William Harrison's "Roller Ball Murder" Rollerball

"Roller Ball Murder" is the William Harrison short story that became the 1975 film. It was published in the September 1973 issue of Esquire and ran to roughly 7,000 words. Harrison later collected it in Roller Ball Murder and Other Stories (William Morrow, 1974). The story is the seed; the corporate-society architecture that gives the film its structure was largely invented in the screenplay.

A fight at a basketball game

Harrison wrote "Roller Ball Murder" after watching a fight break out at a University of Arkansas basketball game in Fayetteville. By his account, the fight energized the home team, the home crowd loved it, the home team came back to win, and Harrison left the gymnasium thinking about "how violent future sports might become." The story was, in his words, "a little experimental" — a thought-experiment about the carnage threshold at which a sport stops being sport. He wrote a first draft in three weeks and sent it to Esquire; the magazine took it almost immediately. (encyclopedia of arkansas, remind magazine)

What the story is and is not

The story is set inside the rink almost entirely. The narrator is Jonathan E. (the same character name the film uses). The sport — "Roller Ball Murder," the official name in the story; "Rollerball" in the film — is a fusion of roller derby, motorcycle racing, and gladiatorial combat. The teams skate on a banked oval; the ball is heavy steel; the kills are graphic and frequent.

What the story is: a first-person voice over the carnage. The narrator is matter-of-fact about the cost of the sport. Teammates die routinely; the narrator catalogs the kills. The voice is interior and weary — a player who has been at it long enough to know what the body looks like at the end.

What the story is not: a corporate-society architecture. The corporations are mentioned only in passing. There is no Bartholomew, no white office, no Executive Directorate, no Geneva archive, no wife taken for an executive, no Multivision recording session. The escalation of rules — limited subs, no penalties, no time limit — is in the story in compressed form, but it is not the structural spine.

The Harrison original is closer in tone and structure to the 1970s short stories Harlan Ellison was writing in Dangerous Visions anthologies, or to the Robert Sheckley short fiction of the same period (The Prize of Peril, 1958, a closely related precedent). The film is a much larger architectural intervention.

"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)

What the screenplay added

Harrison co-wrote the screenplay with Jewison's input. The principal additions:

• Mr. Bartholomew — the Houston Energy Executive. There is no Bartholomew in the story.
• The Executive Directorate — the anonymous corporate body above the executives. Not in the story.
• Ella — Jonathan's former wife, taken by an executive. Not in the story.
• The white-office summons — Bartholomew's order to retire. Not in the story.
• The Multivision broadcast — the worldwide TV special and the autocue refusal. Not in the story.
• The Geneva Library and Zero — the Midpoint. Not in the story.
• The ranch and the East Texas piney-woods setting — the story is geographically vague; the film's specific Texan ranch is invented.
• Moonpie's hospital pod surrounded by bluebonnets — the Falling Action visit. Not in the story.

The carnage in the rink, by contrast, is largely Harrison's original — the no-penalties Tokyo semifinal, the death-blow to the head, the no-time-limit final.

Why Jewison chose the story

Jewison and Harrison shared the same literary agent in 1973. Jewison had been thinking about a violent-sports satire since seeing the Boston-Philadelphia hockey fight he later described — "blood on the ice and 16,000 people were standing up screaming." When Harrison's story appeared in Esquire that September, it gave Jewison the seed he had been waiting for. Jewison bought the screen rights almost immediately and hired Harrison to expand the carnage into a feature-length political architecture. (wikipedia)

The story in retrospect

"Roller Ball Murder" now exists almost entirely as the prequel to the film. The story is in print in Harrison's collected stories and is occasionally anthologized in 1970s science-fiction collections. It has been audio-recorded and posted online. (Internet Archive)

The film and the story together demonstrate the standard pattern of high-impact 1970s science-fiction adaptation: a sharp short story or novella that diagnoses a single anxiety, expanded for the screen into a full social architecture. Soylent Green (1973) is an expansion of Harry Harrison's 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room!; Logan's Run (1976) expands a 1967 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. Rollerball is the most-dramatic case of the pattern. The story is 7,000 words; the film is a full corporate-society world.