November 11, 2008; NY Time
New DVDs

It’s Spanky and Gang: Hold on to Your Beanies
By DAVE KEHR

Click for PIC: In order,  Alfalfa, Buckwheat, Darla and Spanky

W. C. Fields is said to have been the source of the show business maxim “Never work with children or animals.” “The Little Rascals: The Complete Collection,” a boxed set of eight DVDs from Genius Entertainment, offers approximately 20 hours’ worth of reasons Fields was right: nobody could compete.

Some 220 shorts were produced between 1922 and 1944 starring the “Our Gang” kids and their assorted animal companions. This set consists of the 80 sound films produced by Hal Roach and released to television in the 1950s as “The Little Rascals” — a name change made necessary because Roach had sold the “Our Gang” trademark to MGM in 1938. (MGM continued to produce “Our Gang” shorts, with diminishing results, until 1944.) For the generation that grew up with them, these 80 shorts are the essence of the series, and watching them is a Proustian experience, yielding wave after wave of memories.

But many of the “Our Gang” comedies are remarkable movies in their own right. Roach (1892-1992) was a pioneering independent producer of short comedies who also started the careers of Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chase and the team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. According to Leonard Maltin and Richard Bann’s book, “The Little Rascals: The Life and Times of Our Gang” (Three Rivers Press, 1992), Roach conceived the series while watching a group of children argue over bits of wood they’d taken from a lumberyard near his studio in Culver City, Calif.

Real kids, Roach believed, would be a richer source of comedy than the painted and pampered stage children usually seen in the movies, and drawing on recommendations from friends and studio employees, he put together a first cast of mostly nonprofessionals. After a couple of false starts, he also found a director, Robert F. McGowan, who could capture the natural behavior Roach had in mind.

McGowan would go on to direct most of the “Our Gang” films until he left Roach in 1933, reportedly exhausted by the stress of dealing with the dozens of child actors who passed through his care. But McGowan clearly had a profound rapport with children. He didn’t work from scripts, but instead guided the kids through structured improvisations, coaching them constantly as the cameras rolled (a technique no longer available when sound came in).

With their loose, loopy rhythms and start-and-stop pacing, the early-to-middle-period “Our Gang” films seem to resist the conventional constraints of storytelling. They shake off narrative in favor of a documentary-like texture — here are the real streets and storefronts, brand-new bungalows and refuse-strewn empty lots, of a still semi-rural Culver City — combined with strange, surrealist gags and bursts of anarchic, slapstick violence.

Luis Buñuel might have approved of a film like “Lazy Days” (1929), a pastoral reverie that consists largely of Allen Hoskins, known as Farina, one of the many African-American child actors featured in the series, dozing in an empty lot on a hot summer day. Bothered by an obviously unrehearsed bee that has landed on his nose, he asks his sister to swat it with a handy 2-by-4, with startlingly grotesque consequences.

The early sound shorts carry over many of the children from the silent films — husky Joe Cobb, the blond vamp Jean Darling, the eternally nonplussed Mary Ann Jackson — while gradually introducing new faces like Jackie Cooper and Dick Moore, who would both soon graduate to studio features. The cast most familiar from the television package coalesces around 1934: George McFarland (Spanky), Matthew Beard (Stymie), Carl Switzer (Alfalfa), Billie Thomas (Buckwheat), Darla Hood.

But it’s also around this time that the films become more professional and less appealing. McGowan was succeeded by two directors, Gus Meins and Gordon Douglas, who were far more technically adept than he was. (Douglas would go on to direct some of the toughest films noirs of the 1950s: “Between Midnight and Dawn,” “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye”). But the location settings gradually shift to studio work; the situations become more structured; and the youngsters seem less spontaneous.

In the earlier films the Gang had no set social identity: they could be farm kids in one film, stuck in an orphanage in another, living in a Dickensian slum in a third (as in “Pups Is Pups,” McGowan’s masterpiece of 1930). As the decade wore on, however, they became more and more snugly middle class — a tendency that the MGM-produced films (not included here) reinforced to a fatal degree. When the series ended in 1944, little of McGowan’s spirit was left.

The jacket of the Genius set promises “fully remastered, restored and uncut” versions of the films, which is a slight exaggeration. With one small exception, the films are presented as they were originally released, with the racial stereotyping intact. And while the majority of the shorts do look as if they had been transferred from original negatives, at least a dozen, though, are taken from 16-millimeter prints issued to the home market, and they show obvious flaws. This may not be the ideal “Our Gang” collection, but it’s perfectly “otay.” (Genius Entertainment, $89.95, not rated).

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O, Prince! How Clear You Are on Blu-ray

With its two-dimensional figures and flattened perspectives, the Walt Disney classic “Sleeping Beauty” imitates the look of an illuminated manuscript from the Middle Ages, but its bright, buzzing colors — aquamarine, chartreuse, magenta, goldenrod — are unmistakably those of midcentury America. It’s as if a Book of Hours had been crossbred with an Amana appliance catalog.

Those colors practically soar off the screen in the new Blu-ray version of “Sleeping Beauty” that Disney released last week, making it the first of this studio’s perennials to appear in that new, high-definition format. It’s an appropriate choice, given that “Sleeping Beauty” was itself a product of a high-definition technology of its time, shot in a process, Super Technirama, that yielded 70-millimeter prints with an aspect ratio almost as wide as that of Cinerama.

Equipped with six-channel stereo sound (remixed to DTS 7.1 for the Blu-ray release, though the original tracks are also included), “Sleeping Beauty” thundered forth on Jan. 29, 1959, an imposing embodiment of American technology at its grandest and most self-confident.

In the works for almost eight years, with a budget of $6 million, staggering at the time, the film was meant as a triumphant return to the epic scale of “Pinocchio” and “Fantasia.” Disney animators had drifted through the 1950s with the diminished resources and shrunken ambitions of films like “Alice in Wonderland” (1951) and “Peter Pan” (1953).

For audiences of the period, however, the picture proved to be a bit too grand and too remote. Scolded by critics for its generic characters and relative lack of warmth and humor, “Sleeping Beauty” returned less than half of its investment and ushered in another era of austerity at the studio. Disney animation turned to the small-scale, sitcom-type format of films like “One Hundred and One Dalmatians” (1961), and “Sleeping Beauty” would prove to be the studio’s last animated feature based on a fairy tale until its loose adaptation of “The Little Mermaid” in 1989.

More significantly, perhaps, it was the last Disney film to be hand-inked on animation cels, rather than transferred, by photocopying, from the animators’ sketches and paintings. Henceforth, the handmade element — unevenly applied color fields, broken lines and even the occasional greasy fingerprint — would disappear from the Disney universe, eternally to be missed.

The Blu-ray “Sleeping Beauty” is so sharp that it is occasionally possible to glimpse the tiny shadows cast by misaligned cels, which adds a welcome humanizing factor. But otherwise the digital restoration has eliminated all stray dust motes and turned the color fields into perfectly solid blocks. (“Sleeping Beauty” is also being issued in a standard-definition version, and Disney has included a copy of the standard disc in the Blu-ray box as well.) The effect is to turn a cold film into something slightly, subliminally colder.

