This story about “The Last Movie Stars” originally appeared in the Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
Actor-director Ethan Hawke, who was working on “The Last Movie Stars,” showed his mother a rough cut of the six-part Max documentary about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. She told him, “Well, you’ve managed to make two of the greatest icons of my life completely human. Although I’m not sure anyone is going to do that. Although “The Last Movie Stars” was based on the Newman and Woodward films (” The Three Faces of Eve,” “Cool Hand Luke,” “The Verdict” and many more), the series beautifully folds themes of family, betrayal, aging, grief and healing. Hawke about their labor of love.
The series is very artistic and influential, but it is also influential as a work of profile journalism. how was that for you?
Years ago I wrote a profile of Kris Kristofferson for Rolling Stone, and while I was doing that, I interviewed Cameron Crowe and Hunter S. aired those early Rolling Stone profiles by Thompson that I loved. He kind of inserted himself in the story and thus the approach became clear. And there’s something about the admission of a point of view that always comforts me as a reader.
So that was in your mind when you started this project?
Yes, but one of the first problems to solve is structure. Especially when you are dealing with two 50 year careers in this matter. How do you structure an architecture for the audience so that they feel it has a beginning, middle and end?
You learned that in 1986, Newman hired Stewart Stern, a screenwriter, to write his memoir. But after abandoning the book idea, Newman burned all the tape recordings.
Absolutely. But all transcripts were preserved. And I became fascinated with these tapes that I didn’t have audio for, so I started meeting with actor friends on Zoom during the pandemic so they could read the tapes. I would send these zooms to my editor and we started cutting them into the document, just as placeholders, to create an outline. And strangely enough, I started looking at architecture. It became clear that with all these different actors on Zoom, the story we were telling and who was telling it.
Was it always planned to be this length?
No, I was hired to make a two-hour documentary. But halfway through, I went to the producers and said, “The problem with a two-hour movie is that Paul and Joan are so famous, that if we try to reduce their lives to two hours, it’s just Will be done.” high water moments. It can still be great, like an A&E documentary about a famous person. But my concern was that it would run too fast. I thought it might be more dynamic if we went a little slower. So I sent a five-hour cut to Richard Linklater and asked him how many hours he would cut out of it. And he said, “It’s too short! Slow down!”