A director’s nightmare: Paul Newman’s unusual recurring habit of faking his own death on set
Some actors take themselves and their craft very seriously, and while nobody would ever claim that Paul Newman was ever anything less than 100% dedicated to his day job, he also developed a habit of causing mischief whenever he felt his directors needed to be taught a lesson.
Workplace pranks are a regular occurrence in Hollywood as Brad Pitt and George Clooney have spent decades proving to each other repeatedly, but they didn’t go quite as far as Newman, who was known to have faked his own death on at least three separate occasions.
Nine Academy Award nominations for acting and one win for Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money indicates that Newman was among the best of his generation at convincing audiences he was somebody he was not. That talent for getting into character was also weaponised to strike fear into the hearts of filmmakers who became convinced their leading man had met an untimely end, which came close to causing a meltdown.
Newman taking out a full-page advertisement in print to encourage audiences not to watch his feature debut when The Silver Chalice was gearing up for its television premiere showed that he was never one to take himself too seriously, and becoming a renowned prankster was a logical progression from there.
When director George Roy Hill refused to take his script suggestions on board during the filming of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Newman responded by sawing his desk in half. When he reunited with the filmmaker and co-star Robert Redford on The Sting, he upped the ante by having Hill’s brand new Chevy cut in two following a disagreement over the ending, even if he graciously bought him a replacement.
Those were more light-hearted hijinks, until Newman raised the stakes when they collaborated again by staging a fatal car accident when Slap Shot was in production. The actor climbed behind the wheel of a wrecked car, made sure word reached Hill, and then climbed out of the vehicle when the director arrived on the scene with a huge grin on his face.
He even pulled the same trick twice on Otto Preminger and John Huston, almost a decade and a half apart, on the sets of Exodus and The Mackintosh Man, respectively. Weary at his ideas being cast aside and ignored, in both instances, Newman made sure the directors were close enough – but not too close – to see a dummy being dropped from a great height.
“In the case of Mackintosh Man, after Huston paid no intention to Paul’s lengthy list of script suggestions, with the cameras turning and Paul performing an active scene 60 feet above the ground, Paul hurled a lookalike dummy through a window that landed on the ground below with a thud, causing Huston to yell ‘Cut!’ and race to the scene,” close friend AE Hotchner shared in his memoirs.
In Exodus, the scene required Newman to fight on top of a balcony, where “a perfect lookalike dummy was adroitly substituted for Paul during the fight.” Once again, the inanimate object landed on the ground near the film’s director with an unsightly thud, with “Perminger so shaken he collapsed and required first aid.”
A little on the morbid side, but faking his own death eventually became Newman’s favoured method of getting one over on his directors. Understandably, nobody wanted to be responsible for killing one of the biggest stars in the business, even if the legendary star was happy to let Hill, Huston, and Perminger think they had.
