After nearly a year of negotiations—and a last-minute, $2.5 million bid from another producer in the fall of 1966—United Artists closed the deal for some $2.75 million. They planned a splashy “roadshow” presentation (one of Hollywood’s last, it turned out): opening at first only in select large theaters in major cities, requiring viewers to buy reserved-seat tickets in advance, and trumpeting the grandness of the experience with a curtain, overture, intermission, entr’acte, exit music, and glossy program booklet for sale—a set of lavish formalities that exceeded those of the Broadway show itself.
In the five short years between the start of contract negotiations and the beginning of shooting in 1970, Hollywood, like the rest of America, had been rocked by change. Studio heads had banked on musicals to feed an audience hungry for escapism in tumultuous times; audiences, instead, began to prefer movies that at least acknowledged the tumult. And such movies were becoming available. The censorious Production Code was dissolving in the tide of the sexual revolution; maverick directors were finding inroads into picture-making as the old studio system finally sputtered through its decade-long death throes. Soon after Jewison signed on for Fiddler, he saw popular interest shift away from hits like The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins toward films like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. And while Funny Girl held its financial own in such company, most of the musicals released at the end of the 1960s with cheery high hopes and even higher investments utterly tanked. Camelot, Star!, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Hello, Dolly!—among others—lost millions at the box office, and Doctor Doolittle, a $29 million disaster, nearly ruined 20th Century Fox.
The market was mirroring Jewison’s own taste for engagement and innovation. His 1968 heist picture, The Thomas Crown Affair, hinged on a hot sexual twist and also gave him a chance to experiment with split-screen effects. More significantly, months before In the Heat of the Night snagged the Oscar for best movie, he was tapped to make a film intended as a stirring response to the rising demands of Black Power: an adaptation of William Styron’s highly acclaimed—and highly controversial—novel about the leader of the bloody slave revolt of 1831, The Confessions of Nat Turner. The mere announcement of the project sparked protest from Black activists, who had objected to what they considered negative stereotyping and historical falsification in the book. They organized to demand that, among other things, Jewison and his producer (David Wolper for 20th Century Fox) depict Turner as less brutish, less sexually fixated on white women, and generally more righteous. Though Jewison assertively told the press at the time that he would listen to concerns but make the film as he pleased, the script was altered in response to the outcry.
Jewison had been feeling discouraged for months as the controversy played out. He took the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in June 1968 as a hard personal blow, sensing in it a “defeat” of “all the causes and ideals that I had believed in.” He couldn’t get over how violently he’d been attacked by mounted police at an antiwar demonstration in Los Angeles. He saw adapting Styron’s book as an opportunity to portray a “revolutionary hero,” while some African Americans regarded it as an affront that a white man would have the gall to take up the story, and this also unsettled him. Plus, he later quipped in his autobiography, “Nixon was president. Reagan was governor. I was losing my sense of humor.” In February 1969, he officially bowed out of Nat Turner, and the Canadian-born director with his wife and their two boys moved to London. In a bitter and futile protest, he returned his family’s green cards, asserting that they no longer wished to live in the United States.
In London, Jewison planned to put “all the grief and disappointment of the sixties” behind him and restore the “joy and hope” he knew he needed to film the musical, though he had no intention of making the sort of fluffy Broadway adaptation that was sinking at the box office. Fiddler was granted a budget of eight million dollars (which he eventually pushed to nine million). It wasn’t an outlandish sum by the day’s standards, but it was substantial and United Artists was counting on Fiddler, as Variety reported, “to bring it into the big money for the first time in a couple of years.” Jewison may have left his disappointment behind, but pressure followed him to England.
Some of it weighed upon him like the complaints about white men’s fitness to make Nat Turner, but now the onus had to do with a Gentile making a Jewish film and it felt less fraught. Indeed, Jewison relished the tale of being offered Fiddler and told it often: At the meeting in United Artists’ midtown Manhattan office, Krim popped the question. “What would you say if we asked you to direct Fiddler on the Roof?” Jewison answered with a question: “What would you say if I told you I’m a goy?” Krim calmly explained—inadvertently betraying some vestigial Hollywood shame in Jewish display—that they were not interested in a Yiddish Second Avenue approach. “He covered so beautifully,” Jewison said. “I’m sure he was in shock.” (Topol, ever the Zionist, later ascribed the film’s success in part to its Gentile director: “He could make a film free of complexes typical to Jews in exile.”)
