Today in 1925, actor and entrepreneur Paul Newman was born.
No doubt Newman wanted people to see his movies whenever they could, and he made some pretty famous ones.
But there was one Paul Newman movie Paul Newman really didn’t want people to see: The Silver Chalice.
It was one of the grand scale Biblical epics that were popular in the 1950s, and it was Newman’s first film role.
He played Basil, a Greek man sold into slavery who has adventures and eventually has to sculpt a silver receptacle for the cup of Jesus.
The reviews weren’t great; today it’s sometimes mockingly called “Paul Newman and the Holy Grail.”
One of the movie’s biggest critics was Newman himself.
As the 2011 biography “Paul Newman: A Life” explains, when he first saw The Silver Chalice, “I was sure my acting career had begun and ended in the same picture.”
He would later call it the worst film made in the 50s.
Fortunately he would go on to make many more successful and well-reviewed movies, but when a guy can quote reviews of a bad movie years later, he definitely hasn’t forgotten that picture.
So in 1963, when Newman heard a Los Angeles TV station was going to broadcast “The Silver Chalice,” he took out $1,200 worth of newspaper ads urging people not to watch.
This, of course, backfired; if Paul Newman thought it was terrible, they had to see it.
He later admitted the ads were a mistake, but still, decades later, Paul Newman reportedly offered actor Liev Schrieber a bit of career advice: “When they ask you to do The Silver Chalice 2, don’t do it.”
Among the things Paul Newman loathed about his performance in The Silver Chalice was his Caesar haircut.
Maybe he should’ve aimed for a style more like Hoss, who is the world’s largest ball of human hair.
Hoss is the work of Steve Warden, who runs a hair salon in Cambridge, Ohio and decided in 2013 to aim for the world record human hairball.
Hoss weighs over 200 pounds, and Warden keeps adding to it.
Plus, now Hoss has a hat, boots, a big smile, and eyes as blue as Paul Newman’s.
THE SILVER CHALICE, Paul Newman and a $1200 ad… (By The Gods)
Meet Hoss, the World’s Largest Human Hair Ball (Oddity Central)