According to the opening credits, this “Sleeping Beauty” was inspired by Charles Perrault’s 1697 version of the fairy tale, with other narrative elements drawn from the Russian ballet of 1889, scored by Tchaikovsky. But it is also a film of its time, with themes of adolescent romanticism and rebellion taken from the emerging teenage melodramas of the late ’50s. Released the same year as Delmer Daves’s “Summer Place,” the Disney film offers a Beauty — Princess Aurora — whose long, blond hair and perky demeanor come from the same California cauldron as the Mattel Barbie doll (born March 9, 1959) and Sandra Dee’s Gidget.

When Aurora (with the beguiling voice of Mary Costa) meets her Prince Phillip (Bill Shirley) in a bower populated by sweetly anthropomorphized animals (who seem to belong to an earlier period of Disney animation), they instantly fall in love, and no amount of parental protest is going to keep them apart. Phillip’s father caves in immediately to his son’s expressed desire to marry a peasant girl. (Her royal identity has not yet been established.)

But overcoming the objections of Maleficent (Eleanor Audley), the evil sorceress who functions as a malevolent mother figure, requires more active opposition. Maleficent transforms herself into a dragon — “Now you shall deal with me, O Prince, and all the powers of hell!” — for a climactic battle with Phillip that features the film’s most spectacular animation.

Both the Blu-ray and standard versions are two-disc sets that come with a plethora of extras. For the adult cinephile, there are an excellent commentary track featuring John Lasseter of Pixar, the critic Leonard Maltin and the Disney animator Andreas Deja; a 43-minute documentary on the film’s making; a complete Disney television special from 1959, “The Peter Tchaikovsky Story”; and the Oscar-winning documentary short, James Algar’s “Grand Canyon” (29 minutes of ravishing widescreen images of the natural wonder of the title, set to Ferde Grofé’s “Grand Canyon Suite”) that was shown in theaters with “Sleeping Beauty” in its first-run engagements.

For the little ones the overstuffed set offers a music video of Emily Osment performing the film’s signature song, “Once Upon a Dream”; a cluster of games; a tour of the “Sleeping Beauty” attraction at Disneyland, now shuttered; and the ominously titled “Dragon Encounter Audio Sensory Experience,” which may be better left to the imagination.

Disney is also using the Blu-ray “Sleeping Beauty” to push the company’s new BD Live technology, which requires an Internet connection. Every time I tried to load it on my desktop computer, my software player choked on the 58-page “End User’s License Agreement” and crashed, so I don’t know how well the new features work. But I’m not enchanted with the concept: the promotional material says that BD Live will allow little viewers to exchange text messages while they are watching the movie; create video clips of themselves and inject them directly into the film; and play a trivia game using a chat function.

Has Disney decided that American youth suffers from an excessively long attention span? Things have come to a curious pass when children have to be entertained during their entertainment. (Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, Blu-ray, $34.99; standard-definition, $29.99, G).

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Jolie, Eastwood: Eye to eye on 'Changeling'

The mix sounds like the foundation of a buddy-cop movie, but it basically summarizes the creative chemistry behind Eastwood's Changeling. It stars Jolie in the true story of a single mother searching for her kidnapped son in Depression-era Los Angeles after the wrong boy is returned to her.

It's fitting that motherhood is central to Jolie's role in the film, which opens in select cities Oct. 24. The actress and her brood of six with actor Brad Pitt have become a global sensation.

Fitting, too, what happened to her on the set. "I got pregnant during filming, yeah," she says, then hesitates, suppressing a smile.

Eastwood, sitting beside her on a couch in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, looks stunned and says, "Don't tell me on my watch!"

Jolie curls forward, crosses her legs (in high-heeled black boots) and covers one eye with her hand. "I won't tell you which scene," she half-whispers to him.

Though Changeling is a dark drama, Eastwood and Jolie together bring out each other's playful sides. Eastwood jokingly calls their friendship "Clintalina."

The director, 78, is famously mellow behind the camera, but working with Jolie, 33, his tough-guy bluntness was something she preferred.

Jolie recalls shooting one pivotal scene: At a train station, the mother, Christine Collins, meets the boy who is pretending to be her son and is bullied by police into smiling for the cameras. "It was very frustrating," Jolie says. "I couldn't figure out how to do that scene. I kept thinking, 'How do you respond to something like this? It's not your kid, and somebody is telling you it's your kid.' "

Eastwood recalled the scene, with a touch of sarcasm, "I was a big help. I just said, 'Do it! Just do it.' "

Jolie tells him, "You don't give yourself enough credit. You said to me something like, 'She must be thinking this is a (expletive) joke.' It was a great piece of directing! That little bit of help. I thought, 'It is that way! It must be some kind of cruel joke.' "

Eastwood laughs and says, "I'll remember that the next time I do a French cinema class. 'Oh, yes, I told her …' "

Every parent's 'horror'

Apart from being a mystery about a missing boy, the undercurrent of Changeling is the tragedy of a lone truth-teller — dismissed by a society that then tries to destroy her. Police eventually claim she fails to recognize her child because she's mentally unbalanced and threaten her with detention in an asylum. Meanwhile, her real son remains lost, and grisly crimes against children are going undiscovered.

"It's a horror film," says Eastwood, who has seven kids of his own, the oldest 44 and the youngest 11. "It's the worst nightmare an adult could have, especially a woman by herself at a time in the world where there was not a lot of recourse for her."

Eastwood and Jolie say Changeling celebrates the virtue of disobedience.

"I think that's just part of growing up," Jolie says. "You learn to question your parents, you learn to question your teachers. It's the evolution of trying to find your way and not just let any one person or one entity tell you exactly how you should think or feel about anything."

The movie also reveals some of Eastwood and Jolie's shared intensity.

One scene starkly depicts a state prison execution. Eastwood says: "Somebody was saying they thought the execution scene was vivid, and 'Does that mean you approve of capital punishment?' I said, 'When it comes to children, hell, yes!' "

"Yeah," Jolie says, nodding. "If somebody did that to my child, I would go after them."

A momentary silence hangs in the air, and they both look at each other as if they mean it.

'It was so easy to get upset'

Jolie, who in addition to infant twins Knox and Vivienne has Maddox, 7, Pax, 4, Zahara, 3, and Shiloh, 2, says it wasn't necessary to draw on her own maternal instincts for Changeling. Quite the opposite: She tried not to think of her own children.

"It was so personal that I spent a lot of time trying not to think about it," she says. "It was so easy to get upset. It was easier to understand the emotion, but it was so hard to want to allow that to come out. You don't even want to sit and think about something happening to your kid, let alone really let it absorb you and get emotional about it and scream things like, 'I want my son back!' It just makes you want to take a shower and wash it off and get it as far away from you as possible."

To play Collins, who begins as a meek woman, pleading with police instead of accusing or attacking them, Jolie instead drew on another part of her life: her own mother, Marcheline Bertrand, who died of cancer in January 2007.

"Christine is very much like my mother, who was very soft and soft-spoken, and it was hard for her to get angry and fight for something. But she would do anything for her children and could possibly fight that hard, even though she was quite shy. I thought a lot about that and the appreciation of that love." (Her father is the actor Jon Voight, from whom she has been estranged for years.)

