Norman Jewison, who has become one of Hollywood’s most eclectic directors, has made all kinds of films, epic and intimate, farcical and melodramatic. It brought out the distinctive performances of actors such as Sidney Poitier in “Knight” and Cher in “Moonstruck.” ” He passed away on January 20th at the age of 97.
Spokesman Jeff Sanderson confirmed the death but provided no further information.
During his 40-year career as a photographer, the Canadian-born Jewison has moved in and out of a variety of genres, shooting actors such as Steve McQueen, Rod Steiger, Chaim Topol, Denzel Washington and Olympia Dukakis. He has directed hit musical films, romantic comedies, and crime dramas. He frequently investigated social issues.
He received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director and won the Best Picture Oscar for the racing and police drama In the Heat of the Night (1967). Fiddler on the Roof (1971), based on Sholem Aleichem’s Broadway musical about Jewish milkman Tevye. Moonstruck (1987), a romantic comedy about an Italian-American Brooklynite, grossed $80 million at the box office.
Mr. Jewison became what film critic David Thomson called “the Abu of directors”, directing films such as the Cold War satire “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming” (1966) and the steamy heist movie. He has produced a variety of films, including “The Thomas Crown Affair.” (1968) and the post-Vietnam War drama In Country (1989). He also produced many of his own films and received his four Best Picture Oscar nominations over a three-decade period.
Mr. Jewison, cropped, bespectacled and wearing the ubiquitous baseball cap, came to Hollywood in the early 1960s and directed live television specials before learning from masters such as William Wyler and Alfred Hitchcock.
He lived through the director-driven New Hollywood of the 1970s, advising editor and filmmaker Hal Ashby that “the studio is the enemy of the artist.” He lamented the “monotony” of 1980s genre films and sequels. And he worked on cable television long enough until he witnessed the rise of network and streaming services, which provided a new outlet for the thematically rich films he liked and wanted to make.
Frustrated by the action-packed scripts that frequently arrived on his desk, he frequently turned to playwrights for material. Examples include “A Soldier’s Story” (1984), based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Charles Fuller about a black military lawyer. (Howard E. Rollins Jr.) investigates the murder of a black noncommissioned officer at a segregated Army base during World War II.
He then produced Agnes of God (1985), about a psychiatrist (Jane Fonda) who investigates the death of a newborn in a convent, and Agnes of God (1985), about a reckless corporate raider (Danny de Vito). “Other People’s Money” (1991) was made into a theatrical film. .
Almost all of his films examined issues of race, class, and injustice, sometimes in a roundabout way. “I don’t make social statements with my pictures, but I feel that a film should be about something. That it has a reason to exist,” he said in New York in 1978.・Told the Times. There is a problem. ”
“Rollerball” (1975), in which James Caan played the star of an ultra-violent sport sponsored by big business, was inspired by his fear of a world ruled by iron-fisted conglomerates. The Fist (1978), in which Sylvester Stallone played a union leader in the mold of Jimmy Hoffa, was notable for his sense that “workers shouldn’t have as much to say about their own fate.” It was done. And Justice for All (1979), starring Al Pacino as an idealistic lawyer, was a dark comedy about corruption within the justice system.
Few of his films were as successful as Moonstruck, in which he played a widowed bookkeeper who falls in love with her fiancée’s brother (Nicolas Cage). The film, written by Academy Award-winning playwright John Patrick Shanley, is a humorous celebration of an Italian-American family, and Dukakis, who played Cher and her mother, won Oscars for their performances.
“He really likes actors,” Shanley told the Times in 2011. “So what you see in his photographs is a kind of celebration of acting, rather than actors as paint for a director’s vision.”
Although Mr. Jewison never won the highly competitive Academy Award, he received the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1999 and the Directors Guild of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010.
Among critics, he is perhaps best known for his role in the landmark civil rights era film In the Heat of the Night, which premiered in the wake of race riots during the long hot summer of 1967. It was well known.
In the film, Poitier plays Virgil Tibbs, a black homicide detective from Philadelphia who is asked to help a white local police chief (Steiger) solve a murder in a small Mississippi town. The scene in which Poitier is slapped by a racist white landowner and then retaliates with a slap of his own elicited various gasps and cheers from the audience.
