Creative Destruction: The Prank War That Forged a Hollywood Legend

Prologue: The Scream

The smell hit Paul Newman before he even opened the car door. It was 97 degrees in Los Angeles, and the parking lot at Universal Studios was baking under the July sun. Something inside his brand new silver Porsche 911 was wrong. Very wrong.

He pulled the handle, the door swung open, and Paul Newman—the coolest man in Hollywood, the man who never flinched, never sweated, never lost his composure—screamed. Not a manly shout, not a surprised yelp. A full, genuine, from-the-gut scream that echoed across the parking lot and made three crew members come running from Stage 12.

What was inside that car, and why it was there, goes back to a single act of theft three days earlier. An act so brazen that even the studio security guards couldn’t believe what they were watching. But before we get to the theft, before we get to the revenge, before we get to the six-month prank war that nearly shut down one of the greatest films ever made, you need to understand something about Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the summer of 1973.

Because what happened between them on the set of The Sting wasn’t just a Hollywood story. It was a love story told entirely in acts of creative destruction.

Chapter 1: The Chemistry

June 1973, Universal Studios, Los Angeles. Director George Roy Hill was three weeks into production on The Sting, a con artist caper film starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. The two men had worked together once before, on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969, and that film had turned them into the most bankable duo in cinema.

But here’s what the press releases didn’t mention. Newman and Redford weren’t just co-stars. They were opposites who recognized something dangerous in each other. Newman was East Coast Yale-trained, method acting royalty. He approached every role like a surgeon: precise, controlled, deliberate. He arrived on set at 5:30 a.m., ran his lines alone in his trailer, and expected silence during rehearsals.

Redford was Western chaos. He’d been kicked out of college for drinking, hitchhiked across Europe, painted in the streets of Florence, and stumbled into acting almost by accident. He showed up when he felt like it, improvised half his dialogue, and treated the set like a playground.

On paper, they should have hated each other. But something happened when they were in the same room. The air changed. Their timing synced. They made each other funnier, sharper, more alive.

George Roy Hill, who directed them both in Butch Cassidy, understood the chemistry, but feared the consequences. “Putting Newman and Redford together,” Hill told a reporter that summer, “is like putting two brilliant, competitive teenage boys in the same house. They’ll either build something incredible or burn it to the ground. My job is to make sure they build it before the fire starts.”

Chapter 2: The Fire Starts

The fire started on a Wednesday, July 11th, 1973. It was the fourth week of production, and the set was running behind schedule. George Roy Hill was stressed. The studio was pressuring him about the budget. The costume department was fighting with the art department about period accuracy. And in the middle of all this chaos, there was the trailer situation.

On any major film set, trailers are territory. They’re not just places to rest between takes. They’re status symbols. The size of your trailer, where it’s parked, what’s inside—it all signals your position in the Hollywood hierarchy.

Newman’s trailer was parked closest to Stage 12, where most of the interior scenes were being shot. It was the premium spot, thirty seconds from the soundstage door, shaded by a row of elm trees that kept it cool even in the July heat. Redford’s trailer was parked about two hundred feet further away, past the catering truck, past the prop warehouse in what the crew called the “dead zone” because it got no shade and the air conditioning unit was unreliable.

Redford had complained about it twice. Both times the production manager had apologized and done nothing. Newman, of course, knew all about Redford’s trailer situation, and he couldn’t resist making it worse.

Chapter 3: The Stolen Trailer

On the morning of July 11th, Redford arrived on set at 6:15 a.m. for a 7 a.m. call time. He walked toward his trailer, coffee in one hand, script pages in the other, sunglasses pushed up on his forehead. But when he reached the spot where his trailer should have been, there was nothing there. Not moved slightly to the left. Not relocated to another row. Nothing. The trailer was gone. Completely gone.

In its place sat a single aluminum folding chair, the kind you’d find at a church picnic, dented and slightly rusty. Taped to the back of that chair was a handwritten note on a piece of Universal Studios letterhead. The note read, “Dear Bob, thought you could use an upgrade. You’re welcome. P. Newman. PS. The chair reclines if you lean back hard enough.”

Redford stood there for a long moment, staring at the empty space and the folding chair. Three crew members who were setting up nearby watched him, trying not to laugh. They’d seen the whole operation the night before. Newman had organized it like a military campaign.

At 11 p.m. on Tuesday night, after everyone had gone home, Newman had convinced two teamsters and a forklift operator to physically lift Redford’s trailer off its blocks and transport it to the far corner of the Universal lot, behind the warehouse where they stored old Western sets. It was now parked between a fake saloon and a broken stagecoach, a quarter mile from Stage 12. Newman had tipped the teamsters $50 each and sworn them to secrecy. But on a film set, there are no secrets. By 6:00 a.m., every single person on the crew knew what had happened. Everyone was watching to see what Redford would do.

