The “bloodsucker” Paul Newman swore he’d never work for: “Not that anyone gives a shit”
He may have emerged toward the end of Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’ when the old studio system was still in full swing, but Paul Newman laid down a marker that would soon become commonplace in the industry by seizing control of his own destiny.
Having signed a multi-picture contract with Warner Bros in the early 1950s, which got off to the worst possible start when he made his feature-length bow in The Silver Chalice, Newman quickly realised that being told what movies to appear in would do his short-term prospects more harm than good.
By the end of the decade, he’d had enough. He had a loose agreement with the studio’s boss, Jack Warner, that he wouldn’t be forced into making anything he didn’t want to. Naturally, that deal was broken when he was pushed into The Young Philadelphians, which was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Sick and tired of having no say over the direction of his career, Newman bet on himself to the tune of $500,000, buying himself out of his Warner Bros deal and finally having the freedom he’d desired. He made the most of it, becoming one of his era’s defining stars and finest actors, but there was at least one boundary he refused to cross.
The Academy Award-winning icon didn’t get into many personal or professional feuds during his storied time in the cinematic spotlight, and the biggest of them all was with a newspaper. Newman and The New York Post spent years slinging mud and shit at each other, whether they were debating his height or bad-mouthing each other in print or in public.
This was all going down in the mid-1980s, around the same time that The New York Post‘s owner, Rupert Murdoch, purchased 20th Century Fox through his News Corp conglomerate. With one of his mortal enemies now in charge of a major studio, there was only one thing he could do: avoid them like the plague.
“I may be dead wrong, he may be the most charitable person in Australia,” Newman ruminated. “He might have a whole hospital complex somewhere. He may have built 63 Presbyterian churches. But I think he’s a real bloodsucker. He’ll take and squeeze and take anything he can get and never give anything back.”
It was clear that he had little time for Murdoch or his media empire, which is why he swore that he’d never again make a film for 20th Century Fox. “Not that anyone gives a shit,” he added, which wasn’t necessarily true, since he was still one of the most famous names in the business, but now he’d made himself completely off-limits to one of cinema’s biggest and most powerful entities.
Newman was so close to being a man of his word, too, but fell at the final hurdle through no fault of his own. He starred in 12 movies after swearing he’d never work for that bloodsucker, only for his final live-action credit in Sam Mendes’ Road to Perdition to be distributed internationally by the very studio he’d made a point of turning his back on.
