Rollerball
(1975)
Dystopian
social fantasy film
Directed
by Norman Jewison
Film
magazine, July 1975
Mediascene magazine, September October 1975
Κινηματογραφικά
Director
Norman Jewison
on
his new film Rollerball
as
told to Hollis Alpert
“WHAT IS ROLLERBALL?
It is a
brutal, physical action game that was created in the early years of the 21st
Century as a vicarious outlet for the hostility and other anti-social feelings
that have no acceptable outlet for a society made comfortable and conformist.
It is a
corporate society, a world nation state, run by seven global corporations, each
dealing with a particular field: energy, food, housing, luxury, transportation,
communication. Politicians have been replaced by a skilled executive management
class. And, in this structured society we deal with one aspect, a sport, a
sport that is the most popular event seen on Multivision, the global TV network
that provides endless entertainment.”
“The idea
for the film came from an Esquire
short story written by William Harrison, who also did the screenplay for me. In
the short story the game was rather bizarre and not too well defined. For
filming purposes, we had to invent a game, and soon realized how difficult it
is to invent a game. For one thing, you've got to make rules. Our game utilized
motorbike riders and speed roller skaters; we evolved it from some of the
rougher aspects of such 20th century sports as hockey, motorbike racing, roller
derbys, boxing, and pro football. Even after we designed the game, we didn’t
know the problems of playing it until we built a special track for it.
First we
tried it out on a Munich track built for the Olympics, and did experiments
using a bike rider and a speed skater, who quickly landed in a hospital. When
he was whipped off the end of the bike he fell, and the friction was so intense
that it burned his track suit (made of the material football pants are made of)
into his skin. So we learned that the uniforms had to be made of leather, so as
to be able to withstand that friction. We ended up with a very” strange game.
The first
time we played it for an audience in Munich we brought in 2,000 people and gave
them a quick explanation of the rules. Within two minutes after the game began
those 2,006 people were up and screaming; not only that, they chose their
favorite sides.”
“James Caan
plays a skilled Rollerballer, who excels at the game to an unexpected degree,
lasting so long at it that all over the world he is fast becoming a folk hero.
He’s mean, a little hostile, and above all, has the ability to survive. He has,
in fact, survived at it without undue injury for six years, though most players
are burnt out after two years. The problem is that in that society the game was
designed to show the futility of individual accomplishment, and it was hoped that
sooner or later the game itself would take care of him. But it didn’t. So, they
decided to change a few rules…”
/ - 1.
/ - 2.
/
- 3.
The Houston Rollerball team, champions for three
years, warm up in the locker room before the big game with Madrid.
/ - 4.
Rollerball star Jonathan E. (James Caan) gazes at
his friend and fellow athlete Moonpie (John Beck); a tragic skating accident
has reduced him to a total vegetable.
/ - 5.
party sequences
/ - 6.
(φωτογραφίες
από το δημοσίευμα: Film magazine, July 1975)
Part
II.
Mediascene magazine, September October
1975
“Rollerball”,
in case you didn't know is a new film which takes its title from the brutal
physical contact sport in tomorrow's world, providing the masses with their
principal outlet for violence and hostility.
It is an
action sport, combining some of the rougher aspects of hockey, pro football,
boxing, judo, motorbike racing and roller derby, played around the year 2016
for a world-wide Multivision audience of four billion each week.
By the first
decade of the next century, when the world is sensibly managed by the six major
corporate conglomerates (Energy, Food, Housing, Transport, Luxury and
Communications), Rollerball will be the game of the people, providing oil of
the vicarious thrills of violence and inflicted pain thot will no longer exist
in a comfortable well-ordered society. Major cities, no longer burdened with
the high costs of crime, poverty and corrupt politicians, avidly support their
local Rollerball teams, playing under the colors of the major corporations with
which they are allied.
Houston,
Texas, for example, is the Energy City which sponsors the World Champion
Rollerball team, led by battle-scarred veteran, Jonathan E. (James Caan).
Rollerball has been his entire life for more than eight years and he enjoys all
of the privileges accorded to the top player of the game. Because he is
becoming an international folk hero, however, Jonathan is asked to retire by
corporation executives who feel that his stubborn independence of spirit is a
threat to their carefully controlled comfort-motivated society.
When he refuses, out of loyalty to his team,
the executives decide to let the game take care of him by eliminating enough of
the rules to change Rollerball from a rough sport into murder on roller skates.
“Rollerball”
is based upon William Harrison's original Esquire
short story. Producer / director Norman Jewison, whose most notable films have
been “Fiddler On the Roof” and “Jesus Christ Superstar”, stated, “Harrison
delivered, in slightly less than five weeks, the best first-draft screenplay
that I have ever read."
