Paul Newman wears a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona

The photograph on this record surfaces around minute 27 of the fifth part of The Last Movie Stars (2022): Paul Newman at a racetrack in aviator sunglasses, his Rolex Daytona on its bund strap, beside his son Scott in a Chiquita Bananas t-shirt. In the film the image appears while Newman, voiced by George Clooney, reckons with his failures as a father; Scott died of an overdose. Ethan Hawke built the six-part HBO Max documentary out of an abandoned memoir. Newman had taped interviews with everyone in his life, then burned the tapes, and the transcripts that survived, thousands of pages, are performed over Zoom by Hawke's friends, Clooney as Newman, Laura Linney as Joanne Woodward.

The watch in the photograph is the most famous Rolex in the world, the Cosmograph Daytona reference 6239 with the white exotic dial collectors now call the Paul Newman. It was a gift from Woodward, engraved "Drive Carefully Me" on the caseback as her husband's racing turned serious, handed to his daughter's boyfriend in the mid-eighties, and sold by Phillips in 2017 for more than 17 million dollars, then the highest price ever paid for a wristwatch at auction. The film's final part opens on the ticking of a chronograph and Aurel Bacs at the Phillips dais, and over the auction footage Hawke and his wife, the producer Ryan Shawhughes, argue about what the scene is doing in the film. Hawke's first answer: "To me, it's the buzzards feasting on the dead." She pushes back, he admits he would love to own the watch himself, and they arrive at the version that stays in. "You can't buy Paul Newman's watch," Hawke says. "It's his watch. What makes it beautiful is him. The watch is nothing. It's a present from his wife." Then, as the bidding climbs: "It's a private thing, that's now made public in death. But it is something real."