The worst period of Paul Newman’s career, according to Paul Newman: “A terrible mistake”
Every star is bound to end up with a few duds, but Paul Newman once elaborated on a losing streak.
After breaking out with 1961’s The Hustler and starring alongside Robert Redford in 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Newman chose several bad movies in the 1970s and at the beginning of the 1980s for “the wrong reasons”.
There was 1970’s WUSA about a New Orleans radio station involved in a right-wing conspiracy, 1973’s The Mackintosh Man, a Cold War spy thriller, and 1975’s The Drowning Pool, which follows a PI who visits an old girlfriend afraid of her husband finding out about her infidelity, and while the latter two received mixed reviews, the first title was more handily criticised.
Of course during this decade, Newman did star in the smash hit The Sting, as well as Pocket Money, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, The Towering Inferno, and Slap Shot, but the end of the ’70s brought with it an extreme flop, the sci-fi drama Quintet, which depicts the last of humanity being obsessed with playing a board game called Quintet.
To give you some idea of its reception, the Robert Altman film currently has a 27% on Rotten Tomatoes, and it was a critical and commercial catastrophe, to the point where Grace Kelly reacted angrily to Newman’s role in it, accusing the board at 20th Century Fox, “How dare you allow my good friend and wonderful actor Paul Newman to be in such an atrocious Robert Altman film?”
Next up after this fiasco was 1980’s When Time Ran Out, directed by James Goldstone and also starring Jacqueline Bisset and William Holden. This film was actually nominated for an Oscar for ‘Best Costume Design’, but that’s about where its achievements end, with this being one of the rare titles that actually has a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, a phenomenon that was a major discussion point fairly recently. As the title suggests, When Time Ran Out is a disaster movie about a group of people at a South Pacific island resort, with an active volcano looming over them.
While critically decimated, Box Office Mojo reported that the venture grossed $3.76million on a budget of $20m. Shortly after this, Newman caught up with The Washington Post about his then two most recent films. “I made a couple of really bad ones back to back,” he said, calling the disaster feature in particular “a terrible mistake”, while deeming that Quintet was at least “whimsical”, but this whimsy came across as being pretentious instead.
“Probably I choose my films for a lot of the wrong reasons,” mused Newman, “If I’m not working, I’ll choose a script because it happens to be around, even though it might be worse than one that came to me five months before, when I was working”, also stating that he was drawn to When Time Ran Out because he wanted “a big, commercial film”.
The actor went on to claim, “Listen, every actor alive wants to do critical blockbusters”, and isn’t that the dream? Plenty of films prove that truly brilliant indie stories can run into financial trouble, while massive blockbusters may be devoid of artistic meaning. Creatives search, often in vain, for genuinely good scripts that will still be financially successful, making life easier for everyone involved when it will pay their bills and help them secure future jobs; at least Newman was cemented as a star at this point and soon rebounded with The Verdict and The Color of Money.
