I’ve packed up and left a few times, and then I realize I have no place to go, and I’m back in ten minutes.” “Being Mrs. It took me a long time to persuade her that I wasn’t as dull as I looked.” “Joanne and I have had difficult, mind-bending confrontations,” Newman told columnist Maureen Dowd many years later in The New York Times Magazine. “Can you imagine being in California with no car?” In New York, Joanne had reportedly dated a lot of young men, even if she wasn’t exactly the type that was in vogue.Īs they got to know each other during the rehearsals and downtime on Picnic, she came to seem to him an ideal girl. “I didn’t have enough money to rent a car,” she later boasted. He got her a series of roles on TV-in episodes of Robert Montgomery Presents, and Goodyear Television Playhouse she played Ann Rutledge in a five-part series about Abraham Lincoln on Omnibus that required that she travel to Hollywood. Morris introduced me to a pretty-looking young man in a seersucker suit, all pretty like an Arrow collar ad, and said, ‘This is Paul Newman,’ and I hated him at first sight, but he was so funny, he disarmed me.” Newman said his first reaction to her was to think: “Jeez, what an extraordinarily pretty girl.” Woodward had been spotted by a scout for MCA in a Neighborhood Playhouse showcase and brought into the agency as a client of a young agent named John Foreman, who was handling the television careers of new actors. As Woodward later remembered it, “I had been making the rounds, and I was hot, sweaty, and my hair was all stringy. Morris introduced the two by way of apologizing to her for running late. Paul Newman was visiting Maynard Morris, the MCA agent who got him a role for “Ice from Space” TV episode in 1952 (from the sci-fi show Tales of Tomorrow) and the agent’s next appointment was already waiting for him in the reception area, a young alluring actress named Joanne Woodward. Shades of gray were on their way in, and with Hud, Paul Newman’s cold blue eyes served as the headlights on the dark road to come. The kids were very cynical they were committed to their own appetites, and that was it.” “Little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire,” Homer says in decrying Hud, and the same is true of our cinema. “If I’d been near as smart as I thought I was,” Ritt added, “I would have seen that Haight-Abshbury was right around the corner. “Hud was meant to be the ultimate heel, condemned to a life of loneliness and alcoholism for his harsh arrogance,” Ritt said at the American Film Institute in 1974. He has lent his voice to Doc Hudson in the Pixar movie "Cars," teaching Lightning McQueen that "life isn't about the destination but about the journey."Īs he would bemoan for the rest of his life, director Martin Ritt-along with screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., adapting Larry McMurtry’s 1961 debut novel Horseman, Pass By-had intended to make a film taking the side of Homer Bannon and the impressionable Lon (Brandon De Wilde), Homer’s grandson and Hud’s nephew. The old man has acted for Michael Curtiz, Robert Wise, Richard Brooks, Robert Rossen, Sidney Lumet, Martin Scorsese. When it turns out that George has forgotten his pocket money at home, he refuses to accept the boy’s gold watch as collateral for the debt: “I’ll trust you ten years, George-not a day over.” You sense affection in the older man and, equally, respect in the younger the mutuality is warming. Morgan, who crafts the fountain treats for the youngsters. Later, when George escorts his sweetheart, Emily, to the drugstore for an ice cream soda, the Stage Manager takes on the persona of Mr. He’s handsome, and when caught up in the spell of love, he croons you wouldn’t tune a piano to it, but he’s sincere. His heart is in the right place, even if he must occasionally be reminded of just where that place is. George Gibbs, the youthful hero, is an all-American boy. Such is his air of decency and authority that you find yourself hoping he deems you worthy. He appears to have lived every vicissitude of life. With his spectacles perched on the tip of his nose and a vaguely distracted air, he stills looks imposing. The Stage Manager is knowing and vigilant. America's national epic is reflected poetically in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1938, and it was described by Edward Albee as "the greatest American play ever written." Our Town contains the snapshots of bygone days, cracker-barrel philosophies, homespun homilies, good-natured ironies, the hints of pain caused by epiphanies, and that climax which brings a welling to your eyes despite yourself.
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