In Jewison’s opinion, “Rollerball” concerns
several pertinent aspects of contemporary life – the increasing violence and
brutality in audience sports today, as well as the diminishing threshold of
individual shock and outrage at the creeping depersonalization of life that has
accompanied the rapid development of our comfortable materialistic,
computerized and franchised society. He honestly believes that the possibility
of a vicious game like Rollerball becoming popular is far from fantasy.
“Of course, all the ingredients of an
exciting sport are present in any high-speed game with two teems, a ball and a
goal to put in. Our skaters got caught up in the competitive spirit of the play
and would have loved to go all-out against one another. But I would hate to see
Rollerball played, even with rigid rules governing fouls and body contact. It
wasn't meant to be anything more than an illustration of the theme of our
screenplay. I can't see any way it could avoid becoming the most vicious and
brutal game ever played."
Since the actual game of Rollerball was not
clearly defined in terms of rules in Harrison's impressionistic short story,
one of Jewison's biggest challenges was to create a completely new game on the
screen that could serve to illustrate the brutal, bone-crunching action needed
to amplify the game's ugly purpose.
Jewison was able to contract the services of
John Box, England's foremost production designer (“Lawrence
of Arabia”, “Dr. Zhivago”) to whom he
assigned the task of giving the game a workable, physical reality.
Understandably, Box's first challenge was to
create a futuristic yet practical arena in which Rollerball could be played.
Within weeks, he had designed a miniature model of a circular race track on
which both skaters and motorbikes could perform at high speeds.
The next step was to test the practicality of
his design concept, so he and Norman Jewison took British speed skater Peter
Hicks to Munich to try out the Olympic cycle track. They found the cycle track
much too sharply banked for roller skates, but essentially adaptable for the
game. Then they checked the Olympic Basketball Stadium, one of the five largest
circular arenas in the world, which proved to be the most feasible site for building
the Rollerball track.
In its finished form, the track
circumference measured 535 feet, approximately one-eighth of a mile. It is
built of pre-fabricated hardwood, with on 18 degree pitch from the top railing
down to the infield. The glistening, polished surface makes it possible to obtain
skating speeds as high as 40 to 45 miles per hour. Motorbikes can go even faster
without skidding or sliding in the banked turn.
Norwegian-born Max Kleven, a Hollywood
veteran of dozens of films, was chosen to act as action director to stage
"the game” for the screen.
England provided o pretroined,
pre-conditioned group of 17 skaters, all experienced players of a game called Roller Hockey, which enjoys a modest fan
following in England and several countries of Europe.
America's rough bump-and-shove game of Roller Derby added 12 tough players from
the Northern California league. Kleven found six top-flight motorbikers,
experienced on both banked hardwood and the more dangerous dirt tracks of
southern California, to ride the modified Honda 125's.
The group was rounded out by 11 hard-core
stunt men from Hollywood and England, men chosen to perform the flaming bike crashes
and high-speed pileups involving the kind of real physical danger which stunt
men undertake on a strictly business-like "pay for play" basis.
As finally plotted by Jewison, Harrison, Box
and Kleven, Rollerball is played by two ten-man teams, each consisting of three
bikers, five skaters (forwards) and two skating catchers, who wear heavy padded
mitts for trapping the steel ball in flight.
The game begins with a compressed-air cannon
firing a steel ball (approximately the size and weight of a shot-put) around
the perimeter of the track. As the ball loses momentum in its circular course
round the track, it is fielded by a catcher of either team, who passes the ball
forward to one of the foster skaters of his own team.
The skater then hitches a ride from one of
his bikers while other members of the team form a defensive shield around him.
Before the offensive team can attempt to score, it must make at least one
complete circuit of the track from behind its own goal line, regardless of
where the ball is fielded. A point is scored when a player throws the steel ball
accurately into his own magnetized goal, located high on the rim of the track.
The defensive, or opposing team tries to
stop the attacking team from scoring by any physical means— a smash from a
steel-studded glove, a body block, a well-placed kick, judo, even kung fu.
As a result, the Rollerball track becomes a
battlefield as soon as the ball is placed in play. If the offensive player
attempting to score misses his shot at the goal or drops the ball during o scramble
with an opposing player, another ball is immediately put into play by the
cannon and is fielded by whichever team is able to catch it in flight. That
team then takes its turn in attempting to score.
James Caan, who stars as the Rollerball
Champion, Jonathan E., is the most versatile young actor in the business today.
"He was my first and only choice to play the rough and tough Rollerball
star," mentioned director Jewison.
In the last three years, Caan has achieved
stardom on two fronts— motion pictures and television. On the big screen he
played the quicktempered Sonny, eldest son of Don Corleone in “The Godfather”, repeating the part later in a
cameo appearance in “The Godfather II.”
On television he demonstrated his versatility
when he played Brian Piccolo, the late pro-football star, in Brian's Song, for which he won an Emmy nomination as
best actor. Then he appeared as the sailor in Cinderella
Liberty, and the highrolling English professor in the critically
acclaimed The Gambler. "Overnight I was a
genius," says Caan. "But it was out-and-out luck."
