Photo: Peterson/Getty
I had hoped he would stay alive if only to spite the doomsayers. For nearly a year the press has been writing premature obits for Paul Newman. His cancer treatments tipped them off. Asked about his health, Newman's reply was always a terse, “I’m doing nicely.” Now he isn’t. Now, at 83, he’s gone. I’m not going to say acting has lost one of its last legit icons. That’s obvious. "He set the bar too high for the rest us," said George Clooney, "not just actors but all of us." The funny thing is Newman was always slightly embarrassed by his fame, by all the awards he received for his philanthropy, and especially by the body beautiful and blazing blue eyes that made him a star. That’s why he took all the bullshit vanity out of his acting. A peak Newman performance—and I can think of dozens of them—radiated smarts, sexual cool, wry wit and a keen eye for the con just around the corner. Think of him as Fast Eddie Felson in Robert Rossen’s The Hustler, avidly going cue stick to cue stick with Jackie Gleason’s Minnesota Fats around the combat zone of a pool table. Twenty-five years later, Newman would win his only Oscar for playing the older, wiser Eddie in Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money, telling new kid Tom Cruise, “You’ve got to be a student of human moves. See, all the greats that I know of, to a man, are students of human moves.”
Newman was an honors student in human moves. The family and friends he left behind can tell you that. Start with his actress wife Joanne Woodward, who hated that he raced cars. And yet Newman conned her into putting up with it for 40 years. Newman was nothing if not persuasive. Ask his five surviving children, his neighbors in Westport, Connecticut, the kids with life-threatening diseases who benefited from the Hole-in-the-Wall camps he funded with profits from Newman's Own organic products. "I'm the only Oscar winner with his mug on a bottle of salad dressing," Newman told me once, laughing at the absurdity of it. Did everyone like Paul Newman? Hell, no. Obama man Newman was on a lot of right-wing enemies lists, starting with Nixon's. He wore the label like a badge of honor. The critic David Thomson was turned off by Newman's alleged "uneasy, self-regarding personality," and "a smirking good humor" that Thomson termed "more appropriate to glossy advertisements than to good movies." If, like me, you think that Newman was the leading litmus actor of his generation, the one who bridged the Greatest Generation to the boomers and beyond, there's no way you can't take his life personally and treasure it.
• 1973 Rolling Stone cover story: The Redoubtable Mr. Newman
• 1983 Rolling Stone cover story: Paul Newman Takes the Stand
On Sunday night, September 7th, I was one of the lucky ones who scored a ticket to the final performance of the groundbreaking musical Rent at the Nederlander Theater on Broadway. The experience was emotional to say the least. The show's composer, Jonathan Larson, had died at the age of 35 just before Rent opened in 1996. His score, a rich amalgam of rock, Broadway and opera, served a story of 1990's youth trapped in the vises of poverty, drugs and AIDS but able to express their spirit and longing in song. The sanitized, antiseptic 2005 movie version had sucked the soul out Rent. Now, watching the new young cast on stage, I felt restored along with the show. It was a night to remember. But who saw it? Just the few hundred people who could squeeze inside the Nederlander. Rentheads (the most avid fans) huddled outside just to be there and dream of being inside. Now they can be. Let me explain. 
If you've been on the fence about what Blu-ray can do, the just-released The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration will make you a convert. It's not that the restoration looks shabby on regular DVD—it most assuredly does not—but the The Godfather Trilogy on four Blu-ray discs screams the word "definitive." Suddenly, scenes from the first two Godfather films that looked bathed in mud instead of light take on the burnished glow of something freshly minted. I had doubted that the brownish tones and murky shadows that director Francis Coppola wanted from cinematographer Gordon Willis would ever be possible to reproduce on disc. No more. "I believe in America" is the first line uttered in The Godfather trilogy. Well, I believe in this restoration. The DVD is a monumental achievement that preserves the film’s resonant mood, stirring storytelling, haunting Nino Rota score, and gallery of career-defining performances, including Marlon Brando as the iconic Don Vito Corleone and Robert De Niro as the younger Don. Both deservedly won Oscars. In adapting Mario Puzo’s novel about a Mafia family, Coppola turned Mario Puzo's pulp bestseller into lasting cinema art. Parts 1 & II remain indisputable American classics. The fact that the trilogy's major competition for your DVD dollar this week is Sex and the City: The Movie— adding 12 minutes of deleted scenes to a film that was already punishingly long—is laughable. The Godfather Trilogy is the keeper, and it raises a question that needs to be asked. 
Amid the crap attack this week, led by the supremo trio of flops, Speed Racer, The Love Guru, and 88 Minutes, two movie comedies get classy, anniversary DVD treatments that raise the bar. They would be 1983's Risky Business and 1988's Beetlejuice. I'll let you decide which is the better movie and why, but here's what's offered on the discs.
Photo: Focus Features
Photo: Lionsgate Films
- Portions of Album Content Provided by All Music Guide © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC.
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