Norman Jewison
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Norman Jewison, the versatile filmmaker who could direct a racial drama (In the Heat of the Night), a stylish thriller (The Thomas Crown Affair), a musical (Fiddler on the Roof) or a romantic comedy (Moonstruck) with the best of them, managed to die. He was 97.
Jewison died Saturday at home – his family would not say exactly where – publicist Jeff Sanderson announced.
Jewison was nominated for an Academy Award seven times and received the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences in 1999.
The greatest film director in Canadian history is known for his ability to elicit great performances from his actors – twelve of his actors have been nominated for Oscars, while five of his features have made it into the Best Picture category. He often used conventional genre stories about social injustice.
It's unlikely that he started out directing musical specials on television.
Jewison received Best Director and Best Picture nominations for Fiddler on the Roof (1971) and Moonstruck (1987); received another nomination for directing “In the Heat of the Night” (1967), a Best Picture winner; and added two more for the production of the zany Red Scare comedy “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming” (1966) and “A Soldier's Story” (1984).
On leave from the Royal Canadian Navy, Jewison, then 18, began hitchhiking in Chicago and eventually made his way to Memphis, Tennessee, where he jumped on a bus on a hot day. As the naive Toronto native walked to a seat in the back next to an open window, the bus started and then stopped, he recalled in a 2011 interview with NPR.
“The bus driver looked at me,” he said. “He said, 'Can't you read the sign?' And on a wire in the middle of the bus hung a small metal sign that said, “Colored people in the back.”
“And I turned around and saw two or three black citizens sitting around me and… a couple of white people sitting at the top of the bus. And I didn't know what to do, I was just embarrassed. So I just got off the bus and he left me there. I stood in the hot sun and thought about what I had just been through. That this was my first experience with racial prejudice. And it really stuck with me.”
Years later, Jewison followed the advice of Robert F. Kennedy, who thought America was ready for a film about racial injustice, and took on “In the Heat of the Night,” which starred Sidney Poitier as a black Philadelphia detective and Rod Steiger as a racist The main roles were played by the police chief. Both must work together to solve a murder in a southern city.
Four days before the 1968 Academy Awards, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and the Academy Awards were postponed for two days. Jewison attended King's funeral, and although he lost in the directing race to The Graduate's Mike Nichols, “In the Heat of the Night” won five statuettes.
Racism also played a central role in two other Jewison films: the war film “A Soldier's Story” and “The Hurricane” (1999), the latter starring Denzel Washington as Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the real-life boxer wrongly convicted of murder was imprisoned.
But Jewison also had a flair for comedy, as seen in “Moonstruck,” based on the play by John Patrick Shanley and starring Best Actress Cher. The film “Moonstruck,” which focused on an Italian-American family in Brooklyn, was a box office and critical success.
Jewison was also behind such diverse films as Send Me No Flowers (1964), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), Rollerball (1975), FIST (1978), … And Justice for All (1979) and Agnes of God (1985) and Other People's Money (1991).
Norman Frederick Jewison was born July 21, 1926 in Toronto, where his parents ran a general store/post office. He developed an interest in the arts at an early age, studying piano and music theory at the Royal Conservatory and appearing in shows and musical comedies in high school as a stage director and actor.
After graduating, Jewison made his professional debut in a minstrel show, which he also directed and co-wrote. He then served in the Canadian Navy during World War II. Back home, he graduated from Victoria College, University of Toronto in 1949 with a BA in general arts.
Jewison worked as a taxi driver in Toronto and occasionally appeared as a radio actor for the CBC. In 1950 he moved to London for a two-year work-study period at the BBC.
The CBC called him back to work in the new medium of television, and Jewison wrote, directed and produced some of his country's most popular shows and specials. He hired Reuben Shipp, a Montreal writer who had been deported from the United States after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, to work on the variety show The Barris Beat.
In 1950, CBS invited Jewison to New York to update the venerable TV musical Your Hit Parade. After booking African-American singer Tommy Edwards, who had a hit with “It's All in the Game,” on the show, he was scheduled to meet on Madison Avenue with a representative from Lucky Strike Cigarettes, the show's South Carolina branch , called. resident sponsor.
“We have been doing Your Hit Parade on radio and television for many years,” the manager told Jewison in an incident he recalled in his 2004 autobiography, “This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me.” “We had Sinatra, rock 'n' roll and soft stuff, but we never had a black guy, and, young fella, we're not starting now.”
