Tthe synopsis of latest movie stars, HBO’s new six-part documentary about Hollywood power couple Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, doesn’t look promising on paper. Filmed at the height of Covid, it’s directed and hosted by Ethan Hawke and threatens us with a long list of A-list actors showing up via Zoom to take on various characters. The source material, hundreds of hours of interview transcripts commissioned by Newman for a biography that never materialized, tells the story not only of the couple and their careers, but of an era, a marriage, and an industry. All of which sounds good, within its limitations. But who has the time or the appetite for six hours of this stuff?
It turns out that watching The Last Movie Stars is an extraordinary experience. As a documentary, it is different in form from The return of Peter Jackson, the eight hours of studio footage cut from the Beatles’ 1969 recording session. The Last Movie Stars is a more conventional project, with commentary and talking heads interspersed with archival footage from Newman and Woodward’s filmography. And yet, the depth of the material and the sheer audacity of the show’s length invite a similar sense of immersion to Get Back. Newman burned all the audio tapes from which the transcripts are derived, for reasons that, as the show progresses, become obvious: the revelations are so intimate, so startling, and sometimes so devastating that it’s surprising they even existed. first.
George Clooney reads for Newman; Laura Linney for Woodward. The interviews with Gore Vidal, his great friend, are brilliantly read by Brooks Ashmanskas. Zoe Kazan, whose grandfather, Elia, directed Newman several times and figures prominently in the material, reads for Jackie McDonald, Newman’s first wife. Newman and Woodward were beloved movie stars, but there’s something about the granular level of immersion in their lives that almost makes celebrity meaningless. A portrait of a marriage, not only of Newman and Woodward, but also of the aftermath of Newman’s marriage to McDonald, would be, one suspects, gripping even without the glitter of Hollywood.
Of course, there’s one big additional chill that comes from the stars playing the stars. When Newman talks about the vicissitudes of fame, you know that Clooney, by conveying the actor’s words in his own unmistakable voice, is applying every idea to himself. The series also captures a time when, as Vidal says, “the end of cinema as a universal art form” was seen. Overshadowed in his early career by Marlon Brando and James Dean, handsome but not fiery, quiet, reticent, reserved and unsure of himself, Newman nonetheless reached the level of icon. Unraveling how this happened and how Newman, who says, at one point, “I struggled with confidence all my life,” got through this, is like reading a really good novel.
And then there are the personal things. In an interview, Newman says that the first time he cried as an adult was at the birth of Nell, his first child with Woodward. The fact that he has already had three children with McDonald does not require further comment, although the presence in the documentary of Stephanie, one of his daughters with McDonald, feels, from a production point of view, like an achievement. incredible. “They were so in love with each other,” she recalls of her father and stepmother, before talking about how “disgusted” she was with her father for how he treated her mother, and allowing the viewer to understand that the story is much more big than what “Dad was a complicated guy.”
Woodward’s portrait is even more fascinating. When the couple met, Woodward was the star; she had just won an Oscar for The Three Faces of Eve. Meanwhile, Newman was barely able to land a leading role. Over the years, the balance changed. After the couple had children, Woodward found himself spending more and more time at home with the children. “Why does Shirley MacLaine get all those papers?” she says bitterly at one point, before admitting, “if she had to do it all over again, she might not have had kids.” Hawke, with the sensitivity of a movie star who has been married to another movie star, wisely says, “Many of us lose our dreams. But most of us don’t have a partner who has the exact same dreams and theirs come true.”
The effect of it all: the accumulation of detail, the stunning imagery, the startling honesty of the transcripts, in which, at one point, Newman says with rare insight for the time: “Born white in America in 1925; that’s the start of luck” – makes The Last Movie Stars one of the best TV shows of the year so far. (A date for its broadcast in the UK has not yet been set.) Hawke, disheveled as he tries to find decent Wi-Fi at his house, rounds up his famous friends in what, in lesser hands, might have been an act of self-indulgence. As it is, these six hours about art, love, ambition and disappointment are absolutely electrifying.