Norman Jewison, Mr. Lucky

EMBEDDED in the sardonic title of Norman Jewison’s memoir is the widespread belief that Hollywood’s studio system is anathema to art. There is, however, at least a double-entendre to the Canadian director’s claim that “This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me.” To revisit such diverse offerings as “The Cincinnati Kid,” “In the Heat of the Night,” “The Thomas Crown Affair” and “Moonstruck” is to realize not only how well these films have survived the passing decades but also that, time and again, he got to have his art and his financial success too.

One hardly thinks of Jewison in the same cinematic breath as Orson Welles, filmdom’s sacrificial lamb to artistic goals, or Stanley Kubrick, whose artistry may have compromised his commercial viability. But the 79-year-old director deplores today’s “dumbed-down Hollywood movies” that are “made to appeal to eight- to twelve-year-old males and their adult equivalents: guys who have chosen not to grow up.” He also emphasizes his commitment to serious projects: “Racism and injustice are two themes I have come back to, again and again, in my films.”

Although Jewison says the book isn’t an autobiography -- “it’s mostly about my work, my experiences as a filmmaker” -- he includes enough details to convey a well-rounded portrait of his life and particularly of his youth. Born in 1927, he grew up during the Depression in a “tough” and “politically left” working-class section of Toronto. The salt-of-the-earth values instilled in him clearly influenced many of the stories he would later tell on the big screen.

The director of such films as “A Soldier’s Story” and “The Hurricane” writes of first encountering segregation in Tennessee as an 18-year-old hitchhiker. He later graduated from the University of Toronto and joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. when it “stumbled onto the airwaves” in 1952. He worked on 300 shows over five years before heading south of the border.

Jewison next supervised many CBS TV specials. He’s especially “proud” that more than 20 of the network’s Southern affiliates refused to broadcast Harry Belafonte’s first show. It was Judy Garland’s TV special -- with guest stars Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin -- that prompted Tony Curtis to invite Jewison to direct his film “40 Pounds of Trouble.” “Okay, so he may have been looking for a young TV director he could get cheap,” he writes in his typically straightforward manner, “but I was happy to be asked.”

Jewison can be shrewd and candid in assessing his work. He bemoans some of the “studio comedies” he made under a seven-picture contract with Universal Studios at the start of his film career. He fell into a “horrendous funk” in the fall of 1964 after the failure of his fourth picture for the studio, “The Art of Love.” “Here I was, not just still directing light studio comedies but directing a light studio comedy that nobody laughed at.” He wanted to make films “with meaning and conflict and substance,” but Universal had categorized him as a comedy director and “that was that.”

Jewison tenaciously defends some of his movies that didn’t do well with critics or the public. He acknowledges that “Gaily, Gaily” “bombed,” for instance, but the director calls the 1969 film, starring Beau Bridges, Melina Mercouri, George Kennedy and Hume Cronyn, “a tremendous historical piece.” And not only was “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1973) “the most inventive and visually interesting” of all his films, but he also calls it “the first rock video before MTV.”

Jewison has what might be considered an inflated view of the importance of some of his films -- “Fiddler on the Roof,” “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming” and “Rollerball” -- but his overuse of superlatives is a bigger stumbling block: Denzel Washington “gave the performance of his life” in “The Hurricane,” Meg Tilly played the title role in “Agnes of God” “more convincingly than anyone else could have done,” and “In Country” was Bruce Willis’ “finest bit of acting.”

The memoir is full of anecdotes, gossip and canny insights about those with whom Jewison has worked. It’s intriguing to learn that he got to direct “The Cincinnati Kid” (1965) -- the Steve McQueen film he says made him “feel like I had finally become a filmmaker” -- only because Sam Peckinpah, who was “known in the business as a hard drinker and a loose cannon,” had been fired from the project. It’s also a revelation that he wanted Sean Connery for the title role in “The Thomas Crown Affair” and that McQueen had to petition for that part. And the director had George C. Scott in mind as the gum-chewing police chief in “In the Heat of the Night” -- the 1967 role that earned Rod Steiger an Oscar for best actor.

Jewison doesn’t disguise his resentment at having lost three best director Oscars. Nominated for “In the Heat of the Night,” he sums up losing to Mike Nichols for “The Graduate” with, “unlike me, he was an American.” But he went on to win the Irving Thalberg award three decades later. “Never mind the gross, Top Ten or Bottom Ten,” he advised in his 1999 acceptance speech, “just tell stories that move us to laughter and tears.” He has done just that, as often as not.

David Kaufman, a New York theater critic and author of “Ridiculous! The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam,” is at work on a biography of Doris Day.