'A new kind of family'

Jolie's new family has come to define her. The world watched as she, and later Pitt, created a family through adoption (three of their children are from Cambodia, Ethiopia and Vietnam) and biological reproduction (three more). She has said they'd like at least one more.

"They are a new kind of family," says Suzanne Riss, editor in chief of Working Mother magazine. "Families have welcomed adopted children long before Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, but they brought a new level of visibility and acceptability. They symbolize a generosity of spirit that is irresistible."

And, she says, "she and Brad Pitt seem to be very involved. People love to see him walking around with a kid on his shoulders and taking them bike racing. They consider themselves parents first."

Jolie describes the latest additions to her brood in terms familiar to any parent: "When you have more than three kids, it's just chaos anyway, no matter how many you add."

Eastwood nods, smiling like an affectionate uncle who has been there before: "Once you get beyond two, that's it," he says, slicing the air with his hand.

"It's even more beautiful chaos in the house," she says of the 2-month-old twins. "They're lovely. And all I wished for was that they'd be healthy, because I was nervous since they were twins. They are, and they're great."

Not only healthy, but voracious. "I was late (to the interview) because I was feeding them," says Jolie, whose family photos of her breast-feeding appear in November's W magazine.

But there is a possible drawback to her high-profile family life. Tom O'Neil, Oscar analyst for TheEnvelope.com, has been writing that Jolie's passionate performance has the potential to land her a second Academy Award, this time for best actress. (She won supporting actress for 1999's Girl, Interrupted.)

"She's the victim of injustice who finally battles back. She's vulnerable but strong, and she admirably does not play it on the ceiling," O'Neil says. But he cautions the parallel between her real-life mothering image and the woman in the film could backfire. "It's so close to home and who she really is that it could seem less like a performance."

Eastwood, of course, believes in her talent, but even he was wary of her presence at first. They didn't know each other before Changeling, but when Eastwood got the script, she already had expressed interest, and he said he'd heard she was "a really great gal and a real pro. A real pro is what I like to hear."

But, he says, "when we were going to start this film, I thought 'Here is somebody who is on the cover of every magazine, and she gets a tremendous amount of attention, she and Brad together, but by herself as well.' I thought, 'This person could be a real jaded creature.' But she isn't. She's very normal. I joke with her. I called her Angie Dickinson all the time, and she never got upset."

Their work habits meshed well, too.

"She seemed to like the style I like to shoot in, which is not exactly dawdling," Eastwood says. "I like to find things in people before they have the chance to overthink it. I like to hear it the first time it has been spoken out loud. And she came extremely prepared. As prepared as any actress I've ever been with — worked with. Excuse me."

He smiles politely, almost sheepishly, a little playfully.

Jolie says she was a bit more exuberant when she learned he signed on. "I got all excited, like a little girl, and jumped around. Then I was very shy on my first day."

She joins in pumping Eastwood for information about Gran Torino, his drama scheduled to arrive in December, in which he stars as a racist Korean War veteran who bonds with an immigrant neighbor over his classic car. And she teases, "You still haven't found a role for me in the next movie, though, have you?"

Eastwood pauses momentarily, surmises her figure in a tight black dress, and jokes: "You could play an automobile in Gran Torino."

While talking about the dowdy Depression-era costumes and makeup, Eastwood casually refers to Jolie as "the world's most beautiful woman."

That makes her slide over and sink down into the cradle of his arm, cooing, "That's why he's him. That's why the girls just go, 'ooohhhh …' "

When Jolie is about to describe her impressions of Eastwood, he gets up and pretends he's going to leave the room. "This is really hard in front of him," she says. "That's it, Clint. Go outside! I'm going to really embarrass you. I've never seen you embarrassed, actually."

After feigning toward the door, Eastwood instead grabs a bottle of water and returns to his spot beside her on the couch, prepared to squirm.

Jolie lets him have it with both barrels. "He is, to me, very much the ideal man. Maybe it's generational, but I think we could use more of it. People look up to him. He is absolutely who he is. He doesn't apologize to anybody. He has very, very strong, decisive opinions and is very gracious as a man, as a friend and somebody on set as a director, too."

Eastwood looks as if he's ready to head for the door again. And the way she's talking, maybe Pitt will kick it down first.

Jolie laughs. Eastwood may be the ideal man, she says, "but Brad knows that he's my ideal man."

Eastwood jokingly suggests that if they work together again, it should be "The Tomb Raider and Dirty Harry."

Who would win in a showdown?

Eastwood whistles at this question — the hollow, mournful tune from his old Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns.

"I wouldn't want to face him," Jolie says. "I want to be on the same side.".

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Cool Hand Paul

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Forget Cool: Paul Newman Knew How to Play It Smart

By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post, September 28, 2008

Paul Newman, who died Friday at 83 of cancer, was a beautiful man who never seemed to notice his own beauty.

He was at his worst when the camera did.

But far more often, he was at his best when he was too busy thinking to care about the looks he'd been given. He stood for an American archetype: He was the shrewd guy. Practical, tough, urban. He figured angles, calculated odds, charted courses, deployed distractions, maneuvered brilliantly. He wasn't violent, he wasn't a leader, he wasn't Mr. Cool with the babes, he had limited gifts for comedy and highly articulate, dialogue-driven set pieces. But nobody played shrewd better than Paul Newman. He became great playing shrewd.

You could see it in his eyes, and he probably didn't care much that they were blue or not. You'd see them narrow as he lapsed into concentration, then come alive again as they read cues, divined patterns, perceived dynamics, sniffed weaknesses. He figured it out with a gusto he sold to audiences brilliantly, and you -- with him -- enjoyed his triumphant cerebration.

That, after all, was the point of his most successful movie, "The Sting." As con man Henry Gondorff, a Depression-era shark on a mission of vengeance, he was no '30s gunslinger with a Thompson gun packed away for rattatatat later on. He built elaborate schemes of dramatic fraud, almost a producer as much as a grifter, cast roles, staged action, manipulated illusion. He got his vengeance, all right, he and his buddy Johnny Hooker (that laconic, iconic avatar of blond diffidence, Robert Redford), but it was never in a spasm of killing. It was in the gotcha moment, when the hook, so elaborately prepared, was set with a mighty crank in the throat of a brutal gangster.

The same tactical hydraulics had been applied earlier in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," again with Redford and the director George Roy Hill, who seemed to understand Newman's gifts better than most. In the western, Butch and Sundance are Wild West robbers, and while the Kid is a gunhand, Butch again is not drawn to the killing but to the money. He's like the Hollywood exec who said, "It's not the money, it's the money." He just wants to get over on people and things, mostly railroads, and seems grievously offended that they don't share his sense of game. They actually hire a posse of professional manhunters to ride him and the Kid down, and he keeps saying in wonder, "Who are those guys?"

It helped, of course, that he and Redford, another embarrassed beauty, had sublime timing and a genuine, if bluff, hearty, masculine affection for each other. In both of their great popular successes, that male bonding is the core of the appeal, because it's so unstated and unsentimentalized. When they go down at the end of "Butch" in the famous freeze-frame that captures them in time a fraction of a second before 300 Bolivian bullets take them apart, it's almost as if a sort of manhood has died: spontaneous, unaffected, generous, capable of love and loyalty, driven by intelligence, unclouded by doubt or recrimination. What came later would be more problematic.

