The only movie Paul Newman was forced into making: “Jack Warner, go fuck yourself”
When Paul Newman first started breaking into Hollywood, he was at the mercy of the studio system. It was an era when actors signed multi-picture contracts with studios and had no idea which movies they’d be contractually obligated to make, affording them very little control over their destiny.
If they read a script and knew from the first page that it was terrible, there was nothing they could do about it. Their careers were defined by how many films they’d agreed to make, not what kind of pictures they’d turn out to be. However, it didn’t take Newman very long to realise that wasn’t how he wanted to work.
He made his feature debut in 1956’s The Silver Chalice and regretted it for the rest of his life. One major positive was that, in his own words, he never starred in anything worse, so if there’s one shining light from the debacle that haunted him for decades, it was that he got his weakest effort out of the way first.
The panned historical epic was a Warner Bros production, and the studio became his de facto home. He inked a deal with the outfit and made five movies for the company before the end of the decade, but it was the last one that pushed him over the edge and saw him take a huge risk.
Newman was contractually obliged to play the lead in Vincent Sherman’s literary adaptation, The Young Philadelphians, even though he really didn’t want to. He had a gentleman’s agreement with the boss, who’d given the actor his word that he’d never be pushed into anything he’d typically turn down.
“Though Warners had promised me they’d never force me into making a movie I simply didn’t want, they lied,” he wrote in his memoir, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man. “I called the studio directly. ‘Jack Warner,’ I said. ‘This is Paul Newman. Go fuck yourself.'”
He dreamed of returning to the stage, but Warner Bros pushed him into another picture to capitalise on the success of his Academy Award nomination for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Newman had lined up a Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Birds of Youth, which had to be pushed back to accommodate his Young Philadelphians schedule.
When he’d wrapped the film and returned to the theatre, Warner “asked to come by after the show and offer congratulations,” but Newman wasn’t having it: “I wouldn’t allow him backstage.” Furious at being betrayed by his paymasters, the disgruntled contract player came up with a risky solution.
Newman’s agent brokered a deal that would let him out of his deal for the princely sum of half a million dollars. “The deal was frightening to me,” he admitted. “I was still nervous, but the gamble ultimately paid off. Within a few years, I had paid back the $500,000 to Warners.”
From that point on, nobody pushed him around. Now that he’d freed himself from the restrictive terms and conditions, his new focus was “to decide what projects to do based on whether I really wanted to do them,” not how many movies were left on his contract.
