The death of the great Paul Newman gives us a chance to reveal a heretofore unpublished piece of American mustache history - the role AMI played in the mustache revival of the late 1960s..

The movie was "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and there was a debate about how accurate the actors should be in their portrayal of the two outlaws. We're obviously talking about the wild west, a time when barbers were in short supply, as was general hygiene. The lead actors, Newman and Robert Redford, were open to any methods that would allow them to play the characters accurately.

AMI was brought in as consultant on the film through a little-known program that later grew into the more modern product placement we see in TV and movie. In effect, we were hired to find ways to place mustaches in films. Our recommendation was that the actors play the lead characters with a modern sensibility which in 1969 meant long hair and a mustache, the uniform of young people across the country. At first, Redford's agent balked about the idea and Newman's was dead-set against it, citing the fact that Butch Cassidy did not have a mustache. But, Redford, himself, liked the idea, especially becauee the Sundance Kid was a Mustached American.

"When I did Butch Cassidy I insisted on having a mustache," Redford said in an interview. "My agent said, ‘Don’t do it. It’ll kill your career’. I said, ‘What career? I haven’t even started out’, and I went ahead anyway and grew one. And boy was that mustache a big hit. Every guy had one after that. That’s how films change the world.”

It should also be noted that many characters in the film had mustaches, all of them grown under AMI supervision. And the film remains the highest-grossing Western in film history. More importantly, it triggered the mustache revival.

Ironically, Newman grew a mustache for his role of a grifter in the Sting in 1973 and the mustache trend was off and running.

So, remember him well, Paul Newman, not just a great actor and humanitarian, but a Mustached American in good standing until the end.