Newman was born of middle-class parents and grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. Fortune smiled from the start: His father owned a prosperous sporting goods store; his mother was "creative" and encouraged his participation in school drama. But he had a wild side and left his first university. He joined the Navy (it was World War II), and flew as a radioman/gunner on torpedo aircraft. But unlike many, he never made a thing out of it, never pretended to be a hero, never referred to it. In that respect, he was typical of his great generation: It was an obligation, he did it, so what? Now let's get on with life.

After the war, he managed the store for a while -- how un-Paul Newman is that? -- then went to New York to pursue an acting career, where his good looks soon got him noticed.

He rode early television success to his first role, starring in "The Silver Chalice" in 1954. Playing a Greek sculptor named Basil, he spent the picture looking baffled and embarrassed by a thigh-length toga. Paul Newman in a toga? Hollywood, we have a problem.

The real big break came in 1956, when Robert Wise, with his great eye for talent, picked him to play Rocky Graziano in "Somebody Up There Likes Me." That was the first Paul Newman, of the New Gen Method Acting School, a kind of proto-Brando or post-Dean Dean, almost always (particularly in Tennessee Williams adaptations, which he specialized in -- he got a lot of Southern roles, even if he never quite mastered the accent). He was the sensitive brute, beautiful, muscular, brimming with masculinity if not quite intelligence. (He played Billy the Kid in "The Left Handed Gun" for Arthur Penn as Billy probably was: rather stupid.) In "The Young Philadelphians," they got him into an undershirt to show off the good biceps.

He really hit his stride as he matured and found his lasting persona in a series of "H" pictures most movie buffs remember and adore for their intensity, intelligence and power. These were "Hud," in which he played the amoral son of a noble rancher in modern-day Texas, a great performance not hurt as much as you'd think by the Ohio accent; "Hombre," from an Elmore Leonard novel, as a super-shrewd outcast who finds himself in a stagecoach about to be robbed, and uses his wiles as much as his gun to defend civilization; "Harper," where he was Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer, with the name changed to accommodate the lucky H, another shrewd guy solving a new crime and an old one; and finally the shrewdest of them all (I save the best for last and pass on strict chronology), Robert Rossen's great "The Hustler," about the world of pool sharking. Newman's "Fast Eddie" Felson is all talent and guile, a fast-talking, great-shooting, pool-hustling demon. But he has character issues: hubris disguising doubt disguising fear disguising self-hatred. He is played expertly by another merchant of shrewd, George C. Scott as the malevolent gangster Bert Gordon.

Filmed in black and white by the great James Wong Howe, the movie crackled with the reality of low pool dives, the bitter clash of egos and aspirations, and Jackie Gleason's Zen presence as Minnesota Fats. It was the rare American film that dealt with issues of character instead of plot and for most Baby Boomers remains an icon of drama. Too bad they don't make 'em like that anymore, although they tried when Martin Scorsese directed a later sequel featuring Newman as a mature Fast Eddie. It won Newman his first Oscar in 1987.

But Newman was too protean a personality to be satisfied with just being a movie star. At least four other themes run impressively through his life. He was a lifelong liberal and was one of the first politically active stars, risking his reputation and possibly his livelihood for his beliefs. He campaigned actively for Eugene McCarthy in '68 when that was a hard thing to do, and even till the end of his life, he was a true believer in the classical liberalism of the '60s, with its adoration of the common man, its commitment to racial equality and its hunger for a less-bellicose world stance.

Then there's the driving. A friend who has raced and knows of such things said, "Paul Newman isn't a movie star; he's a world-class racing driver who happens to make his living acting in movies." It was true; discovering the sport in his 40s, he took to it intuitively and developed into a very fine driver. It gave him much pleasure and, in turn, showed the world that stars could be more than pretty boys who let the stuntmen take the risks.

Then there was his charity work. An able chef, Newman decided to market his spaghetti sauce and his salad dressing to the world as "Newman's Own." The stuffs were successful from the start, and Newman did something remarkable: He decided to donate all profits to charity. It is reliably reported that he made more than $250 million for charity.

But he was also a family man, remaining married to his second wife, the actress Joanne Woodward, for more than 50 years. He quickly sickened of the Hollywood lifestyle and, since 1960, lived in Connecticut, away from the ugly glitz of the movie town. Handsome, powerful, beloved, he probably could have had any woman in the world; he stayed with the one who brung him . . . that is, who was with him on the rough climb up.

Fifty years a star and 50 years a class act -- how Paul Newman is that?

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September 28, 2008; NY Times
Paul Newman, a Magnetic Titan of Hollywood, Is Dead at 83
By ALJEAN HARMETZ

Paul Newman, one of the last of the great 20th-century movie stars, died Friday at his home in Westport, Conn. He was 83.

The cause was cancer, said Jeff Sanderson of Chasen & Company, Mr. Newman’s publicists.

If Marlon Brando and James Dean defined the defiant American male as a sullen rebel, Paul Newman recreated him as a likable renegade, a strikingly handsome figure of animal high spirits and blue-eyed candor whose magnetism was almost impossible to resist, whether the character was Hud, Cool Hand Luke or Butch Cassidy.

He acted in more than 65 movies over more than 50 years, drawing on a physical grace, unassuming intelligence and good humor that made it all seem effortless.

Yet he was also an ambitious, intellectual actor and a passionate student of his craft, and he achieved what most of his peers find impossible: remaining a major star into a craggy, charismatic old age even as he redefined himself as more than Hollywood star. He raced cars, opened summer camps for ailing children and became a nonprofit entrepreneur with a line of foods that put his picture on supermarket shelves around the world.

Mr. Newman made his Hollywood debut in the 1954 costume film “The Silver Chalice.” Stardom arrived a year and a half later, when he inherited from James Dean the role of the boxer Rocky Graziano in “Somebody Up There Likes Me.” Mr. Dean had been killed in car crash before the screenplay was finished.

It was a rapid rise for Mr. Newman, but being taken seriously as an actor took longer. He was almost undone by his star power, his classic good looks and, most of all, his brilliant blue eyes. “I picture my epitaph,” he once said. “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.”

Mr. Newman’s filmography was a cavalcade of flawed heroes and winning antiheroes stretching over decades. In 1958 he was a drifting confidence man determined to marry a Southern belle in an adaptation of “The Long, Hot Summer.” In 1982, in “The Verdict,” he was a washed-up alcoholic lawyer who finds a chance to redeem himself in a medical malpractice case.

And in 2002, at 77, having lost none of his charm, he was affably deadly as Tom Hanks’s gangster boss in “Road to Perdition.” It was his last onscreen role in a major theatrical release. (He supplied the voice of the veteran race car Doc in the Pixar animated film “Cars” in 2006.)

Few major American stars have chosen to play so many imperfect men.

As Hud Bannon in “Hud” (1963) Mr. Newman was a heel on the Texas range who wanted the good life and was willing to sell diseased cattle to get it. The character was intended to make the audience feel “loathing and disgust,” Mr. Newman told a reporter. Instead, he said, “we created a folk hero.”