What Redford did was nothing. He picked up the folding chair, carried it to the edge of the soundstage, sat down, opened his script, and started reviewing his lines. When Newman arrived twenty minutes later, grinning like a kid who’d just gotten away with stealing cookies, Redford didn’t even look up.

“Morning, Paul,” he said casually. “Nice weather.”

Newman waited for the explosion—the anger, the demand to have his trailer returned immediately—but Redford just sat there reading his script in a folding chair as if nothing unusual had happened.

Newman’s grin started to fade. This wasn’t the reaction he’d expected.

“You’re not going to say anything?” Newman asked.

Redford turned a page. “About what?”

“About your trailer.”

Redford looked up, squinting slightly in the morning sun. “What trailer?” he said. Then he went back to reading.

Newman stood there for a moment, confused, and then walked to his own trailer. But here’s what Paul Newman didn’t understand about Robert Redford. Silence was never surrender. Silence was planning.

Chapter 4: The Masterpiece

For the next forty-eight hours, Redford said nothing about the trailer. He sat in his folding chair between takes. He ate lunch in his folding chair. He reviewed his lines in his folding chair. He was so calm, so unbothered, so perfectly composed that Newman started to get nervous.

“He’s too quiet,” Newman told George Roy Hill on Thursday morning. “Redford’s never quiet. Something’s wrong.”

Hill shrugged. “Maybe he just doesn’t care about the trailer.”

“No,” Newman said, his blue eyes narrowing. “He cares. He’s just waiting.”

Newman was right. Redford was waiting. But he wasn’t just planning revenge. He was planning a masterpiece.

Chapter 5: Biological Warfare

On Friday afternoon, July 13th, while Newman was on set filming a poker scene, Redford made his move. He had spent the previous two days quietly recruiting allies.

The propmaster, a man named Eddie Bracken, who had worked on every major Universal film since the 1960s, owed Redford a favor from the Butch Cassidy days. The catering manager, a woman named Gloria Santos, thought Redford’s smile could cure cancer and would have helped him rob a bank if he’d asked nicely. And the security guard at the east parking lot gate, a retired marine named Charlie Dunn, had been looking the other way for actors’ pranks since the days of Alfred Hitchcock.

Here’s what Redford had them do. First, Eddie Bracken procured six whole salmon from the Universal Commissary. Not canned salmon, not smoked salmon—six entire raw Pacific salmon, each about three feet long, fresh from the seafood delivery that morning.

Second, Gloria Santos wrapped each salmon in brown paper and tied them with twine as if they were Christmas presents. And third, Charlie Dunn unlocked Newman’s silver Porsche 911 in the east parking lot and looked the other way while Redford and Eddie carefully placed all six salmon inside the car. Two on the back seat, two on the front passenger seat, one in the trunk, and one they wedged under the driver’s seat, positioned so that Newman wouldn’t see it when he first got in.

Then they locked the car, walked away, and let the July sun do the rest.

Chapter 6: The Reveal

Now, you need to understand something about physics. A brand new Porsche 911 in 1973 had no tinted windows. It was essentially a glass greenhouse on wheels. On a 97-degree July day in Los Angeles, the interior temperature of that car would have reached approximately 140 to 150 degrees within two hours. Six raw salmon sealed in a glass oven for an entire afternoon.

The chemical process that was occurring inside Paul Newman’s Porsche was not just unpleasant. It was biological warfare. By 6:00 p.m., when filming wrapped for the day, the car had been baking for nearly five hours. The salmon had moved well beyond spoiled. They had entered a new dimension of decay. The smell had become something with its own personality—a living presence that had permeated every surface of the leather interior, seeped into the dashboard, embedded itself in the carpet fibers, and begun what automotive detailers would later describe as permanent aromatic contamination.

But Redford wasn’t finished. Inside the glove compartment, tucked between the decaying fish, was a note.

Newman found it after he stopped screaming, after he staggered backward from the open door with his hand over his mouth, after three crew members had rushed over to see what had happened and immediately wished they hadn’t. He reached in, gagging, eyes watering, and pulled out a folded piece of paper.

The note said, “Dear Paul, thought your car could use an upgrade. You’re welcome. R. Redford. PS. The chair was more comfortable.”

Newman read the note three times. His eyes were streaming from the smell. His $22,000 Porsche, which in today’s money would be well over $150,000, smelled like a fish market that had been closed for a month in the middle of August.