Though the son of an Anglican and a Methodist, Jewison had a long-standing affinity for Jewish culture, even a sense of identification. It began in his childhood in Toronto, where his name had made him the target of some “hey Jewboy” bullying, and he bristled at “Gentiles Only” signs on the shore of the Balmy Beach Canoe Club; he gleefully joined a Jewish friend for synagogue services on a regular basis. Prejudice of any kind rankled and rattled him for as long as he could remember and he recognized the historical persecution of Jews as part of a deadly human virus that had to be eradicated. To that end, “we need to feel how ‘the other’ feels,” he maintained, and he believed his work could make a modest contribution to that daunting project by touching audiences’ hearts. “I’m not a cerebral filmmaker,” he said. “I make emotional films and I want my audience to become emotionally involved.” He expected Fiddler to be every bit as socially relevant as In the Heat of the Night or even, perhaps, as Nat Turner might have been had it ever been made. He took on Fiddler with an enormous sense of responsibility.
Like Robbins before him, but with the burden of being an outsider, he plunged into research: He purchased at least 37 books (the usual suspects: Heschel, Maurice Samuel, and, of course, the Sholem-Aleichem stories, along with art books of paintings and photographs of Eastern European Jewish life). He sent copies of Life Is with People to those responsible for set decoration, wardrobe, script supervision, makeup, hairdressing, and props, among others. In the fall of 1969, he took a whirlwind five-day trip to Israel, under the guidance of Rabbi Moshe Davis, the influential Jewish-American educator who had consulted with Arnold Perl years earlier and was now a professor at Hebrew University. The professor set up visits to archives and museums dedicated to Sholem-Aleichem, Russian Zionism, and Jewish music; screenings of historical footage and Yiddish films; visits to observant families in religious neighborhoods. At a kibbutz, Jewison interviewed old immigrants from a Ukrainian shtetl, who described a pogrom they had witnessed as children. (One couple’s recollection of feathers flying from slashed pillows made it into Jewison’s pogrom scene.)
Jewison also turned to A Vanished World, not only by studying the work; he also spent an afternoon with “dear old Roman Vishniac.” Jewison considered the photographer particularly influential in developing his own visual vocabulary, especially for “the look of the people.” Some listings in his “casting breakdown” notes for Anatevkans—“Sheftel—A tanner—lean, wiry … A hard-working generally stoic individual”; “Berl, Blacksmith—a giant, massive, full bearded man … a gentle creature”; “Farcel … Fishmonger … solid, mustached, square-built … Adroit in his dealings with the women who buy from him in the Square”—are followed by a page number referring to an image in A Vanished World.
Most striking, Jewison made the character of the rabbi resemble the cover of Vishniac’s book, projecting, with his full wh
ite beard and crinkly eyes, gravitas along with warmth and good humor.
Having assured the preemptive Rabbinical Council of America that the rabbi would be portrayed “in a dignified manner,” Jewison cast Zvee Scooler, a longtime actor and Yiddish radio personality who had been born in Ukraine in 1899 and performed for years in Maurice Schwartz’s company—including in Di brider ashkenazi with Jerry Robbins; he also played the innkeeper in the original production of Fiddler, staying with the show for its entire seven-plus years. Jewison thought that in addition to location, actors like Scooler would help him make a “direct connection” with Sholem-Aleichem. Thus he cast Molly Picon, also in her seventies and a peppy star since girlhood of Yiddish stage and screen, as Yente, and she dodders through the movie, head atilt, as Yente’s job is rendered obsolete.
Jewison had hoped to add two more Israelis to the company, believing they would provide the same kind of authenticity: for Perchik, Asaf Dayan (son of the famous defense minister, Moshe Dayan), whose English turned out not to be up to the task; and for Golde, Hanna Maron, a leading actor at Israel’s Habima and Cameri theaters. On their way to the audition in London, the actors had to change planes in Munich; there, at the airport, members of a pro-Palestinian group moved to hijack their flight, throwing live grenades when a pilot resisted the militants’ orders. Maron was among the injured, losing her left leg. The incident “devastated” Jewison and added to his resolve to portray a tough, persevering people.
