The Norman Jewison Affair
THEY SAY IT’S GOOD TO spend time around young people because their energy and enthusiasm is infectious. Perhaps. But it has been my experience that if you want either energy or enthusiasm, you should spend some time with Norman Jewison.
For anyone who is unaware, Norman Jewison is a very big deal in the world of cinema.
He has won the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, which is the highest honour that can be given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and is presented during the Oscar broadcast. Other recipients include Alfred Hitchcock, Walt Disney, Cecil B. DeMille, Steven Spielberg and Ingmar Bergman. Good company.
Norman’s movies have won a boatload of Oscars. He has worked with the biggest stars in Hollywood and has done so for over six decades. He made In the Heat of the Night, The Hurricane, Fiddler on the Roof, The Thomas Crown Affair, Jesus Christ Superstar and many more…it’s an embarrassment of cinematic riches.
That said, he appeared on the Mercer Report in 2011 not in his capacity as a filmmaker, but as one of the people who, in the early eighties, saved Christmas. Or at least Canada’s largest Santa Claus parade.
The Toronto event was, from its inception, known to everyone as the Eaton’s Santa Claus Parade. It was by far the largest of its kind in North America. Long story short, the Eaton family, owners of the legendary Canadian department store chain, woke up one morning and realized they had forgotten to mind the shop. The company was on the verge of collapse. Sponsorship of the parade was one of the first things to go.
It was Norman and a group of Toronto businesspeople, including Paul Godfrey, Ron Barbaro and George Cohon, who stepped forward and found a way to save the parade. The parade’s continued survival is due in great part to their efforts.
One way they came up with for raising money was to offer people with deep pockets the opportunity to appear in the parade as “celebrity clowns.” To this day more than 150 celebrity clowns march the parade’s route at the beginning of each year’s extravaganza. It is a significant fund-raiser. And in return for their sizable donations these clowns get sore feet and thousands of smiles.
Norman appeared on the Mercer Report and gave me tips on how to be a parade clown. A part he has played many times.
How many children over the years were given candy or a tissue for their runny nose by the director of Moonstruck? Nobody knows. Certainly not the kids. Norman always appears anonymously. Like all the clowns in Toronto’s parade, celebrities or otherwise. Big wigs, red noses, painted faces. The epitome of dignity in public service in floppy shoes.
It was my great privilege not so long ago to deliver a toast to Norman on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday at the Canadian Film Centre. A centre which he himself founded. I should mention that, while I was honoured to MC the event along with comedy legend Eugene Levy, I went to Norman’s birthday party against the wishes of my mother, who thinks Norman is a bad influence on me. More about that later.
Norman made one of my favourite movies of all time: The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.
The movie is legendary—it’s one of the great satires. Made at the height of the Cold War, it was about a Russian submarine that goes off course and gets stuck on a sandbar next to a small town on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. The hapless Russians in the grounded sub are terrified they will be captured and shot. Their only chance at survival is to sneak into town to get supplies to fix their submarine.
When the Americans living in this picturesque resort realize that there are Russians in their midst, Cold War hysteria breaks out. The townsfolk are convinced that the United States is being invaded, and they alone are the only line of defence against the communist superpower.
The film was brilliant. How brilliant? After it was released John Wayne threatened to beat the shit out of Norman at a Hollywood party—because clearly he was a Canadian commie. Now that’s hitting a nerve.
So I knew Norman was a great film director. What I didn’t know was that on occasion he watches TV.
Because one day in 2014, out of the blue, I got a phone call from Norman Jewison asking me if I would work on a script with him for a remake of—The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming. To this day, that phone call remains one of the most absurd and fantastic experiences of my life.
And while I sat with the phone to my ear and my jaw on the ground, Norman told me how he saw this reboot—that instead of hapless Russians on a submarine, it would be hapless Iraqi circus performers who take a wrong turn and end up in the wrong town, where they are mistaken for a terrorist cell hell-bent on destroying America.
He was a little ahead of his time.
I had no idea whether it would work or not, but I said yes. If Norman had called me up and asked me to wash his car, I would have responded by asking if he wanted it waxed as well.
Days later, I met Norman at his office and we began what has become a wonderful friendship.
Just entering the office was a real thrill. It is a Hollywood time capsule. Norman bought the building in downtown Toronto many decades ago, and his office sits on the top floor. It’s the ultimate sixties man cave. If Austin Powers made pictures, this is where he would hang. It’s got shag carpet, and dimmer switches are built into the vintage coffee and end tables. There are director’s chairs, giant art deco ashtrays and signed pictures of everyone from Doris Day to Frank Sinatra.