As the self-destructive convict in “Cool Hand Luke” (1967) Mr. Newman was too rebellious to be broken by a brutal prison system. As Butch Cassidy in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) he was the most amiable and antic of bank robbers, memorably paired with Robert Redford. And in “The Hustler” (1961) he was the small-time pool shark Fast Eddie, a role he recreated 25 years later, now as a well-heeled middle-aged liquor salesman, in “The Color of Money” (1986).

That performance, alongside Tom Cruise, brought Mr. Newman his sole Academy Award, for best actor, after he had been nominated for that prize six times. In all he received eight Oscar nominations for best actor and one for best supporting actor, in “Road to Perdition.” “Rachel, Rachel,” which he directed, was nominated for best picture.

“When a role is right for him, he’s peerless,” the film critic Pauline Kael wrote in 1977. “Newman is most comfortable in a role when it isn’t scaled heroically; even when he plays a bastard, he’s not a big bastard — only a callow, selfish one, like Hud. He can play what he’s not — a dumb lout. But you don’t believe it when he plays someone perverse or vicious, and the older he gets and the better you know him, the less you believe it. His likableness is infectious; nobody should ever be asked not to like Paul Newman.”

But the movies and the occasional stage role were never enough for him. He became a successful racecar driver, winning several Sports Car Club of America national driving titles. He even competed at Daytona in 1995 as a 70th birthday present to himself. In 1982, as a lark, he decided to sell a salad dressing he had created and bottled for friends at Christmas. Thus was born the Newman’s Own brand, an enterprise he started with his friend A. E. Hotchner, the writer. More than 25 years later the brand has expanded to include, among other foods, lemonade, popcorn, spaghetti sauce, pretzels, organic Fig Newmans and wine. (His daughter Nell Newman runs the company’s organic arm.) All its profits, of more than $200 million, have been donated to charity, the company says.

Much of the money was used to create a string of Hole in the Wall Gang Camps, named for the outlaw gang in “Butch Cassidy.” The camps provide free summer recreation for children with cancer and other serious illnesses. Mr. Newman was actively involved in the project, even choosing cowboy hats as gear so that children who had lost their hair because of chemotherapy could disguise their baldness.

Several years before the establishment of Newman’s Own, on Nov. 28, 1978, Scott Newman, the oldest of Mr. Newman’s six children and his only son, died at 28 of an overdose of alcohol and pills. His father’s monument to him was the Scott Newman Center, created to publicize the dangers of drugs and alcohol. It is headed by Susan Newman, the oldest of his five daughters.

Mr. Newman’s three younger daughters are the children of his 50-year second marriage, to the actress Joanne Woodward. Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward both were cast — she as an understudy — in the Broadway play “Picnic” in 1953. Starting with “The Long, Hot Summer” in 1958, they co-starred in 10 movies, including “From the Terrace” (1960), based on a John O’Hara novel about a driven executive and his unfaithful wife; “Harry & Son” (1984), which Mr. Newman also directed, produced and helped write; and “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge” (1990), James Ivory’s version of a pair of Evan S. Connell novels, in which Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward played a conservative Midwestern couple coping with life’s changes.

When good roles for Ms. Woodward dwindled, Mr. Newman produced and directed “Rachel, Rachel” for her in 1968. Nominated for the best-picture Oscar, the film, a delicate story of a spinster schoolteacher tentatively hoping for love, brought Ms. Woodward her second of four best-actress Oscar nominations. (She won the award on her first nomination, for the 1957 film “The Three Faces of Eve,” and was nominated again for her roles in “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge” and the 1973 movie “Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams.”)

Mr. Newman also directed his wife in “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” (1972), “The Glass Menagerie” (1987) and the television movie “The Shadow Box” (1980). As a director his most ambitious film was “Sometimes a Great Notion” (1971), based on the Ken Kesey novel.

In an industry in which long marriages might be defined as those that last beyond the first year and the first infidelity, Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward’s was striking for its endurance. But they admitted that it was often turbulent. She loved opera and ballet. He liked playing practical jokes and racing cars. But as Mr. Newman told Playboy magazine, in an often-repeated quotation about marital fidelity, “I have steak at home; why go out for hamburger?”

Beginnings in Cleveland

Paul Leonard Newman was born on Jan. 26, 1925, in Cleveland. His mother, the former Teresa Fetzer, was a Roman Catholic who turned to Christian Science. His father, Arthur, who was Jewish, owned a thriving sporting goods store that enabled the family to settle in affluent Shaker Heights, Ohio, where Paul and his older brother, Arthur, grew up.

Teresa Newman, an avid theatergoer, steered her son toward acting as a child. In high school, besides playing football, he acted in school plays, graduating in 1943. After less than a year at Ohio University at Athens, he joined the Navy Air Corps to be a pilot. When a test showed he was colorblind, he was made an aircraft radio operator.

After the war Mr. Newman entered Kenyon College in Ohio on an athletic scholarship. He played football and acted in a dozen plays before graduating in 1949.

Arthur Newman, a strict and distant man, thought acting an impractical occupation, but, perhaps persuaded by his wife, he agreed to support his son for a year while Paul acted in small theater companies.

In May 1950 his father died, and Mr. Newman returned to Cleveland to run the sporting goods store. He brought with him a wife, Jacqueline Witte, an actress he had met in summer stock. But after 18 months Paul asked his brother to take over the business while he, his wife and their year-old son, Scott, headed for Yale University, where Mr. Newman intended to concentrate on directing.

He left Yale in the summer of 1952, perhaps because the money had run out and his wife was pregnant again. But almost immediately, the director Josh Logan and the playwright William Inge gave him a small role in “Picnic,” a play that was to run 14 months on Broadway. Soon he was playing the second male lead and understudying Ralph Meeker as the sexy drifter who roils the women in a Kansas town.

Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward were attracted to each other in rehearsals of “Picnic.” But he was a married man, and Ms. Woodward has insisted that they spent the next several years running away from each other.

In the early 1950s roles in live television came easily to both of them. Mr. Newman starred in segments of “You Are There,” “Goodyear Television Playhouse” and other shows.

He was also accepted as a student at the Actors Studio in New York, where he took lessons alongside James Dean, Geraldine Page, Marlon Brando and, eventually, Ms. Woodward.

Then Hollywood knocked. In 1954 Warner Brothers offered Mr. Newman $1,000 a week to star in “The Silver Chalice” as the Greek slave who creates the silver cup used at the Last Supper. Mr. Newman, who rarely watched his own films, once gave out pots, wooden spoons and whistles to a roomful of guests and forced them to sit through “The Silver Chalice,” which he called the worst movie ever made.

His antidote for that early Hollywood experience was to hurry back to Broadway. In Joseph Hayes’s play “The Desperate Hours,” he starred as an escaped convict who holds a family hostage. The play was a hit, and during its run, Jacqueline Newman gave birth to their third child.

On his nights off Mr. Newman acted on live television. In one production he had the title role in “The Death of Billy the Kid,” a psychological study of the outlaw written by Gore Vidal and directed by Arthur Penn for “Philco Playhouse”; in another, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Battler,” he took over the lead role after James Dean, who had been scheduled to star, was killed on Sept. 30, 1955.

