Sometime during the eighties, the legendary American actor Paul Newman started working on a memoir about his life and career. He and his friends made a series of interviews recorded on tapes, but after a while Newman not only gave up on the project, but decided to burn all the material he had previously collected. Years later and after Newman’s death, his daughter dug through her father’s belongings and found transcripts of those same interviews without knowing what they were about. When she understood, she turned to her friend, also famous actor Ethan Hawke, who gladly accepted the idea of filming the idea of a documentary film.
In the end, “The Last Movie Stars” turned out not to be a documentary, but a six-part documentary series. And not only about Newman, but also about his lifelong companion, wife and also actress Joanne Woodward, because it would simply be impossible to tell the story of one without the story of the other. As Hawke is primarily an actor, his initial position of fascination with Newman, but also with Woodward as colleagues and artists who were great at their jobs, is also clear. However, “The Last Movie Stars” is at the same time a brilliantly researched, in-depth, smart and touching personal story about a couple that was actually something atypical for Hollywood because they remained married for the rest of their lives and were never associated with any major scandals.
In order to revive the interviews conducted with Newman and people close to him back in the eighties by the writer Stewart Stern, Hawke gathered a whole constellation of his fellow actresses and actors. He gave them the task of reading what was found in the transcripts, so the role of Newman was liked by George Clooney, Woodward Laura Linney, etc. As the series is obviously filmed during the pandemic, we simultaneously follow Hawke’s conversations with all these actors, as well as Newman’s children, and later grandchildren. This completely atypical approach to the origin of the story, in which the director himself shows how much he struggles and how much he thinks about how to present the story of the lives of the protagonists through all these decades, worked.
The story actually begins at the very beginning of the fifties, when both Newman and Woodward were two young, ambitious actors who tried to make their way on the New York theater scene. Newman was already married at the time and already had three children in his first marriage, but soon they got married and were inseparable throughout their lives. It’s a great story about that amazing time in the fifties, when along with the Actors Studio, the way of acting and the film itself changed, and how Elie Kazan Newman attended the studio at the same time as Marlon Brando and James Dean. We see how it was not easy for Newman to break into the acting elite, while for example Woodward became a successful and famous actress long before him, but also how it all turned around very quickly.
However, it is a series that does not only serve to raise a monument to the protagonists, but Hawke does not hesitate to show the darker side as well. Although Newman always said that he was born under a lucky star and that he was very lucky in his life, we also see some difficult moments in his life. Here we see how those two people developed, whose lives everyone followed through movies, television shows, and newspaper covers. Although from the outside it may have always seemed idyllic, of course it is never really like that. We see what shaped both of them, but primarily Newman, into the man he later became and how he constantly fought with some inner demons and sometimes more, sometimes less managed to overcome them.
“The Last Movie Stars” is nowhere near that classic television documentary in which the author gathers a bunch of interlocutors who then tell anecdotes about the protagonist’s life along with archival footage. Hawke tries to understand who Newman and Woodward really were, what the dynamic was in their relationship, what their life was like and what bothered them. What did they think about in the moments when the whole world celebrated and adored them and what was their life like away from the spotlight. Hawke succeeded in this, and this documentary series captures a much broader picture than the typical one. It is not a classic story about Hollywood stars, but something much, much more.