Every day I would meet Norman at his office and we would work on this movie script. For me, it was a master class. When he punched the clock there was no idle chitchat. It was all business. Plot, structure, character development. There was only one subject: the project at hand. He was a machine.
But at lunch? Or on a break? Then he was a font of showbiz stories. I would look up on the wall and see a picture of Norman with Dean Martin and ask, “What was Dean Martin like?” And of course there would be a great story. He met Dean while directing Judy Garland’s first TV special.
Think of a legend, and Norman had a story. Karl Malden, Edward G. Robinson, Denzel Washington, Faye Dunaway, Olympia Dukakis, Michael Caine, Tony Curtis—he worked with them all. His next-door neighbour in Malibu was Don Rickles. How could there not be stories?
We got along fabulously. The age gap of forty-plus years presented no problems at all. Except for one.
My phone.
I check my phone. I check my phone a lot. Sometimes I check my phone and I don’t even realize I am checking it—it’s not just my phone, it’s my fidget spinner. Maybe I am addicted—at least I have the strength to admit it.
Norman hates the phone.
“Why are you looking at your phone?” he’d say. “We’re working here.”
“Right,” I would say, putting it back down, but never putting it away.
Finally, one day, he let me have it.
“In my day when you were making a picture, you would work in a bungalow on a Hollywood lot. You would come into the office in the morning and you would say, ‘Hold my calls,’ and they held your calls. The way people knew you were working was they couldn’t get a hold of you. And you got work done because you weren’t wasting time talking on the phone. Your generation, you look at your phone every time the bloody thing beeps, and it’s never important—half the time, as far as I can tell, it’s someone you know sending you a picture of the salad they had for lunch.”
He had a point. I’ve received my fair share of salad pics.
So I made a decision. A very difficult decision. I put the phone away…for Norman.
“Norman, you are right. I am sorry. I am here to work. You’ll never see my phone again.” I put it away.
Norman said, “I don’t believe it.”
We went back to work. And true to my word, the phone never saw the light of day again. At least not in front of him.
About a week later, we were at work when I got up from the table and headed for the washroom. Norman told me that the regular washroom in the main office was acting up, so it was best that I use the small one in the inner office—“First door on your right.”
I headed to the room, an area of the office I had never been in before. I found the door and sure enough, there was a small half bath, sink and toilet.
I was standing there, having a leak and minding my own business, when I saw that above the toilet was a framed black-and-white picture. It showed a young Norman Jewison directing a young and very handsome Steve McQueen in The Cincinnati Kid.
They were on set in the pouring rain, and Steve McQueen was lying on the ground, back propped up against a wall, in a white shirt that’s pasted to his body. Norman was leaning over and giving him direction.
For perhaps the hundredth time that month, I was amazed to think where I was. “I’m really here working with Jewison. Look at the legends this guy has worked with. Steve McQueen—at the time, he was the biggest actor of his day. He was a giant sex symbol. The Cincinnati Kid was a huge film.”
It dawned on me that my mother would get a huge kick out of this photograph. She, like every woman of the era, loved Steve McQueen. So I took my phone out of my pocket and took a picture of the picture on the wall.
I walked back to the main office and sent a fast email to my mother. I typed, “Look who’s hanging out with Steve McQueen today,” and attached the picture, just as I was rounding the corner to the main office.
Norman was waiting for me outside the door. “I knew you were in there checking your phone,” he said, quite pleased with himself.
I hit send, shoved the phone into my pocket and went back to work.
That night, after I had been home a few hours, I realized I hadn’t heard anything from my mother. I called her and said, “Did you get the picture I sent you?”
She said, “Yes—and I didn’t think much of it.” Then she quickly hung up on me.
My initial thought was that I’d taken a picture of a picture in bad lighting—the bloody thing probably didn’t turn out. It must’ve been a blur.
So I forwarded the picture to my laptop, opened it up and took a look.
The picture I took while taking a leak had turned out perfectly. You could tell who it was, all right.
The email was titled, “Look who’s hanging out with Steve McQueen today.” And attached was a picture of Steve McQueen and Norman Jewison. And framed perfectly between the two of them, reflected in the glass, was my penis.
Thanks to this Hollywood legend and his aversion to cell phones, I had sent my mother a dick pic.
A bad influence indeed.
I told that story at his ninetieth birthday party. I look forward to hearing his version of events at mine.