Mr. Penn, who directed “The Battler,” was later sure that Mr. Newman’s performance in that drama, as a disfigured prizefighter, won him the lead role in “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” again replacing Dean. When Mr. Penn adapted the Billy the Kid teleplay for his first Hollywood film, “The Left Handed Gun,” in 1958, he again cast Mr. Newman in the lead.

Even so, Mr. Newman was saddled for years with an image of being a “pretty boy” lightweight.

“Paul suffered a little bit from being so handsome — people doubted just how well he could act,” Mr. Penn told the authors of the 1988 book “Paul and Joanne.”

By 1957 Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward were discreetly living together in Hollywood; his wife had initially refused to give him a divorce. He later admitted that his drinking was out of control during this period.

With his divorce granted, Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward were married on Jan. 29, 1958, and went on to rear their three daughters far from Hollywood, in a farmhouse on 15 acres in Westport, Conn.

That same year Mr. Newman played Brick, the reluctant husband of Maggie the Cat, in the film version of Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” earning his first Academy Award nomination, for best actor. In 1961, with “The Hustler,” he earned his second best-actor Oscar nomination. He had become more than a matinee idol.

Directed by Martin Ritt

Many of his meaty performances during the early ’60s came in movies directed by Martin Ritt, who had been a teaching assistant to Elia Kazan at the Actors Studio when Mr. Newman was a student. After directing “The Long, Hot Summer,” Mr. Ritt directed Mr. Newman in “Paris Blues” (1961), a story of expatriate musicians; “Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man” (1962); “Hud” (1963), which brought Mr. Newman a third Oscar nomination; “The Outrage” (1964), with Mr. Newman as the bandit in a western based on Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon”; and “Hombre” (1967), in which Mr. Newman played a white man, reared by Indians, struggling to live in a white world.

Among his other important films were Otto Preminger’s “Exodus” (1960), Alfred Hitchcock’s “Torn Curtain” (1966) and Jack Smight’s “Harper” (1966), in which he played Ross Macdonald’s private detective Lew Archer.

In 1968 — after he was cast as an ice-cold racecar driver in “Winning,” with Ms. Woodward playing his frustrated wife — Mr. Newman was sent to a racing school. In midlife racing became his obsession. A Web site — newman-haas.com — details his racing career, including his first race in 1972; his first professional victory, in 1982; and his co-ownership of the Newman/Haas Indy racing team, which won eight series championships.

A politically active liberal Democrat, Mr. Newman was a Eugene McCarthy delegate to the 1968 Democratic convention and appointed by President Jimmy Carter to a United Nations General Assembly session on disarmament. He expressed pride at being on President Richard M. Nixon’s enemies list.

When Mr. Newman turned 50, he settled into a new career as a character actor, playing the title role — “with just the right blend of craftiness and stupidity,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times — of Robert Altman’s “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” (1976); an unscrupulous hockey coach in George Roy Hill’s “Slap Shot” (1977); and the disintegrating lawyer in Sidney Lumet’s “Verdict.”

Most of Mr. Newman’s films were commercial hits, probably none more so than “The Sting” (1973), in which he teamed with Mr. Redford again to play a couple of con men, and “The Towering Inferno” (1974), in which he played an architect in an all-star cast that included Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway.

After his fifth best-actor Oscar nomination, for his portrait of an innocent man discredited by the press in Sydney Pollack’s “Absence of Malice” (1981), and his sixth a year later, for “The Verdict,” the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1986 gave Mr. Newman the consolation prize of an honorary award. In a videotaped acceptance speech he said, “I am especially grateful that this did not come wrapped in a gift certificate to Forest Lawn.”

His best-actor Oscar, for “The Color of Money,” came the next year, and at the 1994 Oscars ceremony he received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. The year after that he earned his eighth nomination as best actor, for his curmudgeonly construction worker trying to come to terms with his failures in “Nobody’s Fool” (1994). In 2003 he was nominated as best supporting actor for his work in “Road to Perdition.” And in 2006 he took home both a Golden Globe and an Emmy for playing another rough-hewn old-timer, this one in the HBO mini-series “Empire Falls.”

Besides Ms. Woodward and his daughters Susan and Nell, he is survived by three other daughters, Stephanie, Melissa and Clea; two grandchildren; and his brother.

Mr. Newman returned to Broadway for the last time in 2002, as the Stage Manager in a lucrative revival of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” The performance was nominated for a Tony Award, though critics tended to find it modest. When the play was broadcast on PBS in 2003, he won an Emmy.

This year he had planned to direct “Of Mice and Men,” based on the John Steinbeck novel, in October at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut. But in May he announced that he was stepping aside, citing his health.

Mr. Newman’s last screen credit was as the narrator of Bill Haney’s documentary “The Price of Sugar,” released this year. By then he had all but announced that he was through with acting.

“I’m not able to work anymore as an actor at the level I would want to,” Mr. Newman said last year on the ABC program “Good Morning America.” “You start to lose your memory, your confidence, your invention. So that’s pretty much a closed book for me.”

But he remained fulfilled by his charitable work, saying it was his greatest legacy, particularly in giving ailing children a camp at which to play.

“We are such spendthrifts with our lives,” Mr. Newman once told a reporter. “The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”

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The battle over 'The Godfather'

By Todd Leopold
CNN.com; 9/28/08

"The Godfather" was supposed to be terrible.

The author of the novel, Mario Puzo, had written the book for money after his well-reviewed works, such as "The Fortunate Pilgrim," flopped. The studio, Paramount, optioned Puzo's treatment hoping for a quickie gangster film; when the book became a huge best-seller, it almost dropped the project, worried about expectations.

The director, Francis Ford Coppola, took the job after several more noted directors (including Elia Kazan, Arthur Penn and Costa-Gavras, according to then-Paramount executive Robert Evans) turned it down. The studio didn't want him -- he'd directed just three major films, none of them hits -- and Coppola didn't want to do it either, but he needed the money to finance his failing countercultural studio, Zoetrope.

It was not the greatest atmosphere to make a movie. At one point, Coppola was almost fired. Tempers were short. Arguments were constant.

And then, on March 15, 1972, "The Godfather" premiered, and the world changed. Ten things you may not know about "The Godfather" »

"I was pulverized by the story and the effect the film had on me," Steven Spielberg says in documentary material accompanying the new, digitally cleaned and remastered "The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration." The new DVD edition of the "Godfather" trilogy is out Tuesday.

"I also felt that I should quit, that there was no reason I should continue directing because I would never achieve that level of confidence or the ability to tell a story [as well as Coppola did in 'The Godfather']," he added. "In a way, it shattered my confidence."

" 'The Godfather' hit a cultural nerve," Peter Biskind writes in his history of '70s cinema, "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls." "It was all things to all people, which is perhaps, as marketers would soon realize, a sine qua non for blockbusters."

All this for what was supposed to be little more than a gangster film. But Coppola, as he says in the documentary, saw the source material as more than a B-movie; it was a family saga.

"The Godfather," as the world knows by now, is the story of the Corleone organized crime family: father Vito, sons Sonny (the hothead), Fredo (the slow-witted one) and Michael (the inheritor); as well as their adviser, Tom Hagen, and generations of cops, performers, criminals, politicians, hitmen and hangers-on. The opening words of the first film are "I believe in America," and the sprawling trilogy attempts to show the family's -- and country's -- often violent journey amid the changes of the century.

