R.I.P. Barry Newman

[Big Magilla]

Hospitals can't release details about a death, but they have an obligation to report a death to the authorities. In the old days every newspaper in the city would have a reporter stationed at city hall to comb through records for such information. I don't know how it's done now, but with most celebrity deaths being announced on Facebook and Twitter these days, maybe they don't feel it's worth the expense of paying someone to search for the ones that fall between the cracks.

[Sonic Youth]

Hospitals in New York and most everywhere in the U.S. are required to report deaths to the authorities at which time they become public knowledge. They will usually wait until the family has been notified before doing so but are not under any obligation to.

Media relies on publicists and family members for information about a person's death not that the person has died per se. Not all deaths make the news, but Barry Newman was a big enough name to have had his death announced within a day or two. It's puzzling that that didn't happen.

It must have been embarrassing for his widow to have to go to the Hollywood Reporter to get the new out almost a month after his passing.

I would think they DID have an obligation to wait, at least an ethical obligation, and maybe even a legal one. This sounds contrary to any law I'm familiar with, but I'm no legal expert so what do I know? I thought there were disclosure laws that forbade any hospital informtion being made public unless family or a representative allows it. And even if it were legal, it would reflect extremely poorly on them for doing so, which is why we don't see it happen.

Plus, hundreds of people die in New York City every day. I can't imagine a reporter combing through a list of hundreds of names just to break a story.

[Big Magilla]

Wonder why it took almost a month for his obituary. He wasn't a major star, but he wasn't an unknown either.

He died at New York Presbyterian, which is a major New York hospital. You would think that someone whose job it is to follow these things at the N.Y. Times and other news outlets would have caught this.

Do newspapers do that? It sounds like a National Enquirer practice. I thought legit newspapers relied on statements from publicists or family members.

Hospitals in New York and most everywhere in the U.S. are required to report deaths to the authorities at which time they become public knowledge. They will usually wait until the family has been notified before doing so but are not under any obligation to.

Media relies on publicists and family members for information about a person's death not that the person has died per se. Not all deaths make the news, but Barry Newman was a big enough name to have had his death announced within a day or two. It's puzzling that that didn't happen.

It must have been embarrassing for his widow to have to go to the Hollywood Reporter to get the new out almost a month after his passing.

[Sonic Youth]

Wonder why it took almost a month for his obituary. He wasn't a major star, but he wasn't an unknown either.

He died at New York Presbyterian, which is a major New York hospital. You would think that someone whose job it is to follow these things at the N.Y. Times and other news outlets would have caught this.

Do newspapers do that? It sounds like a National Enquirer practice. I thought legit newspapers relied on statements from publicisists or family members.

[Reza]

He wasn't a major star, but he wasn't an unknown either.

He was huge in Pakistan. I remember the hysteria and the lines around the block to get into see Vanishing Point when it came out. Must have been because of the cars. Later crowds again for both Fear is the Key and The Salzburg Connection. None of these films were all that good but they ran to packed houses here. And Petrocelli was also a great success here on tv.

I first saw Charlotte Rampling in Vanishing Point in a brief role as a hitchhiker.

[Big Magilla]

Wonder why it took almost a month for his obituary. He wasn't a major star, but he wasn't an unknown either.

He died at New York Presbyterian, which is a major New York hospital. You would think that someone whose job it is to follow these things at the N.Y. Times and other news outlets would have caught this.

[Reza]

Barry Newman, Star of ‘The Vanishing Point’ & ‘Petrocelli,’ Dies at 92
He got to drive very, very fast in the Richard C. Sarafian cult classic and in 'Fear Is the Key,' too.

by Mike Barnes (Hd Reporter) 6/4/2023

Barry Newman, who propelled a supercharged Dodge Challenger across the American West in The Vanishing Point and portrayed a defense attorney on the NBC series Petrocelli, has died. He was 92.

Newman died May 11 at NewYork-Presbyterian Columbia University Irving Medical Center, his wife, Angela, told The Hollywood Reporter.

After appearing on Broadway and starring in The Lawyer (1970), the Boston-born actor was up for a change of pace when he was offered the role of a man tasked with transporting a car from Denver to San Francisco in the action-packed Fox film The Vanishing Point (1971), directed by Richard C. Sarafian.

“This was very unique,” he said. “I had just done this film about a lawyer, a Harvard graduate, and I thought this is a different kind of thing. The guy was the rebel, the antihero. I enjoyed doing that very much.”

Newman’s taciturn character, Kowalski, was a Vietnam veteran, former stock car driver and dishonorably discharged cop with nothing to lose. Amped up on amphetamines, he attempts to drive a white 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T 440 Magnum to his destination as fast as possible.

Vanishing Point was shot over eight weeks and has become an admired cult classic, with Steven Spielberg calling it one of his favorite movies.

Attorney Anthony Petrocelli was first introduced by Newman in The Lawyer in a story loosely based on the infamous 1954 case in which Cleveland neurosurgeon Sam Sheppard was initially convicted for the brutal bludgeoning murder of his wife.

Four years later, Newman returned as the maverick lawyer in the telefilm Night Games and then in the Arizona-set Petrocelli that ran for two seasons, from September 1974 through March 1976.

More recently, Newman showed up in such films as Sylvester Stallone-starring Daylight (1996), Bowfinger (1999), Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey (1999) and 40 Days and 40 Nights (2002).

Barry Foster Newman was born on Nov. 7, 1930. His father, Carl, managed the local outpost of the nightclub The Latin Quarter. He graduated from Boston Latin School and Brandeis University, played saxophone and clarinet in the U.S. Army band and studied acting with Lee Strasberg after chucking the idea of becoming an anthropologist.

In 1957, he made his Broadway debut playing a jazz musician in the Herman Wouk comedy Nature’s Way and a year later appeared with Alice Ghostley in Maybe Tuesday, written by Mel Tolkin and Lucille Kallen of Your Show of Shows fame.

Barry Newman in 1971’s ‘The Vanishing Point’ 20th Century Fox Film Corp./Photofest

In 1964-65, while playing tough-guy assistant director Sheik Orsini opposite Steve Lawrence in the musical adaptation of Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?, he also was portraying a young attorney on the CBS daytime drama The Edge of Night before getting fired after an argument with a director. (His character got sent off to a sanitarium.)

Newman had also appeared onstage in Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, as a gangster in Pretty Boy Floyd (1960) and on such shows as The Defenders, Naked City and Get Smart when he toplined The Lawyer, directed and co-written by Sidney J. Furie.

The Vanishing Point didn’t create much of a stir in the U.S., but when it opened in London at the Leicester Square Theater, “people lined up around the block to see it,” he told Paul Rowlands in a 2019 interview. “In England, I was a hero, and in America, I was just a guy picking up his bags at the plane terminal!

“It opened again in America after playing Europe and people then started getting on to the film. It became a cult film without me even realizing it. To this day, I’m always being asked to talk about it somewhere.”

In 1972 releases, Newman starred in Fear Is the Key, which like Vanishing Point, also featured an exciting car chase, and the CIA thriller The Salzburg Connection.

His work also included turns in 1980’s King Crab and several other telefilms; the movies City on Fire (1979), Amy (1981) and Good Advice (2001); and the series L.A. Law, Murder, She Wrote, The Fall Guy and The O.C., where he played Professor Max Bloom.

Newman’s career was curtailed after he was diagnosed with vocal-cord cancer in 2009, but he recently reunited with writer-director Furie to star in the independent film Finding Hannah (2022).