ETHAN SUCKE

I had to call my old friend Paul Newman the other night because I finally bit the bullet and watched the rest of that turgid documentary, The Last Movie Stars, about Newman and his wife Joanne Woodward. I had originally given up on the 6-part series after Ethan Hawke, the film’s director who inserted himself into every five minutes of the story, dragged out his daughter and had her pretend that Hawke had given her sage relationship advice as he nodded into the camera approvingly.

I was worried that maybe I was just being a little too judgmental because I grew tired of Hawke’s whole ‘trying way too hard to look like he’s not trying at all’ act and the unorganized facial hair 20 years ago, so who better to ask than the man himself? Of course, Newman died by 2001, but I did not let that stop me, after all, Newman was known to fake his own death from time to time just for a laugh, like when he staged a car wreck during the filming of Slap Shot just to put the fear into director George Roy Hill.

“Oh my Christ,” Newman said after we got the traditional ‘Do you have any idea what time it is?’ and ‘You were told to never call me again’s out of the way. “I just watched it last night,” Newman continued. “If I wasn’t dead, I’d kick that little squirrel-eyed, medium talent right in his twat”.

“It wasn’t that bad,” I lied. It was bad. It was Daybreakers bad.

PN: Listen, that grave robbing, half a pant-load, built his whole documentary on interviews with my friends and co-workers that I paid to have recorded for a book I was going to write. He didn’t even do his own research!

LN: Why didn’t you write that book? Why’d you leave your legacy in the hands of these pikers.

PN: Because I listened to the tapes, and they were all bullshit. I don’t know what I was expecting, but everyone was just saying what I wanted to hear. There was very little poetry or truth in the tapes. I even had them ask my first wife Jackie what she thought about my relationship with Joanne, and she speaks about it in glowing terms. What a load of horse shit. Do you know what I did with those tapes? I set them on fire at the dump. That empty turtleneck dug up the transcripts and recreated them… Although, I must say, I liked George Clooney playing me.

LN: Clooney only did it because Hawke threatened to release a sex tape he made with Uma Thurman on the set of Batman & Robin.

PN: At least something good came out of that piece of nippled bat suited shit. Speaking of heroes, you know, the character of The Green Lantern was based on me?

LN: That was a shitty movie too.

PN: It was a comic book before it was a movie.

LN: If you say so. So, why, do you think, did Hawke make this movie, other than to insert himself into every other frame? Did you consider him a colleague?

PN: Let me tell you the difference between me and Ethan Hawke. When I was younger, you know who people used to mistake me for? Marlon Brando. You know who people mistake Hawke for? Peter Berg…

LN: That’s just mean…

PN: But true.

LN: But surely Hawke is a great actor. He was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, after all.

PN: He got that nomination for riding in the wake of Denzel in Training Day and 2002 was a pretty weak year for Best Supporting Actors. Even that Trump Rube Jon Voight got nominated for playing Howard Cosell. Who’s next, Rich Little?

LN: There must be some part of The Last Movie Stars that you liked.

PN: Not really. He even pussy footed around my cheating on Joanne. And her, she was no Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm herself, but you wouldn’t know it from Hawke’s movie.

LN: Why do you think that is?

PN: Ethan Hawke lives in the rarified air of Ben Affleck, Robin Williams, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mick Jagger, that is the ether that surrounds a particular type of asshole entertainer that gets busted tapping the nanny. To his credit, Hawke, like Williams, married the nanny afterwards, maybe that was something he learned on the set of Dead Poets Society, but it certainly wasn’t acting. If you think Ethan Hawke is any good, go watch Dad or The Purge. Never has anyone worked so hard at trying to look like they aren’t working at all and failed so miserably. Need I mention Taking Lives, Staten Island, Fast Food Nation, or Great Expectations? Heck, just watch his crying scene in Dead Poets Society. Case closed.

LN: Well, what about Vince D’Onofrio’s bit? That was interesting.

PN: Real interesting. Reducing one hundred years of Method Acting down to a party trick.

LN: You know, Hawke got D’Onofrio to do the movie by threatening to release a sex tape D’Onofrio made with Richard Gere when the three of them were making Brooklyn’s Finest?

PN: That may be how he got anyone that isn’t related to him to appear in this piece of shit. And yet, not one mention of the time James Dean and I tag teamed Eartha Kitt. What’s up with that?

LN: What else was missing?

PN: All kinds of great stuff, like how I wanted to be a football player when I was a kid, even played in college, but I grew up in Cleveland and was worried that after graduation I have to play for the Browns, so I switched to acting… And not one mention of the fact that that shitheel Robert Forrester, the CEO of Newman’s Own, forced my kids off the board directors at the company and raised his own salary by 50%. It’s a freaking charity! Hawke couldn’t spare two minutes to mention that, but he’s got plenty of time to talk about how my god damn watch was auctioned off for $17.75 million?

 

At this point the conversation strayed off into which garden vegetables and farm implements we would like to see Ethan Hawke violated with, but discretion being the better part of valor, I think we will leave it there. On a positive note, I had kind of given up on watch Joanne Woodward later on in her career, when she started making all those Hallmark Hall of Fame movies, but The Last Movie Stars did remeind me of how great she used to be.