to find some decency in his own life, and tried to extend himself as a human being.” That vision and his efforts toward it resonate today, through his legacy, carried on by his daughters and their respective philanthropy and activism. And through Joanne, his partner in this work, with whom he completed fifty years of marriage before his death. On their fiftieth wedding anniversary, Paul Newman asserted: “Joanne, being married to you has been the joy of my life.” Source: www.thebookseller.com
This year’s Emmy Award nominees were announced, with “Squid Game” earning 14 nods, the most ever for a foreign-language show. The 74th Emmy Awards will be broadcast live at 8 p.m. Eastern on Sept. 12 on NBC and will stream live for the first time on Peacock TV. Best Drama Nominees shows: “Better Call Saul” (AMC), “Ozark” (Netflix), “Severance” (Apple TV+), “Squid Game” (Netflix) and “Stranger Things” (Netflix). Best Comedy Nominees shows: “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (HBO), “Hacks” (HBO Max), “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon), “Only Murders in the Building” (Hulu) and “Ted Lasso” (Apple TV+). Best Actor in Drama: Jason Bateman, “Ozark”, Brian Cox, “Succession”, Lee Jung-jae, “Squid Game”, Bob Odenkirk, “Better Call Saul” and Adam Scott, “Severance”. Best Actor in Comedy: Donald Glover, “Atlanta”, Nicholas Hoult, “The Great”, Steve Martin, “Only Murders in the Building”, Martin Short, “Only Murders in the Building” and Jason Sudeikis, “Ted Lasso”. Best Actress in Drama: Laura Linney in “Ozark”, Melanie Lynskey, “Yellowjackets”, Jodie Comer, “Killing Eve” and Reese Witherspoon, “The Morning Show”. Directing for a Drama Series: Jason Bateman, “Ozark” (“A Hard Way to Go”), Ben Stiller, “Severance” (“The We We Are”), Lorene Scafaria, “Succession” (“Too Much Birthday”), Hwang Dong-hyuk, “Squid Game” (“Red Light, Green Light”), Karyn Kusama, “Yellowjackets” (“Pilot”) and Mark Mylod, “Succession” (“All the Bells Say”). Source: nytimes.com
Jason Bateman made his first important contribution as a film director in The Family Fang (2015), which opens with a sequence that is one of the most provocative introductions to a movie I’ve ever seen. The story is based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Kevin Wilson. Bateman (Juno, The Gift) and Nicole Kidman (The Hours, Dogville) play as the siblings Annie and Baxter Fang, both artists, somewhat successful but struggling with their art: she’s a moderately successful actress who’s appeared in a bunch of crap and a tampon comercial, and he’s a wunderkind novelist whose third book-in-progress is stuck in low gear while he is mired in writer’s block. Bateman is his usual splendidly sharp but understated self; Kidman matches him beat for beat in a way that she doesn’t often get the chance to do. Their warm but contentious relationship is the box out of which emerges a tale of the existential crisis of a whole family, but not in any way you’ve seen before, one that explores the boundaries between being true to oneself and being a self-obsessed freak when other people need you. It asks how much you may reasonably draw on other people as the inspiration for your art. It’s not funny in a way that makes you laugh out loud, but funny in a way that makes you uncomfortable. That is a place that few movies dare to go. Source: www.flickfilosopher.com
When Jason Bateman accepted his Emmy award for his work as director/producer in Ozark, Bateman began to tear up as he thanked his family. "I would like to say specifically though to my wife, my two daughters – Amanda, Franny and Maple – without you, none of it would be enjoyable and it probably wouldn’t be possible. I love you more than I even tell you I do. And I’ll be home for kisses so don’t go to bed. Amanda, pop a mint, I’m going to come give you yours in about five minutes." He called his family the "three most important people" in his life and gave them credit for allowing him to be the best actor/director he can be, saying that because of their love and support he doesn't mail-in his performances when he must be away from them.
