Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 4 October

The Last Movie Stars (Hawke, 2022) is streaming on Neon (six parts)

Reader JL from Freeman’s Bay asked me to men­tion this because he had been watch­ing it on the newly rebranded Sky Open chan­nel and wanted oth­er people to know about it.

Luckily, I had included it in a seg­ment I did with Karyn Hay on Nights back in October last year so I had fond memor­ies to draw on.

The Last Movie Stars is a six-part doc­u­ment­ary series by the act­or Ethan Hawke about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, one of the best celebrity bio­graph­ies I’ve ever seen.

Why is it so good?

Hawke is an astute judge of not only screen act­ing and what it entails, but also the com­plex­it­ies of long-term rela­tion­ships. This film deliv­ers an under­stand­ing of both as Newman and Woodward, who were both solidly at the top of their game from the 1950s to the 1990s but also shared a rela­tion­ship that had to tran­scend – and incor­por­ate – their fast mov­ing careers.

Newman recor­ded a bunch of inter­views in later life with the expect­a­tion that they would become the basis for an auto­bi­o­graphy. Later, he thought twice about that and had the tapes des­troyed, but not before they had been tran­scribed and filed away.

Luckily for us, those tran­scrip­tions still exist and Hawke has com­mand­eered many of his A‑list friends to read from them so that auto­bi­o­graphy has come to life – uned­ited and blessedly free of Newman’s loss of nerve. George Clooney reads Newman. Bliss.

Put togeth­er largely dur­ing lock­down, Hawke can be seen on Zoom with his col­lab­or­at­ors as he dir­ects their voice per­form­ances and also chats about the insights they get from what they are read­ing – as act­ors and par­ents, sib­lings, children.

A high­light for act­ors read­ing this is the dis­cus­sion between Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio about Method act­ing: a key to Woodward and Newman’s careers and some­thing rarely taken ser­i­ously these days.

For Aotearoa New Zealand read­ers, The Last Movie Stars can be found on Neon.

In Australia it’s on Binge and Foxtel.

In the U.S. you can stream it on Max.

In the afore­men­tioned Nights seg­ment I also talk about Sidney – a Sidney Poitier doc­u­ment­ary bio­graphy that is still play­ing on Apple TV+ – and Apollo 10 1/2 which is a superb anim­ated film about the effect of the moon land­ings on a kid that may (or may not) have gone on to become Richard Linklater.