Paul Newman’s bizarrely sexual take on “popcorn” cinema: “The orgasm has to be four times as great”
For someone who constantly railed against being reduced to a sex symbol with a pair of the most striking blue eyes in cinema history, Paul Newman repeatedly proved himself to be a bit of a randy bugger.
After all, this is a man who built a bespoke boudoir on the grounds of his home that he dubbed the ‘Fuck Hut’, and there are no prizes for guessing what the Academy Award-winning legend and his wife, Joanne Woodward, got up to behind closed doors in their specially designated area.
He was also the guy who finally accepted that he was indeed a Hollywood heartthrob when he saw a picture of his own face being used in a French softcore porn movie, so there was a hypocritical air to Newman constantly damning the press for calling him a pretty face. He was a handsome fella, no doubt, but he benefitted from doubling as one of his generation’s finest actors.
Like many stars who straddled the ‘Golden Age’ and ‘New Hollywood’ eras and found success in both, he became increasingly concerned with the commodification of cinema. Once the auteur bubble had burst in the wake of Heaven’s Gate, which came several years after Star Wars changed everything, big-budget blockbusters and popcorn flicks were the new normal.
That didn’t sit too well with Newman, which is why he only made two of them. His first, The Towering Inferno, was an Oscar-winning smash hit that still ranks as one of the best disaster movies ever made. He knew it was “junk,” but it was entertaining junk, and he made no bones about the fact that he’d only made it for the money.
The second, When Time Ran Out, was abysmal. In fact, it was so awful that Newman couldn’t even remember what it was called, but he definitely didn’t forget that it was shite. Unless you count his voice-only performance in Pixar’s Cars, those were his only pair of mass-marketed entertainment films, and no amount of money could convince him for a third tilt at a style of cinema he despised.
He’d already raged against how “you have to kill 53 people” to entertain a modern audience, lamenting how the “insistence on sexual, visceral gratification” had taken hold of mainstream movies. That wouldn’t be the last time he made a frisky comparison, citing Sam Mendes’ Road to Perdition as a touchstone.
The graphic novel adaptation was violent, yes, but it wasn’t gratuitous. It served the story, and in a conversation with Entertainment Weekly, Newman made it clear in no uncertain terms that it wasn’t “a popcorn flick,” which he summed up as a movie where, in spectacle terms, “the orgasm has to be four times as great as the last orgasm.”
The Tom Hanks-led crime thriller didn’t fit that bill, with Newman offering that “this picture aspires to be something.” That wasn’t his only saucy analogy, either. When asked how he felt about being called a living legend, he said, “Very fucking little,” before describing himself as being a lucky beneficiary of “that torrent of sperm out there.” Technically, he’s not wrong, but that doesn’t make it any less weird.
