The 1974 movie Paul Newman couldn’t stand making: “That was his idea of a giant sellout”
Paul Newman is a man of many talents, known for being a creative force within the film industry as well as extending his talents to the racing tracks and blurring the two together after his voice work in the Cars films made by Pixar.
However, he is perhaps best known for his performance in films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and The Verdict, with famously piercing blue eyes and an emotional depth that shines through in his dramatic work.
However, while he has starred in some of the most influential films of all time, he has expressed regret over starring in one film from 1974 that made him feel like a sellout.
Towering Inferno was one of the pivotal action films in Newman’s career, following the opening party of a huge sky scraper that subsequently goes up into films, threatening the lives of everyone in the tower. Newman stars alongside Steven McQueen and Faye Dunaway, combining the force of many of Hollywood’s greatest talents for the disaster picture that took an extreme amount of manpower to bring it to life.
20th Century Fox and Warner Brothers combined together to tackle the picture, with two directors being credited on the project (with one in charge of action scenes and one in charge of talking scenes) and the story being the product of two novels being smashed together. The result is a huge and meticulously constructed project that was intended to amplify the power of both the leads and capitalise on their combined star quality.
From the outside, it looked like exactly the sort of production any Hollywood star would have been eager to join. Big-budget disaster movies were becoming some of the industry’s most dependable box office attractions, and pairing Newman with Steve McQueen turned the film into an event long before audiences had seen a frame of footage. Commercially, it was almost impossible to argue with the logic behind the project.
For Newman, though, success had never been measured solely in ticket sales. Throughout his career, he gravitated towards characters that challenged him emotionally or morally, often favouring nuanced dramas over outright spectacle. That tension between artistic fulfilment and commercial opportunity would come to define his feelings towards The Towering Inferno, despite the film’s undeniable popularity.
However, after recently starring in the series The Last Movie Stars, in which the life’s work of Paul Newman and his romance with Joanne Woodward is explored in great detail, Ethan Hawke described the turmoil Newman experienced during production and his dislike of starring in the project.
When explaining his feelings towards the picture, Hawke said, “He hated doing Towering Inferno. That was his idea of a giant sellout. You see him in physical pain in that movie. But, it’s still a job. You still have to put food on the table.” There are many actors who accept jobs for the sake of a pay cheque and staying active within the film industry, but for Newman, his work was much more than a means to put food on the table, and working on a film he didn’t care about was borderline painful for him.
Despite not being hugely fond of Towering Inferno, every artist will find themselves in a similar predicament, with the prospect of working on something you don’t care about being an inescapable part of the job. Jacob Elordi has recently risen to fame through his work with Sofia Coppola and Paul Schrader but accepted roles on awful Netflix teen dramas at the beginning of his career as a means to an end. We can see the same with Margot Robbie on Neighbours and Dakota Johnson with Fifty Shades of Grey.
Ultimately, we do what we can to stay in the business, whatever the cost, and perhaps this is the mark of a true artist.
