Remembering Norman Jewison, the legendary Canadian ‘working stiff’ filmmaker who loved making movies that mattered

Norman Jewison had a wicked sense of humour and a big Yogi Bear laugh.

The legendary Canadian filmmaker, who died this past weekend at age 97, would have enjoyed making movie critics — and all of Hollywood — sing his praises on the eve of the Oscar nominations, when they were supposedly too busy to think about anything else.

A ham actor as a kid, the Toronto-born Jewison loved faking theatrical death scenes, as his biographer Ira Wells (“Norman Jewison: A Director’s Life”) noted. And Jewison chuckled in 2004 when erroneous reports of his demise hit wire services, prompting him to quote the famous Mark Twain line, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

But this time the reports are real, though hard to believe. The bearded and bespectacled Jewison seemed eternal, having delighted, captivated, provoked and puzzled moviegoers for more than 40 years, from the early 1960s to the early 2000s, following a decade of pioneering television work that included helping launch CBC TV.

Jewison spanned genres with apparent ease, directing socially aware pictures (“In the Heat of the Night,” “A Soldier’s Story”), musicals (“Jesus Christ Superstar,” “Fiddler on the Roof”), thrillers (“The Thomas Crown Affair,” “The Cincinnati Kid”), and rom-coms (“Moonstruck,” “Send Me No Flowers.”) He even made a sci-fi movie, “Rollerball” in 1975, in which he helped create the futuristic blood sport of the title.

Stealing thunder from the Oscars with his obituary would likely have amused him most of all. Jewison had a love-hate relationship with the Academy Awards, which honoured his movies (they amassed 12 wins out of 46 nominations). But the academy never gave him the best director prize or other competitive gold he dearly wanted, despite being personally nominated for seven Oscars (three for best director, four for best picture). He received an honorary career-achievement Oscar in 1999, the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award.

His racially groundbreaking 1967 movie “In the Heat of the Night,” a controversial story about a Black detective (played by Sidney Poitier) investigating a murder in the Deep South, won best picture and four other Oscars. But because he didn’t produce it, Jewison wasn’t handed the best picture trophy; he lost the statuette for best director to Mike Nichols’ “The Graduate,” that film’s sole win.

With “In the Heat of the Night” though, Jewison did have the immense satisfaction of having made a movie people talked about, a movie with “a raison d’être,” as he called it. This was different from a message movie, a term he hated. His many kudos for the work included congratulations from former U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, who praised him for making a film that fought prejudice and advanced civil rights.

Not bad for a “Canadian pinko,” as Jewison half-jokingly described himself in his breezy 2004 autobiography, “This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me.”

He confessed in his book that as the liberal-minded son of a blue-collar family from Toronto’s Beach neighbourhood, he always felt like an outsider in cynical and profit-driven Hollywood. Jewison declared he was always “on the side of the working stiff and against the owners of the company store.”

His good deeds were many. In the late 1980s, he founded Toronto’s Canadian Film Centre to nurture young talent and, from 2004 to 2010 served as chancellor of the University of Toronto’s Victoria College, his alma mater. Jewison’s career was filled with other film and community service honours, the latter including Officer of the Order of Canada (1982), member of the Order of Ontario (1989) and, in 1992, Companion of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian award.

What Jewison craved, though, was recognition from his Hollywood peers in the academy. His 1987 rom-com “Moonstruck,” starring Cher and Nicolas Cage in one of the great comedies of the 1980s, looked like a cinch to win best picture and director at the Oscars. Instead, he lost both categories to Bernardo Bertolucci’s ancient China epic “The Last Emperor,” prompting Jewison to quip, “You can’t fight 200 Buddhist monks and the Forbidden City.”

More than anything, he loved making movies that deeply reached people, films that, as he said in his Thalberg acceptance speech, “move us to laughter and tears, and perhaps reveal a little truth about ourselves.”

When I interviewed him on the New Jersey set of “The Hurricane,” his 1999 biopic of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a champion boxer falsely convicted of murder, Jewison told me he chose his film subjects through a combination of intuition and an innate sense of timing.

“I just have a hunch,” he said.

“That’s all it is. Timing is not about sitting down and dealing with demographics. It’s about where people are and where you are at a certain point in time. It’s like when I did ‘Moonstruck.’ I felt the timing was right for a deeply romantic film. And that was the most romantic film of that year.”

He was then 72, still full of energy. Yet he jokingly referred to himself as “a dinosaur” in Hollywood because he still wanted to make movies that mattered.

“I make films that are about people who have something to say, not films with endless mindless reels of action because (the studios) hope they’re going to sell them to the Third World and exploit the s–t out of them.”

He pushed back against my suggestion that perhaps his social consciousness had fallen out of favour in Hollywood, if indeed it ever had been in favour.

“I’m not a spoon-fed idealist!” he countered. “I’m a cynical, old, disillusioned …”

He struggled to find the right word.

“Son of a bitch?” I offered.

“Revolutionary!” Jewison said, roaring with laughter.

“I know that only by staying a little angry, by not totally succumbing to it all, can I survive.”

Jewison did more than survive. He had the last laugh.