Norman Jewison (Rollerball) Rollerball

Norman Jewison was forty-eight when he directed Rollerball. He had won the Best Picture Oscar for In the Heat of the Night (1967), made The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), directed Fiddler on the Roof (1971) — three Oscars, $80 million worldwide on a $9 million budget — and Jesus Christ Superstar (1973). Rollerball was, by some distance, the most violent film he had made, and the one furthest from the social-issue dramas and musicals that had defined his reputation.

Toronto, the CBC, and an apprenticeship in live television

Jewison was born July 21, 1926, in Toronto. He left the University of Toronto after the war and went into the CBC as an actor and television director. He moved to Hollywood in 1958 and built a feature-directing career in the early 1960s on Doris Day comedies — The Thrill of It All (1963), Send Me No Flowers (1964) — and Steve McQueen vehicles (The Cincinnati Kid, 1965).

"After another comedy, The Art of Love (1965), Jewison was determined to escape from the genre and tackle more demanding projects." — Wikipedia, Norman Jewison

The Cold War comedy The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966) was the pivot. In the Heat of the Night (1967) followed and won five Oscars including Best Picture; Robert Kennedy reportedly told Jewison during the shoot that it could prove "a very important film. Timing is everything."

The pivot to Rollerball

By 1973 Jewison had made the films that defined his canon — In the Heat of the Night, Thomas Crown, Fiddler, Superstar. Rollerball was a deliberate genre pivot. The germ was William Harrison's short story "Roller Ball Murder" in Esquire (September 1973). Jewison and Harrison shared an agent. Jewison bought the story, hired Harrison to co-write the screenplay, and pitched a satirical action film to United Artists.

The motivation was specifically the spectacle violence he had seen at sports events.

"There was blood on the ice and 16,000 people were standing up screaming." — Norman Jewison, describing a Boston-Philadelphia hockey game, Yahoo / Telegraph (2022)

"Rollerball is all about the absurdity of conflict, it's obscene to have violence for the entertainment of the masses. That's an obscene idea that goes back to Circus Maximus, that goes back to Rome. Surely, we've become more civilized." — Norman Jewison, Den of Geek (2022)

What he asked of the film

Jewison's filmmaking practice on Rollerball was unusually research-driven. He worked with production designer John Box (a four-time Oscar winner — Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Oliver!, Nicholas and Alexandra) to design the sport from scratch, blending roller derby, hockey, football, motocross, and judo. He gave screen credit to stunt performers — Rollerball was the first major Hollywood production to do so. He cast Ralph Richardson out of British theatre for the Geneva scene; he cast John Houseman three years after The Paper Chase to weaponize the Kingsfield voice.

"When I got into the arena and started shooting, I was just terrified that I was going to kill somebody." — Norman Jewison, Yahoo / Telegraph (2022)

"They would go faster and cut each other up." — Norman Jewison, on the stunt performers, Yahoo / Telegraph (2022)

The most-quoted statement of his intent — and his frustration when the intent was misread — concerned the audience response itself:

"In Europe, they bought into that idea. In America, they just wanted to play the game, man." — Norman Jewison, Yahoo / Telegraph (2022)

When promoters approached him after release wanting "rights to the game" for real leagues, Jewison was, in his own word, "outraged." The entire point of the picture had been to show the "sickness and insanity of contact sports and their allure," and the picture's first cultural effect was to demonstrate exactly the allure it intended to indict.

After Rollerball

Jewison's late-70s and 80s included F.I.S.T. (1978) with Stallone, ...And Justice for All (1979) with Pacino, A Soldier's Story (1984, Best Picture nomination), Agnes of God (1985), Moonstruck (1987, Best Director nomination), and In Country (1989). He founded the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto in 1988 — a director-training institution that has shaped two generations of Canadian filmmakers. He received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the 1999 Oscars. He died January 20, 2024, at ninety-seven.

"Norman Jewison was, by the time of Rollerball, a director who could open any door in Hollywood. He used the door for a satirical sci-fi about corporate sport. The fact that the satire didn't entirely land — that the film became, against his intention, an advertisement for the brutality it indicted — is part of the film's history and not a flaw in Jewison's intention. The director made the picture he meant to make. The audience took a different picture out of the theatre." — CBC News, Norman Jewison obituary (2024)

"I want people to recognise themselves in the movies I make. I don't enjoy no-brainer action movies." — Norman Jewison, Wikipedia