Like Robbins, Jewison also sought the direct participation of Marc Chagall; he hoped to set a spirited, spiritual tone by using some of Chagall’s paintings in the opening title sequence. This time, the refusal was harsher: “MADAME CHAGALL SAYS HER HUSBAND HATES FIDDLER BASED ON FRENCH TELEVISION EXCERPT OF PARIS STAGE VERSION,” declared the cable to Jewison from Saul Cooper, a United Artists representative, who looked into the prospect in Paris. But, like Hodel appealing to Tevye, Cooper added, “BELIEVE POSSIBILITY STILL REMAINS FOR OBTAINING CHAGALL’S BLESSING IF NOT HIS PARTICIPATION.” Three months later, Cooper updated Jewison: Even after receiving an extensive, French-language synopsis of the film, the artist’s answer remained non.
Even if Jewison had won the master’s cooperation, it’s difficult to imagine how Chagall’s airy images would have related to the film’s earthy specificity. The stage is a land of metaphor, but narrative movies are, by nature, literal—and Chagall hated realism. With movies, “you’re taking the story out of the theater and putting it in the real world,” Jewison believed, “where there are animals and carts and people.” That’s why he insisted on shooting in Eastern Europe, and Yugoslavia was as near as he could come. In the Soviet Union he figured he’d be too prone to unpredictable delays. He also had to give up a location he fell in love with in Romania during a six-week scouting trip because no one would provide insurance—for fear of Soviet invasion. “That’s when I turned to Tito. He had the largest standing army in Europe and he loved movies,” Jewison said. He loved movies “almost as much as he loved hard currency.”
Filming in a country run by an autocrat provided many advantages. If Jewison needed to take down telephone poles to keep such anachronisms out of his shots, no problem. If the local farmers had to shut off their tractor engines when he required quiet on the set, all he had to do was sound a horn to alert them to do so. If the fourteen November days of unseasonably warm and sunny weather put him behind schedule as he waited for snow, he could go ahead and cover the ground with marble dust, never mind what it might do to the farmland. The site comprised two rural villages—Lekenik and Mala Gorica, some forty-five minutes’ drive from Zagreb (where the cast and crew stayed during the four-month shoot), plus an enclosed square within Zagreb where Jewison filmed a scene he added, supposedly set in Kiev: Perchik arrested after stirring up the masses along with his comrades. “The winds of freedom are beginning to blow all over Russia,” Perchik cries as mounted Cossacks close in while John Williams’s underscoring swells with thick Russian chords turning ominously dissonant. (The new song Perchik was given in place of “Now I Have Everything”—a rousing march called “Any Day Now”—reiterated his speech and, though recorded, didn’t make it into the film.)
As for the villages, their wooden, weathered buildings could be used almost just as they were, with their ramshackle shingles, log fences, and crooked arrangement around a curving road (whose tarmac need only be covered in mud). Jewison was instantly smitten with the setting: “I could almost see a Chagall fiddler standing on a roof,” he marveled. “All we had to do was build a synagogue.”
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In fact, they had to build a bit more—Tevye’s house and barn, a community well, some other structures. But the two-story wooden synagogue was the most significant addition. Overlooked in the reviews, the synagogue defined the film’s tone as much as—and in tension with—Topol’s toughness. Though the stage Fiddler required no synagogue and no scene is set in one, the building plays a crucial role on screen: more than anything else in Jewison’s Anatevka, it represents the “tradition” that distinguishes the lusty Jews (as he portrays them) from the local thugs who hate them. If the “people made the shtetl” for Zborowski and Herzog, (and for the stage), the shul did so for celluloid. Decades before wide interest arose in restoring or documenting these structures, Jewison and his production designer, Robert Boyle, constructed a painted shul in painstaking detail, building it from the timber of old barns to give it a sense of age. It is a stunning, syncretic replica of architecture and decor, forgotten for decades as the beautiful old synagogues of Eastern Europe had been destroyed in the war, had decayed in the absence of caretakers, or been appropriated for use as garages and groceries.