Coppola and Paramount started battling immediately, Biskind writes. The director wanted to cast Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone, but Brando in 1970-71, when production started, was box office poison.

Coppola also wanted to cast Al Pacino as Michael Corleone, the film's linchpin role. Pacino, who had dazzled on the New York stage, had starred in just one film, "The Panic in Needle Park." Moreover, in the book Michael is tall and blond; the studio wanted someone in that mold, perhaps Robert Redford.

Other actors also came to "The Godfather" with little breakout experience. James Caan and Robert Duvall were veterans -- both had been in Coppola's "The Rain People" (1969) -- but generally in supporting roles. (Caan's breakthrough role, as Brian Piccolo in "Brian's Song," appeared as "The Godfather" was in post-production.)

Then there were those -- the largely ethnic performers who peopled lesser roles -- who weren't known at all. Abe Vigoda, a character actor who had an established career on the New York stage, remembers being called to Coppola's office.

"He interviewed me -- it seems he'd seen me in a play or plays," Vigoda, later to play detective Phil Fish on "Barney Miller," told CNN.com in a phone interview. "One of the [reasons] I think Francis Ford Coppola was interested in me was that nobody knew my face." After some months, Vigoda was cast as Tessio, one of the Corleone capos, or lieutenants. Sidebar: Yes, Abe Vigoda is very much alive

For Vigoda and much of the cast, "The Godfather" was simply "a low-budget movie," in Vigoda's words. But the actor says there was a sense of something bigger at work.

"What we did know was that this was a very creative project," he says. "The actors, director ... I thought, 'This is like doing a play.' It was a very creative job, and strange as it may seem, an easy job for me ... [once I was on the set, I felt] I am Tessio."

Behind the scenes, things weren't going as well. Besides casting, Coppola and studio executives battled over music (the studio didn't like Nino Rota's score) cinematography (Gordon Willis' compositions were considered too dark), locations (Coppola wanted New York; the studio suggested cheaper St. Louis) and even era (Coppola wanted a period piece, the studio wanted the present day).

"There were people on the crew trying to take over the production," Coppola protégé George Lucas recalls in the documentary material.

Oscar-winning sound editor Walter Murch, a longtime Coppola friend, recalls the director being saved by the Italian restaurant scene in which Michael kills two opponents. "The feeling up to that time was, 'What is this movie? It's not turning out the way we thought it would' -- whatever that was," he says in the DVD.

The bickering continued practically up to the release date, with Coppola overshooting the two-hour, 10-minute running time the studio desired and the studio -- though pleased with the final two-hour, 55-minute cut -- uncertain how to please exhibitors who longed for more showings. Paramount came up with two solutions: eliminate an intermission -- de rigueur for long movies -- and open it in many theaters at once.

What emerged was a phenomenon.

"The Godfather" opened wider than any film before, changing Hollywood economics, and became the most successful film in history up to its time. ("Jaws," its successor as box office king, would codify the wide opening once and for all.) The film won best picture, gave the language such lines as "I'll make him an offer he can't refuse," and spawned two sequels, a video game, more Puzo underworld novels and -- essentially -- every gangster work to follow.

"When we started 'The Sopranos,' [referencing 'The Godfather'] was one of the original conceits," says "Sopranos" creator David Chase in the DVD set. Indeed, "Sopranos" characters are forever quoting from the films, thinking of them as a model for the mob experience.

"The Godfather Part II," which came out in 1974, also won best picture -- the only time an original film and its sequel have pulled off the double. With its more intricate structure, many critics consider it the best film of the three. The third film, "The Godfather Part III" (1990), though the least successful, still contains some fine work; as a character on "The Sopranos" said, "A lot of people didn't like it, but I think it was just misunderstood."

The American Film Institute ranks the first film as the second-best of all time, after "Citizen Kane"; Internet Movie Database denizens have ranked it as No. 1 or No. 2 for years. It's been more than 35 years now, and the films still have a hold on the American psyche.

Just ask Joe Mantegna, who starred in "Godfather III" and plays Fat Tony on "The Simpsons" -- a character that owes an obvious debt to "The Godfather."

" 'The Godfather' was the Italian 'Star Wars,' " he says in the DVD.

Or, as Abe Vigoda puts it, "This was true to life. This story, these characters you see in 'The Godfather,' are real. ... It did something to you. It made you part of the real thing."

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Hollywood War, Revised Edition

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Abe Vigoda is still alive, thank you very much

By Todd Leopold
CNN.com; 9/23/08

Abe Vigoda found out he was dead in 1982. He was doing a play in Calgary, Alberta, while a People magazine writer visited the "Barney Miller" wrap party in Los Angeles, California.

"Somehow it mentioned in the article that 'the late Abe Vigoda' was not [there]," Vigoda recalls.

The error was corrected, but the damage had been done. Vigoda's "Barney Miller" character -- the decrepit, downcast Det. Phil Fish -- didn't help the image. Never mind that the real Vigoda was a vigorous man just turning 60 at the time; the question of whether he's shuffled off this mortal coil has followed him around ever since. There's even a Web site devoted to his life-or-death status.

But Vigoda takes the attention with good humor (and occasional appearances on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien"). Now 87, he can look back on a successful career with at least two immortal characters: Fish and the "Godfather" lieutenant, Sal Tessio.

Vigoda was a successful New York stage actor when "Godfather" director Francis Ford Coppola came calling. (Among his credits: Robert Shaw's 1968 play "The Man in the Glass Booth," with F. Murray Abraham.) Though he hadn't read the book -- and was Jewish, not Italian -- he had a presence Coppola liked, and was finally cast as Tessio.

"The Godfather" -- now in a digitally pristine "Coppola Restoration" DVD edition, out Tuesday -- was Vigoda's first movie, and it was an experience he greatly enjoyed. Every day, a car would pick him up at his apartment to take him to the location; at makeup, he'd sit near Marlon Brando.

"I found him to be a quiet man. He kept mostly to himself," Vigoda recalls. "I respected his privacy. He was a great star. This was my first big thing -- I felt lucky and grateful I was with these people."

More amusing were some of the people on the set, actual members of New York Mob families. "They kept looking at me, as if to say, 'What family is he from?' " Vigoda says. "It was fascinating."

After "The Godfather" came out, people started confusing Vigoda with his character. In one case, he was driving with his wife in Los Angeles when a police car pulled him over. One officer asked for his license; his partner glowered at Vigoda, gun drawn.

"He said, 'You look familiar to me.' ... I said, 'My name is Abe Vigoda, I'm an actor.' And he said, 'Oh! Tom, this is Abe Vigoda, the actor. So good to see you. Go ahead and have a good time in L.A.,' " Vigoda says. "These were the incidents that followed 'The Godfather.' "

"The Godfather" changed Vigoda's life. He was quickly offered a movie of the week, then the role of Fish on "Miller," a character eventually spun off into his own show. He's had roles in "The Cheap Detective," "Look Who's Talking" and "Joe Versus the Volcano," as well as the occasional TV guest appearance.

And -- have no fear -- he's still in good shape. For years, Vigoda was a top New York handball player, and he still plays.

"I'm still quite [involved]," he says. "Which has helped me with my coordination all my life, including with my theater work. Coordination is the key in getting things done correctly."