Mr Jewison explained to the Guardian that the scene was not improvised as has been suggested. “I kept telling Poitier that Tibbs was a sophisticated detective who wasn’t used to being pushed around. I showed him how to slap him. ‘Don’t hit him in the ear,’ I said. said. “I really want to crack the greasy area on his cheeks.” I told him to practice on me. A black man has never slapped a white man in an American movie. We broke that taboo. ”
Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote that Mr. Jewison had made “a film that looks and sounds real and has a heartbeat of truth,” but some viewers were less impressed. Author James Baldwin, among other African American critics, criticized the film’s self-congratulatory vision of racial reconciliation and its “insane” depiction of southern black men.
Mr. Jewison later called “In the Heat of the Night” the first of a personal trilogy about race. The film also includes “A Soldier’s Day,” in which Washington plays Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a real-life boxer who was wrongly imprisoned for murder and who served as the inspiration for a Bob Dylan song used on the soundtrack. It also included “Story” and “The Hurricane” (1999).
In an interview, Jewison traced his interest in race relations in the United States to his first visit to the United States, hitchhiking across the South in the 1940s, and was shocked to discover the apartheid system of racial discrimination. He said he received it.
As a boy in Toronto, he was exposed to prejudice and was bullied by classmates who assumed he was Jewish because of his last name. In fact, his family was Methodist and Anglican, but he said United Artists executives had the same mistaken impression when they offered him “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Norman Frederick Jewison was born on July 21, 1926 in Toronto. His parents ran a general store and post office below their apartment. In his 2004 memoir, “This Terrible Job Was Good for Me,” he wrote that he spent most of his childhood Saturdays at the movie theater, where he would pay 10 cents to watch two full-length features, and then He recalls re-enacting the film for a friend.
Mr. Jewison served in the Royal Canadian Navy during World War II and entered the nascent field of television production after graduating from the University of Toronto in 1949. He worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, then in the late 1950s he was hired by CBS and moved to New York, where he appeared on the music show “Your Hit Parade” as well as starring Judy Garland, Andy Williams and an Emmy Award winner. He directed variety shows and music specials. Jackie Gleason and Harry Belafonte.
He made his film debut in the Tony Curtis comedy 40 Pounds of Trouble (1962) and directed the play The Cincinnati Kid (1965), taking over the set after director Sam Peckinpah was fired. He directed several Doris Day romances before becoming a big hit. A few days after production started.
“I was born, grew up, and almost died doing this movie,” Jewison later said, recalling his efforts to win the trust of his unstable protagonist, McQueen, who plays a Depression-era poker player. did. Mr. Jewison promised to film him in such a way that he would not lose the audience’s sympathy even if he lost an important match.
He also reversed his earlier decision to shoot in stark black and white. was Just to be clear, it’s all about the cards,” he told McQueen biographer Christopher Sandford.
“The Cincinnati Kid” was a moderate hit, allowing Mr. Jewison to direct and produce “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming,” about a Soviet submarine that runs aground in New England. The film, starring Carl Reiner as a vacationing American who encounters Russians including a polite Alan Arkin, was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Mr. Jewison capitalized on that success by shooting his next film, “In the Heat of the Night,” on location rather than on studio property. This technique was later used in films such as The Fiddler, which was shot in Yugoslavia. Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) was shot in Israel and the West Bank, and he co-wrote the screenplay.
During his nearly 10-year stay in Europe, he lived in Europe after experiencing what he described as a loss of confidence in the “American Dream” as a result of the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Robert Roberts. Both films were produced in . F. Kennedy, and the reactionary sentiments that helped President Richard M. Nixon win elections.
In 1978, Mr. Jewison settled on a farm near Toronto, where he harvested maple syrup and raised Hereford cattle when he wasn’t working on movies. He also founded what is now the Canadian Film Center to promote the country’s film industry and was made a Fellow of the Order of Canada in 1992.
In 1953 he married Margaret Ann “Dixie” Dixon, who died in 2004. Mr. Jewison later married Lynn St. David. In addition to his wife, survivors include his three children from his first marriage, Kevin Jewison, Michael Jewison, and Jenny Snyder. and five grandchildren.
One of Mr. Jewison’s last films, the theatrical version of “Dinner with Friends” (2001), was produced through the cable television network HBO rather than at a Hollywood studio. Movies like “In the Heat of the Night” and “A Soldier’s Story” are no longer made, at least not by the major studios, he said.
“They’ll say these movies have too many words, too much intelligence, too much dialogue. In order to sell them overseas, they have minimal dialogue, lots of action, and adult themes. They want limited films,” Jewison told the Times in 2001. “So many aspects of our lives have disappeared from movie screens. And now they’re on cable TV.”