And then Paul Newman did something that surprised everyone standing in that parking lot. He started to laugh—not a polite chuckle, but a deep, uncontrollable, bent-over, can’t-breathe laugh that went on for nearly two minutes.

“That son of a—” Newman said between gasps. “That beautiful, evil son of a—”

He looked at the crew members. “Do any of you know where Redford is right now?”

One of the grips pointed toward the west parking lot. “He left about an hour ago, Mr. Newman.”

Newman nodded, still laughing, tears running down his face from both the smell and the joy of being so perfectly outmaneuvered.

“This isn’t over,” he said to no one in particular. “This is just the beginning.”

Chapter 7: Escalation

He was right. What had started with a stolen trailer and six dead fish was about to escalate into one of the most legendary prank wars in Hollywood history, and the set of The Sting would never be the same.

Over the next several weeks, the pranks between Newman and Redford escalated with a precision and creativity that left the entire crew somewhere between terrified and amazed.

Newman struck first in the second round. He arrived early one Monday morning before anyone else was on set and replaced the first three pages of Redford’s script with pages he’d written himself. The fake pages contained dialogue so absurd, so completely wrong for the scene that when Redford read through them during his morning preparation, he nearly choked on his coffee. His character, Johnny Hooker, was suddenly speaking in Shakespearean English and professing his love for a character that didn’t exist in the film.

Redford walked onto set that morning, script in hand, and delivered the fake lines with complete conviction. He played them straight, every ridiculous word, looking Newman dead in the eye while reciting dialogue about forbidden love and a character named Lady Evangelene of the West Side.

Newman, sitting across the table in the poker scene, had to bite the inside of his cheek so hard it bled to keep from laughing. George Roy Hill, who had no idea what was happening, sat in his director’s chair with his mouth open, convinced that Redford had suffered some kind of psychological break.

“Cut,” Hill said slowly. “Bob, what the hell was that?”

Redford turned to Newman. Newman’s face was purple from suppressed laughter. The entire crew was staring. And then Redford held up the fake script pages and said calmly, “Ask your leading man.”

Hill looked at Newman. Newman exploded into laughter. Hill put his face in his hands.

“I am directing children,” he muttered. “Grown men who are being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I am directing children.”

Chapter 8: The Trailer for Ants

But Redford’s counterstrike was already in motion. The next morning, Newman opened his trailer door to find that every single item inside had been replaced with a miniature version. His full-size couch was now a children’s toy couch. His coffee table was a dollhouse table. His coffee mug was a thimble-sized espresso cup. His script had been reprinted in six-point font so small he would have needed a magnifying glass to read it. Even the framed photos of his family had been replaced with tiny wallet-sized prints.

The whole operation had the feel of a museum exhibit titled “Paul Newman’s Trailer for Ants.” Newman stood in the doorway of his suddenly tiny world for a full minute without speaking. Then he shouted across the lot, “Redford!”

From somewhere near the catering truck, a voice called back, “Problem?”

Chapter 9: The Director’s Intervention

George Roy Hill called an emergency meeting that afternoon. He sat Newman and Redford down in his office, closed the door, and spoke very carefully.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I love what you’re doing to each other. I truly do. It’s creative. It’s inspired, and it’s driving me completely insane. The studio has noticed that we are now four days behind schedule. They have asked me why. I told them the truth. My two leads are engaged in psychological warfare.”

Hill paused. “So, here’s what’s going to happen. You can keep pranking each other. I can’t stop you, and I wouldn’t try. But if this film goes one more day over schedule, I am sending the overtime bill directly to both of your houses, split 50/50. Are we clear?”

Newman and Redford exchanged a look.

“Crystal clear, George,” Newman said, snorting.

“Absolutely,” Redford agreed.

They shook hands with Hill. They walked out of his office side by side, and within an hour, Redford had filled Newman’s cowboy boots from the costume department with shaving cream.

Chapter 10: The Real Impact

But here’s the thing that nobody outside the production understood at the time. The pranks weren’t slowing the film down. They were making it better.

The chemistry between Newman and Redford onscreen during The Sting is electric. There’s a looseness, a genuine affection, an unpredictable energy that critics have praised for decades. That energy wasn’t acting. It was real. Every take, Newman and Redford were looking at each other with a mixture of admiration and suspicion. Every scene, they were trying to out-charm, out-think, out-perform each other. The competition made them sharper. The pranks made them closer.

The war was a love letter written in fish and tiny furniture.

Chapter 11: The Peace Offering

The Sting wrapped production in late August 1973. On the final day of shooting, after the last take was printed, Redford walked to Newman’s trailer and knocked. Newman opened the door. Neither man said anything for a moment.

