The Last Movie Stars (2022)

Directed by

Ethan Hawke

Genre

documentary television program

Country

United States

Length

1 season, 6 episodes

Rated

TV-MA

Rating

7.0 of 10 from 21 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

Ethan Hawke directs a documentary miniseries about actors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. It uses old interview transcripts to show their personal lives and long marriage. Actors read the interviews to retell their story.

intimatereflectivewarmnostalgicconversationalheartfeltcontemplativesincere

What happens

The Last Movie Stars is an American documentary television miniseries created by Emily Wachtel and directed by Ethan Hawke. All six episodes of the series were released on HBO Max on July 21, 2022. After discovering transcripts of interviews conducted at Paul Newman's request for an abandoned memoir project, a daughter of Newman and Joanne Woodward asked Hawke to tell their story, personally and as artists. Hawke assembled actors to read pieces of the interviews, conducted and edited by writer Stewart Stern, including interviews with Newman and Woodward. The marriage spanned 50 years and was often cited as one of the great Hollywood successful marriages and love stories. The series takes an unusual approach to telling Newman and Woodward's story, unfolding decades of material and dramatizing interview transcriptions to create a narrative around their relationship and evolving acting careers. Hawke described their influence in shifting acting styles to a more nuanced and natural approach: "Their generation changed American acting. What happened in the fifties with the Actors Studio with Elia Kazan and Tennessee Williams is a pivot point in the history of performance. It radically changed the way that we tell stories and we're still reacting to it." Paul Newman was a member of and studied with the Actors Studio. Joanne Woodward also studied at the Actors Studio and worked with Sanford Meisner in the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, where they met many of those interviewed for this documentary. Many of the older interviews with friends and artistic collaborators are read by the cast over archival footage. Recent interviews with all three of their daughters as well as Sally Field and Martin Scorsese are included. The interviews were the basis for Newman's posthumously published 2022 memoir, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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