A native of the Bronx, Caan knew that when
he graduated from Rhodes High School that he wanted to be an actor, but was
reluctant to break the news to his parents who envisioned their son in a more
stable profession.
He was accepted by the Neighborhood Playhouse,
appearing there in several ploys and in 1961 made his professional debut in the
off-Broodwoy production of La Ronde.
At 34, Caan is a rangy, muscular six-footer.
He is a frustrated athlete who is becoming more frustrated as his career takes
him into the whirl of big money stardom. "It looks like I'm going to have
to get most of my athletic enjoyment from my pictures," he laughs.
"That's certainly true of Rollerball. Physically it has been the most demanding
film I've ever made.
"Audiences are right with an actor on
the screen. They want to see and figure out for themselves what's going
on," he explains. "Today audiences don't want to be hit on the head
constantly. They're getting so sophisticated that I could be saying one thing
up there on the screen and they will know what's going on underneath.
Therefore, in order to play an athlete, I had better play as an athlete and
enjoy doing it on the screen."
But if reality appeals to Caan as an actor,
the reality of some of today's films don't. "I'm very old fashioned, I
guess. I mean. I'm not super-hippy. I like the basic things in life still. May be
that's my upbringing. When I go to the theater I want to be taken into a world
of fantasy. I want to laugh or cry or whatever. I really object to the
exploitation of sex and drugs and all the super-reality. People go to movies to
be entertained, they don't want to look through the wall and see their
neighbors.
( James Caan )
Fantasy is what “Rollerball”
is about. It has avoided futuristic cliches as bizarre furniture and flashing
lights. There are no way-out cars or ray-guns and the costumes are cut with
classic simplicity and see-through transparency. The natural sounds of the
roller game are eerie and depressing and are used in the film as the musical
score and soundtrack with music added as a counterpoint.
“Rollerball”
will not be classed or sold as science fiction. The fantasy elements are
lightly stressed as a subtle future film in a time of corporate global reach and
dehumanization.
John Houseman, at 72, is costarred as
Bartholomew, the chief executive of the Energy Corporation in Rollerball and
will probably be his last screen performance for a while. With Orson Welles, he
was co-founder of the famed Mercury Theater and with Herman Mankiewicz.
contributed to the screenplay of “Citizen Kane”.
He has produced 18 feature films such as “Lust for
Life”, “Julius Caesar” and “The Bad and the Beautiful” as well as winning an Academy
Award for his performance in “The Paper Chase”.
(John Houseman)
Maud Adams, one of New York's highest paid
fashion models plays the wife of Jonathan E. after a notable performance as one
of the Bond girls in “The Man with the Golden Gun”.
( Maud Adams )
Pamela Hensley is the corporation sexpot.
She has been seen in similiar roles in “Blazing
Saddles” and “Doc Savage”.
( Pamela Hensley )
Of notable acting status is Ralph
Richardson, who is sheer delight in his comeo role as a baffled chief
librarian of a central computer known as "Zero" in Geneva. One of the
first British stars to be knighted he has appeared in more than 30 films and
even more stage plays.
( Ralph Richardson )
The behavior patterns of the characters in
the film— their speech, their desires and their dreams— are very much like our
own, modified only by the influence of living in a comfortable, well-managed
materialistic society without the fear of war, hunger or rampant nationalism
and by an attendant loss of intellectual curiosity and individualism.
As Norman Jewison says, "Instead of saturating
the viewer with our conception of what the future will be, we let him use his
own imagination. 1 think the effect will be much more exciting for audiences
that way."
(φωτογραφίες από το δημοσίευμα του Mediascene magazine September October 1975)
Pamela Hensley and James Caan
(φωτ: Youngstown Vindicator, Ohio, July 19,
1976)
Rollerball (1975)
σκηνοθεσία:
Norman Jewison
σενάριο:
William Harrison
φωτογραφία:
Douglas Slocombe
κοστούμια:
Julie Harris
διάρκεια: 125 λεπτά
έγχρωμον
Γυρίσματα:
Βαυαρία
Γενέβη
Αγγλία
Released
on June 25, 1975 (U.S.A.)
Οι ηθοποιοί
(ενδεικτικά):
/
- James
Caan (as Jonathan E.)
/
- John
Houseman (as Bartolomew)
/
- Maud
Adams (as Ella)
/
- John
Beck (as Moonpie)
/
- Mose
Gunn (as Cletus)
/
- Pamela
Hensley (as Mackie)
/
- Barbara
Threntham (as Daphne)
ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΟΓΡΑΦΟΣ
[ ανάρτηση 20 Φεβρουαρίου 2024 :
Rollerball
Dystopian social fantasy film (1975)
Directed by Norman Jewison
Film magazine, July 1975
Mediascene magazine, September October 1975
Κινηματογραφικά ]
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