Actors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward had one of the most legendary partnerships in Hollywood.

They were married over 50 years and made 16 films together.

Now they are the subject of a compelling new docuseries directed by Ethan Hawke.

It's called The Last Movie Stars, and it's a tale of Hollywood and of love, but also

of how heroes are made and sometimes robbed of their complexities.

I'm Aisha Harris.

And I'm Linda Holmes, and today we're talking about The Last Movie Stars on Pop Culture

Happy Hour from NPR.

It is just me and Aisha today.

So the origin of The Last Movie Stars is that Paul Newman at some point commissioned

a massive set of interviews with a ton of people, everybody from Alia Kazan, to Gore

Vidal, to his first wife, from whom he'd had a painful divorce in preparation for a memoir

he wanted to write.

But at some point he burned the tapes.

His children, however, discovered that while the tapes were gone, there were transcripts

that survived, and they reached out to Ethan Hawke about directing a documentary building

on them.

In order to make them suitable for a film, the transcripts needed actual voices.

So Hawke brought in a lot of actors that he knows to essentially play the people in the

interviews to read their words.

So George Clooney and Laura Lennie read the words of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

Zoe Kazan is Newman's first wife, Jackie and so forth.

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