Newman Wrote to Scorsese Pitching a 'Hustler' Sequel No One Wanted
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- Paul Newman wrote fan mail to Martin Scorsese in the mid-1980s after admiring "Raging Bull," asking him to direct a sequel to "The Hustler" that no one else was pursuing, based on Walter Tevis's 1984 novel of the same name.
- Martin Scorsese was at a career nadir when Newman reached out — "The King of Comedy" had bombed at the box office, Paramount had pulled "The Last Temptation of Christ" under evangelical pressure just before filming, and his immediate comeback was the scrappy indie "After Hours."
- Scorsese, Newman, and screenwriter Richard Price hammered out the script in marathon Malibu writing sessions, jettisoning much of Tevis's novel and recasting the story as a "thinly veiled joint autobiography" about reclaiming a gift that had been taken away.
- Tom Cruise plays Vince, the cocky young protégé, opposite an Oscar-nominated Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio; their combined star power helped turn the film into an unexpected crowd-pleaser and one of the biggest commercial hits of Scorsese's career.
- Roger Ebert called "The Color of Money" "watered down Scorsese," and the article argues critics repeated the same misread with "Cape Fear" — both dismissed as journeyman work despite sequences, like a Warren Zevon-scored pool match, that rank among the director's most dazzling set pieces.
- Ellen Burstyn had set the precedent a decade earlier by championing the young Scorsese for "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" (1974) after Francis Coppola recommended "Mean Streets" — establishing a career-long pattern in which actors brought Scorsese their passion projects.
Why it matters: The piece reframes "The Color of Money" as a pivotal recovery project for two filmmakers simultaneously stung by recent failures — Scorsese by "King of Comedy"'s box-office collapse and the "Last Temptation" cancellation, Newman by the flop of his self-directed "Harry and Son." It also pushes back against a recurring critical reflex that treated Scorsese's studio assignments as impersonal work, arguing that films like this and "Cape Fear" carry the same intensity as his personal projects and deserve re-evaluation.
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