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Nicole Kidman credits fertile water with pregnancy

AP
AJC.com; 9/24/08

SYDNEY, Australia — Oscar-winning actress Nicole Kidman said swimming in Australian Outback waterfalls may promote fertility and might have contributed to her unexpected pregnancy over the past year.

The 41-year-old Aussie, who gave birth to daughter Sunday Rose in July, said she and six other women who swam in the waters of a small Outback town during production of the epic romance "Australia" became pregnant.

"I never thought that I would get pregnant and give birth to a child, but it happened on this movie," Kidman told The Australian Women's Weekly in an exclusive interview for the magazine's 75th anniversary edition, released Wednesday.

"Seven babies were conceived out of this film and only one was a boy. There is something up there in the Kununurra water because we all went swimming in the waterfalls, so we can call it the fertility waters now."

"Australia," directed by Baz Luhrmann, was filmed in Kununurra, a small town in far northern Western Australia state. The film, which follows the story of a noblewoman on a cattle drive in Australia during World War II, is due for release in November.

The actress also commented on the relatively diminutive size of her baby bump throughout her pregnancy.

"I'm so lucky I'm so tall, so I carried small and also, I have to say, I had a birth that I was blessed with, a labor that was very good and a baby that was very good to me in that regard," said Kidman, who is married to country music crooner Keith Urban and has two adopted children with ex-husband Tom Cruise.

"To be given this again is a beautiful thing. To have raised Bella and Connor since I was 25 and now to be able to do it again at 41 ... wow!"

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New David Duchovny, Demi Moore film to be shot in Atlanta

By Rodney Ho

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
September 23, 2008

Hollywood Reporter says a new film starring David Duchovny and Demi Moore will start filming next month in Atlanta.

The story, a social commentary, centers on a picture-perfect family that moves into a suburban neighborhood and immediately becomes the toast of the town, loved and envied by all. But the reality is they are a commissioned fake family put together by a marketing company as a way to introduce new luxury-level products to neighborhoods around the world.

Georgia earlier this year improved its tax breaks to entice production companies to film movies and TV shows here. So far, a few other productions have come here as well. A Lifetime pilot TV show called “Drop Dead Diva” has been shooting around town. “Van Wilder 3” has also been reportedly working its magic in the area. (We know, we know. Not exactly Oscar worthy but you take what you can get.) A possible ABC Family film starring Melissa Joan Hart (“Sabrina the Teenage Witch”) is also likely to be hitting town soon.

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September 16, 2008; NY Times

Frank Mundus, 82, Dies; Inspired ‘Jaws’
By DENNIS HEVESI

Frank Mundus, the hulking Long Island shark fisherman who was widely considered the inspiration for Captain Quint, the steely-eyed, grimly obsessed shark hunter in “Jaws,” died on Wednesday in Honolulu. He was 82 and lived on a small lemon-tree farm in Naalehu, on the southern tip of the Big Island of Hawaii, 2,000 feet above shark level.

The cause was a heart attack, his wife, Jeanette, said.

Mr. Mundus and his wife moved from Montauk, on the South Fork of Long Island, to Hawaii in 1991, but often returned to Long Island in summer, when tourists and city-slicker enthusiasts sought to spice vacations with a shark hunt, priced at $1,800 for a party of five.

On just such a venture in August 2007, the tail of a nine-foot thresher shark splashing off the stern of his 42-foot boat, the Cricket II, slapped Mr. Mundus and sent him reeling. He struck right back, planting his gaff — a giant fish hook on a pole — in the shark’s back and hauling it aboard.

Mr. Mundus had run charter boats from the docks of Montauk since 1951, taking fishermen out for easy-to-catch mackerel and fighting bluefish. But one night in the 1950s, according to one of his accounts, sharks outnumbered the blues and in the ensuing struggle a shark was snared. The next day Mr. Mundus posted a sign by his boat: “Monster Fishing.”

Mr. Mundus inevitably became known as Monster Man, and he looked the part, with his safari hat, a diamond-studded gold earring, a jewel-handled dagger with a shark-tooth blade, and the big toe of one foot painted green and the other red, for port and starboard.

His most fateful encounter with a shark came one day in 1964, when Mr. Mundus already had two sharks hanging on the side of his boat and a third on the hook. Then he spotted a huge one alongside.

“I harpooned him and he took off for the horizon,” he told The Daily News in 1977. “Before I got him, I harpooned him five times. A white shark. A killer. He was 17 1⁄2 feet long and 13 feet in girth and weighed at least 4,500 pounds. The biggest ever caught.”

The legend grew, and in the next few years, he repeatedly took Peter Benchley, who wrote the best seller “Jaws,” out to sea.

Mr. Mundus told a New York Times reporter that Mr. Benchley loved the way he harpooned huge sharks with lines attached to barrels to track them while they ran to exhaustion.

In 1975, “Jaws” was turned into Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movie, which for years left millions of beachgoers toe-deep in the sand. Robert Shaw played Quint, who exits by sliding feet first into the belly of a monster great white.

Mr. Benchley, who died in 2006, denied that Mr. Mundus had been the inspiration for Quint, whom he described as a composite character.

Clearly irked, Mr. Mundus said: “If he just would have thanked me, my business would have increased. Everything he wrote was true, except I didn’t get eaten by the big shark. I dragged him in.”

In 1986, Mr. Mundus dragged in a 17-foot-long, 3,427-pound great white — not by harpoon, but by rod and reel, quite a feat for a man with a withered left arm.

Frank Louis Mundus was born in Long Branch, N.J., on Oct. 21, 1925, a son of Anthony and Christine Brug Mundus. He broke his arm as child and a bone-marrow infection set in, leaving that arm shorter than the other. By then, the family had moved to Brooklyn, where Mr. Mundus’s father found work as a steamfitter and his mother ran a boarding house. Doctors told Mr. Mundus’s parents that they should take him to the beach to swim to build strength in his arm.

“He fell in love with the ocean,” his wife said.

Besides his wife, the former Jeanette Hughes, whom he married in 1988, Mr. Mundus is survived by his sister, Christine Zenchak; three daughters from a first marriage, Barbara Crowley, Theresa Greene and Patricia Mundus; five grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. His first marriage, to Janet Probasco, ended in divorce.

Mr. Mundus dropped out of high school and got a job as a freight handler. Soon after, however, the pull of the sea had him working on charter boats for $3 a day. By 1951, he had his own boat, the Cricket, and was sailing out of Montauk Harbor. He named his boats after Jiminy Cricket because people told him that with his sloping forehead and Roman nose, his profile looked like the character in the film “Pinocchio.” Although Mr. Mundus caught hundreds of sharks during his career, he became something of a conservationist in later years. He promoted the use of circle hooks, which catch in the jaw, not the gut, increasing a shark’s chances of survival if it escapes or is released. He also helped start a shark-tagging program and voiced support for catch-and-release fishing.

As it turns out, Mr. Mundus did not think much of “Jaws.”

“It was the funniest and the stupidest movie I’ve ever seen, because too many stupid things happened in it,” his Web site says. “For instance, no shark can pull a boat backwards at a fast speed with a light line and stern cleats that are only held in there by two bolts.”

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September 14, 2008; NY TIMES