The embarrassing movie Paul Newman wiped from his memory: “Fortunately, I can’t remember the name of it”
There was nowhere for Paul Newman to go but up after he started his silver screen career with the movie he would always hate the most, but The Silver Chalice wasn’t the only one of his credits the legendary actor despised with an intense and burning passion.
It’s easily the most famous, though, with Newman shitting on the 1954 historical epic whenever the opportunity presented itself, which admittedly backfired in bleakly hilarious fashion when his full-page advertisement urging people not to watch it on television saw the ratings skyrocket as a result.
For the most part, the ‘New Hollywood’ icon was happy with his lot. Even on the rare occasions he dipped his toes into blockbuster-deep waters, the end results were usually stellar, as The Towering Inferno can attest, seeing as it’s arguably the finest disaster flick of the genre’s 1970s boom period.
However, lightning rarely strikes twice in the same spot, although Newman does at least get a pass for returning to the well when he was contractually obligated to do so and was handsomely paid for his efforts. Six years after his dick-measuring contest with Steve McQueen, the star reunited with The Towering Inferno producer Irwin Allen because the small print said he had to.
During an appearance on Larry King Live, Newman was asked if there were any entries in his filmography – other than The Silver Chalice, naturally – that embarrassed him. As it turns out, there was one, and it left him so red-faced that he’d completely erased it from his memory banks.
“Oh, yes. I did one movie for money in 40 years, I guess,” he confessed. “Fortunately, I can’t remember the name of it. But it was an adventure film about volcanoes and everything. I don’t care to talk about it.” James Goldstone’s 1980 effort, When Time Ran Out, wasn’t just a flop and a terrible movie; it was pinpointed as the main culprit behind the demise of the mainstream disaster film.
Newman may have pulled a Men in Black on himself and had the offending article wiped from his brain, but history remembers it as a woeful big-budget slog that earned less than $4 million at the box office against a $20 million budget and couldn’t find a decent review to save its life, even if it did notch an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Costume Design’.
Newman, his Towering Inferno co-star William Holden, Jacqueline Bisset, Burgess Meredith, and Ernest Borgnine head up the typically starry cast of an Allen-backed blockbuster, but critics and audiences couldn’t have cared less about a ragtag group of characters attempting to flee a picturesque island with their lives when a volcano erupts.
If Newman puts it on the same infamous pedestal as The Silver Chalice, then it’s clear he really doesn’t like When Time Ran Out. On the plus side, he did such a stellar job of forgetting about it that he couldn’t even remember what it was called.