Then Redford reached into his jacket and pulled out a small wrapped package.

“Peace offering,” Redford said.

Newman unwrapped it. Inside was a single can of salmon.

Newman stared at it, then looked at Redford, then back at the can. He started laughing so hard he had to lean against the trailer door.

“You know,” Newman said, wiping his eyes, “my Porsche still smells. Three professional cleanings and it still smells. My wife won’t ride in it. My kids won’t ride in it. I’m going to have to sell the damn thing.”

“You stole my trailer,” Redford said, as if that explained everything.

“I moved your trailer,” Newman corrected. “There’s a difference.”

“Not to me there isn’t.”

Newman held up the can of salmon. “Are we even?”

Redford considered this. “We’ll never be even, Paul. That’s the whole point.”

Chapter 12: The Legacy

The Sting was released on December 25th, 1973, and it was a sensation. It grossed over $156 million worldwide, making it the biggest hit of the year. Critics praised everything about it—the direction, the screenplay, the production design—but above all, they praised the chemistry between Newman and Redford.

Roger Ebert wrote that watching them together was like watching two jazz musicians in perfect sync. Each one pushing the other to play better, faster, more brilliantly.

The film won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for George Roy Hill. At the ceremony, when The Sting was announced as Best Picture, Hill walked to the podium and said, “I’d like to thank Newman and Redford for only destroying one car and one trailer during production. It could have been much worse.”

The audience laughed. Newman and Redford, sitting three rows apart because the seating was alphabetical, both smiled the exact same smile at the exact same time.

Chapter 13: The Prank War Never Ends

But the prank war didn’t end with The Sting. It continued for decades, evolving from set-based sabotage into a private running joke that bonded the two men for the rest of their lives.

Newman once had a wrecked Volkswagen Beetle delivered to Redford’s Sundance property in Utah with a bow on it and a card that read, “Happy birthday. And I know you like imports.”

Redford responded by having the same car compacted into a cube of metal and shipped back to Newman’s house in Connecticut with a note: “Thanks for the gift. I compressed it so it would fit in your living room.”

Newman had the cube melted down and recast into a garden sculpture, which he placed on Redford’s lawn without permission. Redford kept the sculpture. It sat in his garden at Sundance for years. When journalists asked about it, Redford would say, “A friend gave it to me. It’s the most thoughtful gift I’ve ever received.”

Chapter 14: The Final Surprise

In 2007, during one of Newman’s last public appearances before his death from cancer, a journalist asked him about his friendship with Redford. Newman was frail then, thinner than anyone remembered, his famous blue eyes still sharp, but the body failing. He thought about the question for a long time.

“People ask what made our friendship work?” Newman said quietly. “And I think the answer is that we never stopped competing. Not in a mean way. In the way that two people who respect each other keep pushing, keep testing, keep trying to surprise each other. The day I stopped being able to surprise Redford would have been the day our friendship died.”

He paused. “And I never stopped. Even now, I’ve got something planned. He doesn’t know it yet.”

Newman smiled. And for just a moment, you could see the man who had stolen a trailer at 11 p.m. on a summer night in 1973.

“I’ll never tell you what it is,” Newman added. “But when it happens, he’ll know it was me.”

Chapter 15: The Last Word

Paul Newman died on September 26th, 2008. He was eighty-three years old. Redford was devastated. He released a short statement: “I have lost a great friend. The world has lost a great artist. I’ll miss his wit, his generosity, and his relentless ability to make my life unpredictable.”

But here’s what Redford didn’t say publicly. What he told close friends years later in private moments.

After Newman’s funeral, Redford went home to Sundance. He walked into his study, and sitting on his desk—placed there by someone Newman had arranged before his death—was a small wooden box. Inside the box was a can of salmon and a note that read, “You said we’d never be even. You were right. But I wanted the last word. With love, Paul.”

Redford kept that can of salmon on his desk for the rest of his life. He never opened it. And whenever someone asked him about Newman, about their rivalry, about the pranks and the competition and the war that lasted thirty-five years, Redford would glance at that can and say the same thing every time.

“He was the best friend I ever had and the most annoying man I ever met, and I wouldn’t change a single thing.”

Epilogue: The Meaning of Friendship

The story of Newman and Redford’s prank war reminds us that the best friendships aren’t the polite ones. They’re the ones where two people care enough to push each other, challenge each other, and yes, occasionally fill each other’s cars with fish. Because love isn’t always gentle. Sometimes it’s a stolen trailer and a can of salmon. And sometimes, if you’re very lucky, it’s a friend who plans one last prank from beyond the grave just to make sure you never forget them.