“Not a happy experience”: the Paul Newman movie despised by its creator
Paul Newman made some astonishingly good movies in his long career that saw him grace the big screen in six different decades, as a young man and an old man, and earned him 12 Oscar nominations in five of those decades.
His library is about as good as any actor in history: 1968’s Cool Hand Luke might be the best film ever made, then you’ll find him in Sidney Lumet’s thrilling courtroom drama The Verdict as an alcoholic lawyer going up against himself as a rebellious young pool shark in 1961’s The Hustler, plus a dual-superstar performance with Robert Redford in 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Newman was, and is, a genuine, bona fide Hollywood icon, a leading man for the ages, but that doesn’t mean everything he put his name to was of a similar quality. He would often run the rule over his catalogue and dismiss films he felt weren’t up to par or that he hadn’t put in his customarily engrossing performance, movies like 1965’s Lady L with Sophia Loren, 1976’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians or even his 1954 debut The Silver Chalice, which he described as “junk”.
In 1973, he teamed up with the director John Huston, who had been responsible for Humphrey Bogart classics like The Maltese Falcon and would go on to helm Chinatown, for a Cold War spy thriller called The Mackintosh Man, conceived of and written by another filmmaker, Walter Hill, who would have considerable success as a director himself in the 1980s on movies like Eddie Murphy’s 48 Hours and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Red Heat.
Hill had written several gritty scripts that had caused a stir in Hollywood, one called Hickey & Boggs starred a young Bill Cosby of all people, but he’d also written The Getaway starring Steve McQueen, which had been a huge hit the year before.
On making The Mackintosh Man, Hill told the Directors’ Guild of America, “That was not a happy experience. I wrote a script from a novel that I was enamored of, [but] it was a complicated situation. I was being sued by Warner Brothers”.
He explained that “There was a compromise. My agent said they are sending you a box of books. Pick one out, write a script, get it over with…I wrote a quick script which I was not particularly enamored with myself…I took a trip, my agent tracked me down, he said you better get back here, Paul Newman is doing your film, I think John Huston is directing it. I thought, Jesus Christ. I wrote 90% of the first half; various people wrote the rest. I didn’t think it was a very good film.”
Co-starring the esteemed three-time Oscar-nominated actor James Mason, The Mackintosh Man was met with decidedly mixed reviews on release and brought in a meagre $1.5million at the box office, representing a considerable loss for the studio, which was likely contributed to by the fact that the script still wasn’t finished two weeks into shooting. Hill later confessed that he didn’t even bother to watch the finished article but was told it was “a real bomb”.
Newman, meanwhile, didn’t have to concern himself with the film for long, as later that year, another movie he made with Redford was released, the 1930s-set crime caper, The Sting, which became the highest-grossing movie of the year and won the Oscar for ‘Best Picture’.
