The Munich Olympiahalle Rollerball
The Houston arena in Rollerball is the Rudi-Sedlmayer-Halle in Munich — the 12,000-seat basketball arena built for the 1972 Summer Olympics, now known as BMW Park. The arena's selection, the track Herbert Schürmann built inside it, and the corporate-modernist Munich locations the production used (the new BMW Headquarters; the Olympic Village's design vocabulary) make Munich a more-than-incidental setting for the film. Rollerball was, by accident and design, a film about the corporate-modernist Munich of the early-to-mid 1970s.
Why Munich
Three reasons:
The 1972 Olympics infrastructure. The Rudi-Sedlmayer-Halle, built by architect Erwin Schleich for the Munich Olympic basketball tournament, was a brand-new, large, near-circular arena available for rental in 1974 — the kind of venue an American or British production could not have built from scratch on the available budget. The arena's near-circular profile was, for Jewison's purposes, ideal: it allowed a banked oval track to be built inside it without the dead corners that a rectangular sports arena would impose.
Herbert Schürmann's availability. Schürmann had designed the cycling tracks for the 1972 Munich Games — the work that established him as one of the period's most-respected sports-architecture engineers. Schürmann's continued availability in Munich in 1974 meant the production could hire the world's pre-eminent banked-track designer to build the Rollerball rink. Schürmann's design for the rink — a banked oval with thirteen-foot walls at the curves — became the visual anchor of the film. (wikipedia)
The BMW Headquarters as corporate-set. The new BMW Headquarters in Munich, designed by Karl Schwanzer and completed in 1972, was a brand-new piece of corporate-modernist architecture — four cylindrical towers in the shape of a four-cylinder engine, the so-called "Vierzylinder", and the museum's curved bowl. The production used the BMW Headquarters and Museum complex as Houston Energy Corporation headquarters and the Executive Directorate teleconference space. The architecture is one of the most-immediately-recognizable pieces of corporate-modernist building in postwar Europe; Jewison's production borrowed it almost without modification.
What Munich looked like in 1974
Munich in 1974 was a city in the cultural-architectural aftermath of the 1972 Olympics. The Olympic Park, the Olympic Village, the Olympic Stadium with its Frei Otto tensile-fabric roof, the Olympiahalle, and the BMW corporate complex along the Olympic Park's northern edge were all newly built or newly visible. The 1972 Olympics had been Germany's first major international event since World War II; the architecture of the Olympic complex was deliberately light, transparent, post-fascist — the explicit opposite of the Albert Speer monumentalism of Hitler's Berlin Olympics in 1936.
The 1972 Olympics had also been the site of the Black September massacre. On September 5, 1972, eight Palestinian terrorists took eleven Israeli athletes hostage in the Olympic Village; all eleven athletes, five terrorists, and one German police officer were killed in the failed rescue operation at the Fürstenfeldbruck air base. The Munich Olympics ended with a memorial service and the IOC's controversial decision that "the Games must go on."
When Jewison's production arrived in Munich in 1974, the Olympic infrastructure was still under the shadow of the massacre. The arena Jewison chose for the Houston rink was less than two miles from the Olympic Village. The historical resonance — a near-future blood-sport staged for global broadcast, in the venue of the postwar Olympics that had been shattered by terrorist violence broadcast globally — is part of the film's setting whether or not Jewison or Harrison intended it.
What the picture shot in Munich
The Munich shoot covered roughly four months of the production schedule. The principal Munich locations:
- Rudi-Sedlmayer-Halle — all arena sequences (Madrid, Tokyo, MSG)
- BMW Headquarters (Vierzylinder) — Houston Energy Corporation headquarters; the Executive Directorate teleconference room
- BMW Museum — Bartholomew's office vestibules
- Munich Olympic Village and Park — establishing shots of the corporate-society's exterior
The corporate-modernist Munich of 1974 is the corporate-society visual vocabulary of the film. Jewison and John Box did not have to design the corporate-future setting from scratch; they used the BMW Headquarters and let it stand in for the future.
"The BMW corporate headquarters in Munich is the film's most-important location after the arena itself. The four cylindrical towers are the corporate-society's visible signature. The picture uses the architecture without modification — the corporate-future of Rollerball is the corporate-present of post-1972 Munich." — Movie-Locations, Rollerball (1975)
What the picture did not shoot in Munich
The non-arena, non-BMW sequences ranged across Europe. The Geneva archive sequence was filmed at the Palace of Nations in Geneva. The corporate industrial-exterior sequences used Fawley Power Station near Southampton, England. Jonathan's East Texas ranch was built on a Pinewood Studios backlot outside London. The Multivision recording-session set was a Pinewood interior.
The Munich shoot is therefore principally the arena and the corporate-headquarters work. Everything else was assembled around it.
The arena after Rollerball
The Rudi-Sedlmayer-Halle continued to host basketball and concerts through the late twentieth century. It was extensively renovated in the 2010s and renamed BMW Park (the BMW Group's naming-rights sponsorship sealed the long association between the venue and the company whose corporate-architecture was used as Houston Energy headquarters). The arena still seats roughly 12,500 and is the home of FC Bayern Munich basketball.
The Schürmann banked track was dismantled at the end of the production. There is no surviving Rollerball-spec banked oval anywhere in the world.