Norman Jewison: A Director's Life by Ira Wells

Author:Ira Wells [Wells, Ira]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Performing Arts, Film, History & Criticism, Television, Direction & Production
ISBN: 9781989555385
Google: V2fAzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Sutherland House Incorporated
Published: 2021-05-18T23:19:03.845953+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Super Double Dynamite

Love and a Couple

Tons of Peace

JEWISON SOON SETTLED INTO THE RHYTHMS of English life. It must have felt comforting, for an Anglo-Canadian of Jewison’s generation who had grown up singing “God Save the King” each morning before school, to be surrounded by the familiar symbols and ritual. “Norman really belonged in Putney Heath,” said his friend Gary Smith, who met Jewison on the CBS Hit Parade in 1958. “He was a mayor of Putney Heath. He loved going out with his dog in that tall grass and running around. He loved that period of his life.” Smith remembers the mouthwatering omelets that were Norman’s breakfast specialty.1 The family also spent time outside the city (“living as the local Squire,” Jewison said) near Henley-on-Thames, northeast of Reading. “It’s beautiful in the country and the children are running around and I am gardening like mad. Love it!!” he wrote to his friend Chiz Schultz. “This is truly a civil country so far.”2

Jewison’s praise of England as “civil” hints at what perturbed him about his American life. Friends said that Norman and Dixie worried about their kids growing up in Los Angeles. As their friend Henry Mancini explained, “the Californian environment tends to… I don’t know. It has an effect. It has a laidback effect. It’s not like growing up on the streets of New York or anything like that. It’s a little detached from the real world.” Mancini, along with all of Norman’s friends, felt the Jewison kids had turned out to be remarkably well-adjusted—which he attributed to “having the discipline laid on them” during their time in England.3

For her part, Jennifer Jewison doesn’t remember those years as draconian. Her father wasn’t uptight about boys or drugs or other typical sources of parental angst. “I mean, he knows that we all smoke pot—he smokes pot. He can’t really say much about it because we know he does it, you know, I mean I’ve found pot in his room.”

Soon after Fiddler wrapped, Jewison left for a couple of weeks to Klosters, Switzerland, where he could ski “out all my hostilities and fatigue and depression and feel almost whole again.” He often bottomed-out after finishing a film, and Fiddler had been particularly arduous. “After all the delays,” he wrote to Ashby, alluding to his standoff with the studio, “and the return to Yugoslavia, I still missed the fucking snow. It had melted five days before we returned and got nothing but bright sunshine so I had to scramble around and wait for clouds and so on trying to get as bleak a feeling as possible. I must say I’m glad it is over. After seven continuous months I was beginning to feel my age. It really has been a brute of a film to shoot.”

Jewison’s move to the UK had necessitated a new logistical approach to film production. Fiddler would provide the template for future projects. He would avoid British studios, which he found “too slow, hampered as they are by tradition, management-union hostility, reluctance to work past the hour and tea breaks.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.