05: The Perfect Cast Part 1: Paul Newman
The perfect embodiment of casting any acting project (indeed of hiring in general) is the skillful use of expectation based on past performance, and potential for further innovation. In this, Paul Newman was the perfect choice to play captain of industry Sidney Mussburger, because of Newman’s history of being incredibly cool.
The English language has used the word “cool” as an expression of temperature more or less since the Angles landed on the island of Great Britain. Since at least Shakespeare’s time the word has also carried the connotation of being calm and collected, as when Gertrude tells Hamlet:
O gentle son,
Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper
Sprinkle cool patience.
But its current usage, in which “Cool” carries a connotation of style, poise, and mystique, dates from the 20th century in America. Originally (as with virtually all… well… cool things) it was black slang, first being noted in an 1884 paper on “Negro English”, gaining popularity through the era of jazz and blues, very likely evolving from the west African Yoruba culture’s notion of “Itutu”, literally meaning “cool” in temperature but also figuratively describing a person with a certain greatness of character combined with a greater vision for the world. In 1924 Anna Lee Chisholm released the song Cool Kind Daddy Blues, in which she sings about how kind and stylish her man is. In 1957, Miles Davis rereleased a series of singles his jazz group had recorded from the past few years as an LP titled The Birth of the Cool.
Over these decades, white Americans, first known as hipsters and subsequently beatniks were listening to Jazz music and paying attention to black culture in general, bringing the word “cool” in its current connotation to mainstream white American culture. Around the same time, Paul Newman starred in his first breakthrough role as Brick Pollitt in the film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958), ultimately helping to define mainstream white American coolness a decade later in 1967’s Cool Hand Luke.
Paul Newman is really cool, okay.
In Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969) he exemplified the rugged masculinity of cowboy coolness. In The Sting (1973) he exemplifies the effortless charm of con man coolness as he and Robert Redford con a mob boss, somehow seeming cool to the strains of Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer. In 1961’s The Hustler and 1986’s The Color of Money he plays a pool hustler, an occupation that requires both extreme skill and also the ability to disguise and hide that very skill, and what is coolness if not being excellent but not showing off one’s excellence? In the very same Cool Hand Luke mentioned above, Paul Newman makes eating an absurd amount of eggs seem cool. Do you know who else has achieved notoriety for eating an absurd amount of eggs? The guy from Smashmouth after the internet goaded him into it in 2011, that’s who, and there is nothing less cool than Smashmouth.
Wait, that’s not true, there’s nothing less cool than Smashmouth except for captains of industry. With a handful of notable exceptions (Steve Jobs if you ignore the burnout culture of Apple, Richard Branson if you ignore the toxic machismo, Elon Musk if you ignore… many things) corporate executives are not remotely cool. When then-Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi was interviewed by Freakonomics Radio in 2018, she offhandedly mentioned how the company had focus tested their popular “Doritos” chips line and found that their women consumers were more self-conscious about the product’s extreme crunch and yellow seasoning dust left on the fingertips after consumption, leading her to speculate offhandedly about a potential “Lady Doritos” product that would address these concerns that would not crunch as loudly nor leave any residue on the consumer’s fingertips. The internet dunked on her for weeks afterwards because come on: Lady Doritos. When then-Nintendo of America CEO Reggie Fils-Aimé debuted the ultimately incredibly popular Wii Fit product at the E3 show in 2011, he excitedly exclaimed the phrase “My Body Is Ready” as he stepped on the Wii Fit board, proving that he was, you know, a human person. This is of course not to mention the dozens to hundreds of times that heads on industry have closed or relocated factories, demolished pensions, cut benefits and wages, and any other number of ways they’ve destroyed the lives of their workers in the name of profitability. Captains of industry are not cool. They are in fact square.
Sidney Mussburger however, is not a square. He is not cool either. He is ruthless and cutthroat, but man alive is he ever compelling.
