I had deliberately not said anything about Paul Newman’s passing for various reasons.
I was, for one thing, conscious that this blog has turned of late into something like an anthology of eulogies to a succession of towering cultural figures who have sadly passed way over recent weeks and months.
And while I can rattle off a bunch of Newman movies I have enjoyed enormously, it would be dishonest of me to claim I am any kind of expert in his career. Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid is one of the best movies of the past 50 years – one of those rare films in which everything just works; The Sting was almost as good; he was colossal in The Verdict (how he didn’t win an Oscar for that I’ll never understand – Ghandi was good but…); The Hustler, Cool Hand Luke, The Long, Hot Summer, Hud and The Color Of Money are all immensely watchable and The Towering Inferno remains a universal guilty pleasure.
But he was a great actor and, by all accounts, a mightily decent man: we all know that Newman’s profits from the Newman’s Own food range went to charity – perhaps not so many of us knew until we read the obituaries that those profits had totalled $250 million in the company’s 25-year existence.
At 83, Newman literally was almost the last of his generation: of that stature, only Clint Eastwood, at 78, remains and we should treasure him while we can.
Last night, though, I watched two interviews from the BBC’s archive that reminded me of what we have lost – both in terms of Newman and his like, and the way in which the experiences of such individuals are captured for posterity.
BBC Four is having a week-long season called The Art Of Arts TV, looking back at the way in which television documentaries have tackled the subject of art and culture. As part of this season, the channel has screened some exerpts of interviews conducted by Huw Wheldon as part of the landmark Monitor series of the Fifties and Sixties (of which he was editor) including a 1960 interview with Orson Welles and a 1965 interview with Alfred Hitchcock.
Sadly neither interview ran its full course (it’s entirely possible the full recordings no longer survive) but for 30 glorious minutes (15 minutes apiece) we were treated to unhurried, intelligent conversation about the art and craft of film-making, the stories that inspired their plots, their aims and intentions, and the techniques they employed.
(The Hitchcock interview sadly is not online, but the Welles interview can be seen on BBC iPlayer for the next four days.)
Newman was not, of course, as great a director as either Welles or Hitch but he was certainly a Hollywood legend: as well as, I dare say, some fantastic anecdotes about nights on the tiles with Brando, Redford, McQueen et al, the experience he accumulated over his 50-year career could have provided a valuable resource both to students and historians of modern popular culture and to aspiring actors.
I can’t remember the last time I saw on British television someone other than a politician interviewed for more than 10 minutes at a stretch in a studio, by an intelligent, knowledgeable and articulate interviewer interested in more than simply plugging the subject’s latest product. And yet you hop on a Eurostar and you can barely navigate the French TV schedules for serious (and some not-so-serious) talk programmes.
It must have happened since but I’m struggling to think of any such interviews since the demise of programmes such as Wogan and Des O’Connor Tonight, both of which would sometimes devote entire 45-60 minute shows to one guest.
I can’t imagine Wheldon spent the unaired parts of the interviews quizzing Welles or Hitch about their private lives, searching for the quote or revelation that would make the following day’s tabloid front pages – and perhaps that’s why true legends were prepared to appear: they knew they would only be talking about their art.
Only Bravo’s Inside The Actors Studio (shown in the UK on Sky Arts) comes anywhere close these days – and even then it is a rushed affair because it is as much about the ego of the host, the insufferable James Lipton, as it is about his guest. Both Newman and Eastwood have appeared on that programme, as has almost every other American actor and director of note. Oh, and Ben Affleck.
To the best of my knowledge, Paul Newman wrote no autobiography: it’s sad to think that he may have taken the bulk of his experience with him to the racetrack in the sky. May he race in peace.
