William Harrison Rollerball

William Neal Harrison (1933–2013) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter. He spent forty-nine years on the English faculty of the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he founded one of the earliest MFA Programs in Creative Writing in the South. He is best known internationally for the Esquire short story "Roller Ball Murder" (September 1973) and his screenplay for the 1975 Norman Jewison film adaptation.

From Dallas to Fayetteville

Harrison was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1933 and educated at Texas Christian University and the University of Iowa. He joined the University of Arkansas English department in 1964 and almost immediately began organizing a graduate writing program; the MFA he established became one of the most-respected in the region. He taught fiction-writing there for the next forty-nine years.

"He came to Arkansas in 1964 as a young writer and never left. He turned the English department into a place where serious fiction could be written and taught in the South — at a time when very few institutions in the region had the appetite for that." — University of Arkansas, obituary (2013)

"Roller Ball Murder"

The short story that became Rollerball was published in Esquire in September 1973. Harrison later said the spark for the story was a college basketball game he had watched — when a fight broke out on the court the crowd went wild, the home team came back energized to win, and Harrison began to think about how violent televised sports might become.

The story is brutally compact — about 7,000 words — and is set inside the rink almost exclusively. The corporate-society backstory that drives the 1975 film (the executive directorate, the white office, the Geneva library, the wife taken for an executive) is largely invented for the screenplay. The story itself is the carnage of the sport in first-person voice and the players' weariness with it. See William Harrison's "Roller Ball Murder".

By Harrison's own account, the story was "a little experimental" — he wrote it after the basketball brawl and Esquire picked it up. (encyclopedia of arkansas, remind)

The screenplay

Harrison and Norman Jewison shared the same agent in 1973; Jewison bought the story almost immediately and asked Harrison to write the screenplay. Harrison co-wrote the script with Jewison's input, expanding the carnage of the original into the full corporate-society architecture the film inhabits — Bartholomew, the Executive Directorate, Ella, the Geneva library, the rule escalations. The screenplay is Harrison's only major produced screen work; he wrote primarily for the page.

"Rollerball started as 7,000 words in Esquire about men in a stadium killing each other for the entertainment of a global audience. By the time it was a movie, it was an essay on corporate replacement of the nation-state. The story was the seed. Jewison and Harrison grew the rest of it in the screenplay." — The Hollywood Reporter, Harrison obituary (2013)

After Rollerball

Harrison's novels include The Theologian (1965), Lessons in Paradise (1971), Africana (1977, basis for the 1981 film The Mountains of the Moon about Burton and Speke's African expeditions), Savannah Blue (1981), and Three Hunters (1989). His story collection Roller Ball Murder and Other Stories (1974) preserves the original story alongside other dystopian and Africa-set fiction. He received the Columbia School of Journalism Prize in Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

He died October 22, 2013, of renal failure at his home in Fayetteville, a week shy of his eightieth birthday.

"He kept teaching almost until the end. He had an MFA workshop the spring before he died. The University of Arkansas creative-writing program exists because he made it exist." — Arkansas Times, obituary (2013)