"That keeps me from taking any of this for granted or just doing it half-assed," he said. In his usual deadpanning style, when asked if Bateman could make a sequel to any movie what would it be? Bateman said, not missing a bit, Teen Wolf 3 in 3D. Jason Bateman's career dates officially from a Golden Grahams advert in 1979, when he was just 10 (he’s now 53). He talks about his mother's influence – she was a Pan Am flight attendant, originally from the UK. If certain things are hilarious to him, Bateman explains that's because “my mother is British and everything is dry to her”. His father would be the more obvious role model in professional terms. Kent Bateman was a writer and director, and the producer of the 1987 fantasy sequel Teen Wolf Too, the lead role that sealed his son’s teen-idol status as nerdy, unthreatening and very 80s at once. Source: people.com
In Teen Wolf Too, it was explained that Bateman's character Todd Howard was the first cousin of Michael J. Fox’s Scott Howard from the original. Todd Howard was recruited by Scott’s former high school basketball coach Finstock (inexplicably now a college boxing coach) in the hopes that Todd shared the family “werewolf gene” that made Scott Howard such an excellent werewolf basketball player. However, first cousins only have a 12.5% genetic similarity. So there was only a one-in-eight chance that Todd would be a werewolf like Scott. Teen Wolf Too is a 1987 American fantasy comedy film directed by Christopher Leitch, written by R. Timothy Kring, and starring Jason Bateman (his first film debut), John Astin, Estee Chandler and Kim Darby.
It is the sequel to Teen Wolf (1985). During his first boxing match, Todd has his second "wolf-out" to display his supernatural agility and strength and has a dramatic come from behind victory, thus earning the admiration of the students as well as the strict Dean Dunn (John Astin). With his newfound fame as the prodigy wolf it comes girls, top grades and even a car from the dean but as the year goes on, Todd realizes that he is losing his friends and self-respect. He seeks advice from his uncle, Scott's father, Harold Howard (James Hampton), who helps him come to terms with his responsibilities. Todd also reconnects with his nerdy girlfriend, Nicki (Estee Chandler), who helps him regain his focus on being humble. Source: blu-ray.com
Meant to Be by Emily Giffin will suck you right in. When Joe Kingsley, the son of an iconic American family, meets model Cate Cooper on a photo shoot in the Hamptons, it’s love at first sight. But Cate comes from the wrong side of the tracks and isn’t interested in becoming front-page news by dating Joe. Eventually, she gives in, and the two fall in love, but secrets from Cate’s past and a tragedy threaten to destroy their relationship. Out of the gate, you are charmed by Joseph "Joe" Kingsley, Jr., a lovable bachelor with a heap of expectations on his shoulders due to his family's name and prestige. The chapters alternate between Joe's perspective and of his romantic interest, Cate Cooper, a thoughtful, strong and effortlessly elegant model-turned-stylist. It's no secret that Giffin's novel was inspired by JFK, Jr.'s and Carolyn Bessette's love story; however, Giffin's creativity and insights take her characters to a new level. You will be left with insights on how two people from very different worlds can navigate differences, and how sometimes a couple's love story really is meant to be.
Inspired loosely by John F. Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette's ill-fated romance and set in '90s New York City, Meant to Be follows cool, blonde, model-turned-fashion stylist Cate Cooper and hunky Joe Kingsley, scion of the Kingsley family, and as close to American royalty as you can get. The pair have a glamorous, passionate romance, tailed by the ever-present paparazzi. (It sounds familiar?) Giffin spoke to EW about Meant to Be, modern icons, and how the '90s "feels like the last decade of innocence." Source: ew.com
"On the weekends, I would stay in my room with Pepper, listening to music, reading Judy Blume novels about other miserable kids, and flipping through my Bop and Tiger Beat magazines. I didn’t like boys in real life, but I had a robust lineup of celebrity crushes that included Shaun Cassidy, Leif Garrett, and Donny Osmond. My hands-down favorite, though, was Joe Kingsley. Growing up, I’d always known who Joe was. A few years older than I was, he had a famous father who was killed in a failed space mission, and he lived on Fifth Avenue with his glamorous mother. [...] Joe laughed, his face lighting up, then looked directly into my eyes. I held his gaze, feeling a little light-headed. I’d met celebrities before, but no one near this famous—or handsome. Overwhelmed, I had to glance away for a second. When I looked back his way, he was still staring at me. “I’m Joe, by the way,” he said, extending his arm. I gave him a half smile, then shook his hand. “I’m Cate Cooper.” Joe looked smug as he gave me a wink. “Yep. I knew it. I never forget a face. Not one as pretty as yours, anyway.” It was the kind of line that usually sounded cheesy, but Joe’s delivery was so sincere that it disarmed me, and I could feel my heart flutter a little as I thanked him." —Meant to Be (2022) by Emily Giffin
.jpg)
