Production History (Rollerball) Rollerball

A 7,000-word Esquire story buys itself a studio

In September 1973, Esquire published William Harrison's short story "Roller Ball Murder" — about seven thousand words, told from inside a near-future blood sport. Within weeks Norman Jewison had bought it. The two men shared an agent. Jewison was looking for material that would let him pivot from musicals (Fiddler on the Roof, 1971; Jesus Christ Superstar, 1973) into a satirical mode about spectatorship and violence — he had been thinking about a hockey-fight crowd in Boston-Philadelphia, "blood on the ice and 16,000 people standing up screaming." Harrison was hired to write the screenplay, and the picture was set up at United Artists on a budget of $5–6 million. (wikipedia, film buff online)

The screenplay massively expanded the story. The original was almost entirely in the rink; Jewison and Harrison built around it the corporate-society architecture — Bartholomew, the Executive Directorate, the Multivision broadcast, the Geneva library, the wife taken for an executive — that gives the film its structure.

John Box invents the sport

Production designer John Box — a four-time Oscar winner (Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Oliver!, Nicholas and Alexandra) — was hired to design the game. Box and Jewison conceptualized rollerball as "a blend of a roulette wheel and a pinball machine," combining elements of roller derby, hockey, football, motocross, and judo. Teams were set at ten players: three motorcycle bikers, five skaters, two fielders. The ball was a heavy steel-rubber composite; the rink, a banked oval.

The actual rink was built at the Rudi-Sedlmayer-Halle (now BMW Park) in Munich, the 12,000-seat arena that had hosted basketball at the 1972 Summer Olympics. The track itself was designed by Herbert Schürmann, who had designed the cycling tracks for the 1972 Munich Games. The banked curves rose to thirteen feet — a fact the cast did not learn until they arrived. See The Munich Olympiahalle.

A four-month boot camp in California

James Caan, John Beck, and the supporting Houston-team cast attended a four-month rollerball boot camp in California while the arena was being built in Munich. They trained seven days a week — skating, motorcycle work, drilling on the game's rules with stunt coordinator Max Kleven. Beck was the only one of the principals who could skate before training; he had been a competitive roller skater as a teenager. (remind)

The California training arena was flat. When the production moved to Munich, the actual banked track produced a different physics entirely. "We'd just fall downhill," Caan recalled. (yahoo/telegraph)

A perilous shoot

Jewison was, in his own words, "terrified that I was going to kill somebody." Injuries through the shoot were extensive. One stunt performer was hospitalized mid-shoot. A second cast member spent six months recovering from a training accident before the Munich production. Caan came out of the shoot with shoulder and rib injuries; he said later he was "luckier than most." Stunt performer Roy Scammell summarized the shoot's strange combination of danger and appeal: "Naturally, I don't want to die, but take that out of it and it's a terrific game." (yahoo/telegraph)

Rollerball was the first major Hollywood production to give individual screen credit to its stunt performers. Mark Rocco, an English professional wrestler who performed stunts on the film, subsequently adopted "Rollerball" as his ring name. (wikipedia)

"I worked with Norman Jewison on Rollerball. The problem was the huge sets with not many lights. There's an excitement in doing action films. I probably enjoy them on a sort of Boy Scout level." — Douglas Slocombe, British Entertainment History Project (cinematographer; quotes are from the same interview)

Locations beyond Munich

The non-arena sequences ranged across Europe. The BMW Headquarters in Munich (newly built in 1972 by Karl Schwanzer) doubled as Houston Energy Corporation headquarters. The Palace of Nations in Geneva doubled for Zero and the world archive. Fawley Power Station near Southampton, England — the great brick oil-fired power station then operated by the CEGB — provided industrial exteriors. The remainder of the picture was shot at Pinewood Studios outside London. Jonathan's East Texas ranch was built on a Pinewood backlot.

Music and post-production

André Previn was hired to assemble and conduct the score with the London Symphony Orchestra. The film's main musical decisions — Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor over the opening, Albinoni/Giazotto's Adagio in G minor during corporate-executive scenes, Shostakovich during Geneva — were Previn's selections. Simon Preston performed the Bach on a pipe organ for the recording. Previn added three short original cues. See André Previn (Rollerball) and Bach and Albinoni — Classical Music as Corporate Frame.

The picture was edited by Antony Gibbs (Tom Jones, Petulia, Walkabout), who had worked with Jewison on Jesus Christ Superstar. The final cut ran 129 minutes; it was released in some theatres in 70mm with a 2:1 aspect ratio.

Release and its strange afterlife

Rollerball opened June 25, 1975. It grossed about $30 million worldwide on its $5–6 million budget — a clear commercial success. The reviews were mixed; the cultural reaction was the part that startled Jewison. Within months of release, promoters approached him asking for "rights to the game" for real leagues. Jewison was "outraged." "The entire point of the movie was to show the sickness and insanity of contact sports and their allure." (wikipedia)

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

A real American Roller Derby revival followed, and the 2002 John McTiernan remake — universally panned — followed twenty-seven years later. The 1975 film remains the sole canonical version.