During the entire run of Hudsucker, Sidney Mussburger never expresses emotion. There are points where he should be elated, points where he should be terrified, and points where he should be in despair, yet whether his ostensible friend and business partner has just committed suicide, he has found the perfect mark for his stock fraud scheme, or he is on the ledge of the 44th floor* of the Hudsucker building, himself suicidal, he wears the exact same icy expression: brows furrowed, eyes narrowed, mouth in a not-quite-a-frown downturn. He portrays this so excellently that roughly 20 minutes into the film as Sidney and Norville meet for the first time, we understand that his line “This had better be good. I’m in a bad mood” is a laugh line. When are you not in a bad mood, Sidney? A huge aspect of coolness is an even-keeled level headedness, but as Mussburger he turns that very same skill into making the character cold blooded and calculating. The very same thing that made Luke Jackson cool obfuscates Sidney Mussburger’s evil. The Coens saw the cool in Newman’s prior performances and understood implicitly how he could bring their calculating Chairman of the Board to life.
The level to which Mussburger is consistent though also makes for perfect comedy. He delivers every line in a barely pitched gruff monotone except when it involves a threat to his personal prosperity and status. When Sidney’s life is in mortal danger, being held by the pants by Norville, his only two words of concern (“Pants” and “damn”) are delivered with about as much emotion as he delivers to his receptionist to tell her that he will be to Mr. Blumstead directly. The most emotion he ever delivers in the film is when he briefly opens his eyes fully and speaks with a slightly louder voice to exclaim “You mean to tell me any slob in a smelly t-shirt will be able to buy Hudsucker stock?”. Sidney Mussburger is so devoid of emotion that him being in mortal terror is funny. Sidney Mussburger preventing a second Hudsucker board suicide is funny. Sidney Mussburger wearing a party hat is funny.
Paul Newman was also famously involved in the craft of acting. He famously studied at the Actor’s Studio with Lee Strasburg, the man credited with bringing the Stanislavski Method (commonly referred to simply as “The Method”) to America. His fellow alumni in the Actor’s Studio under Strasburg include Julie Harris, Joanne Woodward, Geraldine Page, Maureen Stapleton, Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Patricia Neal, Rod Steiger, Mildred Dunnock, Eva Marie Saint, Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson, Ben Gazzara, Sidney Poitier, Karl Malden, Gene Wilder, Shelley Winters, Dennis Hopper, and Sally Field. The Method compels actors to make very conscious decisions by actually inhabiting the same headspaces as their characters. Dustin Hoffman famously collapsed while performing the climactic scene in Marathon Man (1976) because he, like his character, had spent the night previous running through the streets of New York to make himself as exhausted as his character, causing his scene partner Sir Laurence Olivier to ask “Have you ever tried acting, dear boy?”** Paul Newman may never have gone to this extreme, but still his time with Strasburg makes me think that any aspect of his performance had a reason. There is no such thing as a Method actor who makes an unexamined decision in a performance, which makes me endlessly wonder about one thing:
Sidney Mussburger only talks out of one side of his mouth. Specifically, he only ever talks out of the right side of his mouth, the left of his mouth is constantly pursed closed. To the best of my knowledge, Newman was never interviewed about his performance in Hudsucker, so we do not know the reason for the way Mussburger talks, but everything about Newman as an actor suggests that this was a purposeful decision. The shooting script never mentions any affectations of Mussburger’s speech or appearance, only introducing him as “a tall middle-aged executive with lean and rugged good looks and a commanding presence.” It is not that this is something Paul Newman just does as he doesn’t appear to do this in any other film before or after. Why does he do this? Is it a suggestion at Mussburger being two-faced? Has Mussburger had a stroke? Is his mouth permanently in a state of trying to hold a cigar? Who knows! But everytime I see it, I find it slightly unsettling and also hilarious. It is a brilliant little stylistic choice.
please note: left side of the mouth closed, right side open. It’s that way for the whole filmJoel and Ethan Coen were able to see in Paul Newman his unflappable cool and knew that they could turn that very same thing into their unfeeling business tycoon. They harnessed what they knew was there and knew that despite having an entire incredibly successful career behind him that they could bring something new and yet unseen out of Paul Newman for his performance. Paul Newman is the perfect casting choice for Sidney Mussburger.
*45th floor if we’re counting the mezzanine
** Hoffman has since clarified that his decision to stay awake all night before filming the pivotal scene may also have been informed by his desire to hang out at Studio 54 and do degenerate disco things all night rather than simply inhabiting his character’s exhaustion. Personally my hat’s off to the man if he was able to party insanely hard and sell it to the public that he did it to sacrifice for his craft for some 30 years after the fact.
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