Why Paul Newman happily “pissed away” the biggest payday of his career
These days, Hollywood has become such a lucrative industry that even crap actors are regularly paid seven figures for starring in terrible movies, but cash wasn’t being thrown around with quite as much reckless abandon when Paul Newman was among its biggest stars.
With the industry shifting more towards franchises than actors as marquee drawing cards, it’s not surprising that the usual suspects who trouble the annual list of Tinseltown’s highest-paid names aren’t exactly the types who’ll find themselves in the running for Academy Awards.
Dwayne Johnson, Vin Diesel, Ryan Reynolds, and Adam Sandler are usually among them, which is a far cry from Newman’s era, when he was competing with generational talents like Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, and Gene Hackman to take home the biggest payday.
Then again, after Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor became the first performers to break through the million-dollar barrier with Mutiny on the Bounty and Cleopatra, respectively, salaries began to incrementally increase. By the mid-1970s, it wasn’t unheard of for a high-profile actor to take home millions, with a little piece of the back end thrown into the bargain.
That wasn’t typically Newman’s bag, though, even if vast sums of money are awfully difficult to turn down. He was almost two decades into his career before he accepted a purely paycheque gig, and he didn’t regret it because not only was it one of the decade’s best blockbusters, but he made a fortune.
“Towering Inferno was the first and only picture I’ve ever decided to do for the money,” he confessed. “Up until then.” Of course, his career still had almost 30 years left to run, and he betrayed his artistic principles in the name of financial reward once more before he called it quits, which isn’t bad compared to others.
Steve McQueen was a constant thorn in his side as they battled for leading man supremacy, but Newman was self-aware enough to know that, despite his name value, he wasn’t the draw. “I knew that the quicker I got off the screen and the stuntman got on, the quicker the picture would start rolling,” he accurately surmised.
For the big-budget extravaganza, Newman was rewarded with his usual asking price of $1million, plus a percentage of the box office takings. When The Towering Inferno became the highest-grossing release of 1974 and cleared $200million in ticket sales, his total pay packet was almost ten times his base salary.
He’d never made more money from a single picture before, but as it turned out, he was at liberty to fritter it away however he saw fit. Why? Because by the time he signed on for director John Guillermin’s fiery epic, he’d already wrapped shooting on The Sting alongside Robert Redford, which was released in December 1973.
When the classic crime caper became the second-top earner of the year behind only The Exorcist, raking in more than a quarter of a billion dollars, Newman was more flush than he’d ever been. “After I’d accepted the role, the money from The Sting started coming in,” he revealed. “So I put that aside and pissed away the Inferno money.”
Some actors would consolidate their wealth after headlining back-to-back hits, but not Newman: he made so much from The Sting that The Towering Inferno was disposable income.
