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Winning: The Racing Life Of Paul Newman

WINNING: THE RACING LIFE OF PAUL NEWMAN (Adam Carolla). 84 minutes. Opens Friday (June 19). See listing. Rating: NN

Where to watch: iTunes


In addition to being a respected actor, Paul Newman raced cars. Like, a lot. That’s the entire point of Winning: The Racing Life Of Paul Newman, which celebrates the late star’s career on the track through archival footage and interviews with his friends and teammates.

Newman fell in love with race car driving while making the 1969 drama Winning, continued to race and eventually assembled his own team. Along the way he made some more movies and started a salad dressing business.

The doc was produced and directed by Adam Carolla, the comic, podcaster and racing enthusiast, whose own level of celebrity clearly helped him line up interviews with the likes of Robert Redford, Patrick Dempsey and Mario Andretti.

I don’t doubt Carolla’s respect for the material – he himself is a racer, and owns and drives several of Newman’s cars. But he’s stretching a few interesting anecdotes out to feature length, and you can feel the strain on the material.

Worse, it’s just not very well made, shifting from the death of teammate Jim Fitzgerald in a 1987 crash to Jay Leno’s story about that time he challenged Newman to a go-kart race on The Tonight Show in 2005. Not only is it tonally off, but it also makes Newman look decrepit, which couldn’t have been intentional. 

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