Jewison and Boyle visited whatever standing synagogues they could during their East European scouting trip and were inspired by the ornate Baroque elegance of the Dubrovnik synagogue—the second-oldest in Europe, dating from 1652. In Targu Neamt, in northeastern Romania, they saw an abandoned one that served, in part, as a model for the gold filigreed red velvet panels they placed on either side of Anatevka’s ark. (The design team even tried to purchase the intact prayer stands, Torah scrolls, ark, and “miscellaneous other appurtenances which would be ideal for the Synagogue in our film.” The request was denied.) Following custom, they placed a railed-off bimah—the raised platform on which the Torah is read—in the center of the shul and draped the reading table with embroidered red velvet. A heavy curtain of matching fabric covered the holy ark, where the Torah scrolls are kept. Structurally, the building was based on the wooden shuls of eighteenth-century Poland.
But it was by re-creating pastel murals that Boyle performed the film’s most beautiful act of recovery. Boyle adorned the Anatevka shul with images of a curly-horned ram against a lavender sky, a pair of scales balanced just so, a brown scorpion crawling on a blue field. These are mazoles (from mazel—luck), Jewish zodiac motifs that once marked the months of the Hebrew calendar on sanctuary walls, especially in Galicia (today’s western Ukraine and southeastern Poland). Beneath them, in panels framed by decorative borders, black Hebrew letters spelled out prayers and psalms, edifying Bible passages—or names of big donors. This enchanting folk art, which mixed images of nature and text, secular hope and sacred prayer, was not widely known among Americans, Jewish or not, in 1971 (though some immigrants had brought the convention to New York’s Lower East Side, where mazoles can still be found in a few old synagogues). It made the movie’s shul lovely and strange: an old-world relic of quiet grandeur.
From the very start, Jewison visually presses the point that the synagogue is the locus of all that will be left and lost. The movie opens quietly, with the camera panning over the rooftops, revealing the fiddler, silhouetted against a brightening sky, and then cutting to Tevye, who, speaking right to the camera, leads viewers into Anatevka. “How do we keep our balance?” he asks as he climbs aboard his milk cart. He slaps the reins against his horse as an alarum for his answer: “Tradition!” The orchestra blares in, and keeping
time with the big chords, the camera jolts from image to image in the synagogue: a patch of painted mural, the red Torah cover with gold star of David, some Hebrew text on the wall. The technique is repeated in the song’s brief instrumental passages: jump-cuts that flash the core symbols of a civilization—an open Torah scroll, various segments of the mazoles, a golden menorah.
Norman Jewison shows Zvee Scooler how to carry the Torah when he departs his shul forever.
These interludes alternate with the song’s verses, in which each part of the community describes its role. No matter that they tell of tradition: their daily lives are not depicted as infused with the sacred. Jewison presents them laboring in rhythm with the music: men stripping animal hides, banging anvils, planing wood; women plucking feathers, punching down dough; girls sewing, churning, pitching hay. Boys, per the song’s verse, go to Hebrew school. These are hearty, self-sufficient people, in harmony with the world and each other. (The film drops the play’s cacophonous section of the song, where the verses overlap, as if competing for dominance.) Although there’s a moment when a shul image illustrates a line of verse, a shot of men wrapped in tallisim rocking in prayer, the nine-minute sequence juxtaposes toil and Torah, but doesn’t much connect them. The robust folk who know they belong to the land seem visually and sonically separated from those markers of Judaism. They intersect in the film only in the Sabbath scene, lengthy wedding sequence and, at the end, when Tevye removes the mezuzah from the house he is leaving and pockets it for the journey. As in America, in this Anatevka, it is religious worship, represented by and contained in the synagogue, that marks Jewish difference.
Onstage, Robbins wanted to depict and commemorate a “way of life” and for his cast to express pride in that culture. In making the movie, Jewison was compelled by the example of a people carrying on in the face of bigotry, taking pride in brawny fortitude. The issue for him was persecution. “I wanted audiences to feel the racial hatred,” he said.
Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof Page 36