After a disgruntled Jewison threatened to take this story to the newspapers, Lucky Strike relented and Edwards appeared on the show as planned. His integrity was evident and big names wanted to work with him.
Jewison directed a 1960 special starring the red-hot Harry Belafonte, the first on American television to feature a black actor; led comeback star Judy Garland in a 1961 TV special and episodes of her CBS variety show; directed “The Million Dollar Incident,” a comedy in which Jackie Gleason was kidnapped and held for ransom; and made “The Broadway of Lerner and Loewe,” with performances by Julie Andrews and Maurice Chevalier.
At the recommendation of Tony Curtis, Jewison traveled to LA and was hired to direct Universal Pictures' 40 Pounds of Trouble (1962), which starred Curtis, Suzanne Pleshette and Phil Silvers in one of the first films shot at Disneyland .
He received a contract from the studio and went on to direct the light comedies The Thrill of It All (1963), starring Doris Day and James Garner; “Send Me No Flowers” with Day and Rock Hudson; and The Art of Love (1965) with Garner, Elke Sommer and Angie Dickinson.
When producer Martin Ransohoff fired The Cincinnati Kid director Sam Peckinpah, Jewison was put in charge of the Steve McQueen-Edward G. Robinson drama. called his work “daring, imaginative and confident” and he was a success.
He produced (and directed) his first film, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming!, a wild parody of Russian paranoia starring Alan Arkin and Carl Reiner (of Thrill of It All and Art of Love). had written).
After “In the Heat of the Night,” Jewison produced and directed the stylishly erotic film “The Thomas Crown Affair,” starring McQueen and Faye Dunaway; produced The Landlord (1970), a racist drama series directed by his former film editor Hal Ashby; and produced and directed Gaily, Gaily with Landlord star Beau Bridges.
He had met Kennedy at a hospital in Sun Valley, Idaho, when their sons were injured in a ski race, and he was scheduled to meet with the presidential candidate the night he was assassinated in Los Angeles.
“I was very disillusioned,” Jewison said in a 2011 interview with THR's Kevin Cassidy. “JFK was assassinated, Bobby was assassinated, I was at Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral in Atlanta. It was 1970, so I packed up everyone in LA and went to England.”
Jewison spent the next seven years in Europe, making films such as the top-grossing musical “Fiddler on the Roof,” shot on location in Yugoslavia and at London's Pinewood Studios, and “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Billy Two Hats” with Gregory Peck starring (1974). both were filmed in Israel.
Jewison then directed and produced the violent action film “Rollerball” by James Caan, the legal thriller “And Justice for All” by Al Pacino and the charming romantic comedy “Best Friends” (1982) starring Burt Reynolds and Goldie Hawn.
Jewison continued to explore weighty themes, with the plot of Agnes of God, starring Jane Fonda and Anne Bancroft, focusing on the battle between logic and the Catholic Church. His last film was the Nazi thriller The Statement (2003), starring Michael Caine.
Jewison served as producer of the 1981 Academy Awards, which were postponed after the shooting of President Reagan, and received an Emmy nomination in 2002 for directing the HBO television film “Dinner With Friends.”
Jewison returned to Toronto in 1978 and lived on a 240-acre farm in Ontario. For years he hosted a gala picnic at the Toronto International Film Festival.
In 1982, Jewison was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, the country's highest civilian honor, and then set out to found the Canadian equivalent of the American Film Institute.
“I got a call to visit the AFI in Beverly Hills,” Jewison told THR. “So I went up there and there was a group of young filmmakers sitting on the floor and there was John Ford with a bottle of whiskey. And he answers all your questions. I was just blown away. It was very exciting. So I thought, 'Man, if I could do something like this in Canada, that would be great.'”
The result was the Canadian Film Centre, founded in Toronto in 1988.
Survivors include his second wife, Lynne St. David; his children Kevin (and his wife Suzanne), Michael (Anita) and Jenny (David); and his grandchildren Ella, Megan, Alexandra, Sam and Henry. Celebrations of his life will take place in Los Angeles and Toronto.
Jewison said in his Thalberg acceptance speech:
“I really regret winning this prize because it cannot be compared to the Nobel Prize or the Pulitzer Prize. I mean, there is no money associated with the Thalberg Prize. If so, then I would share it with the Canadian Film Center and the AFI, where the next generation of filmmakers are preparing to entertain the world in the new millennium.
“And my parting thought to all young filmmakers is: just find some good stories. Not to mention gross, top 10, bottom 10, rating, demographic. Do you know something? The highest-grossing film is not necessarily the best film.”