Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (48 page)

From the point of view of the studios in the late 1960s, the “almost magic” of musicals was to be found in what they did for the box office. The
New York Times
noted Hollywood’s banking on the genre in an October 1968 article, “Studios Again Mining Gold with Lavish Film Musicals.” At that moment, American studios had invested $91 million in eighteen major musical projects about to be released or in production, among them
Funny Girl
,
Finian’s Rainbow
,
Oliver!
,
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
,
Paint Your Wagon
,
Sweet Charity
, and
Hello, Dolly!
The trend had begun with
West Side Story
in 1961, which had raked in profits of $32.5 million by the date of the
Times
article. Other hits soon followed:
Mary Poppins
($44.6 million),
My Fair Lady
($55 million),
Thoroughly Modern Millie
($30 million). But none made studio executives see dollar signs as vividly as
The Sound of Music
(1965), earner of the largest box-office gross in history in its day. Within only three years it boasted international returns of more than $112 million.

Interest in
Fiddler
’s movie rights followed the Broadway opening almost as quickly as the first-night reviews. Walter Mirisch saw the show during its opening week and immediately told Krim he wanted to make the motion picture. Krim dismissed the idea at first, Mirisch recalled, sounding the common refrain that it lacked wide enough appeal, but he changed his mind when the show’s sustained popularity proved him wrong. United Artists went after it. They did not get there first. In April 1965—just after he finished
Ship of Fools
and before he got started on
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
—the producer-director Stanley Kramer put in a bid, offering $750,000 against 10 percent of the gross (with a willingness to go as high as one million if necessary). Additional inquiries came in that spring.

But
Fiddler
’s authors felt no sense of urgency. So as not to compete with the show, any film would have to wait until demand slacked off, and by spring 1965, they giddily understood that day was not coming any time soon. They had plenty of time. And leverage. By December 1965, they had drawn up a “memorandum of terms” to share with prospective buyers. Among its provisions, which served to protect the aesthetic integrity of the show: there would be no interpolation of new dance, and no new music and lyrics if not written by Bock and Harnick. And the film would not be released before 1971. Producers who’d put out feelers early did not hang on into the winter. Earnest discussions began with United Artists alone.

The negotiations moved along in standard fits and starts until, once again, Arnold Perl entered the scene. According to the original contract for the Broadway show, he (and the Rabinowitz estate) were entitled to royalties on any sale of the property, and he stood to receive some $100,000 as his share of the movie deal. He bargained for more, driven by the belief—disputed by the authors—that
Fiddler
was based on his own groundbreaking work. Also, he still owned the rights to his play,
Tevya and His Daughters
, and United Artists needed to be sure that no movie based on it would vie with
Fiddler
. “Perl is now in a position to hold up the deal, and will, presumably, want to exact a high price,” Jerry Robbins’s lawyer told him. Indeed. Perl demanded $250,000 for the movie rights to his play. He got $75,000 for them on top of his $100,000 royalty. He kept his “by special arrangement” credit, too.

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 white 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
.