Rule changes for tonights game: No timouts and no substitutions

That is a good movie. I own it on DVD. The short story on which the film is based is also good. It's called "Rollerball Murder."

Interesting article below on the making of the film.

When it comes to the crunch

Sam Delaney on the making of Rollerball, the violent seventies futureworld fantasy

Friday April 30, 1999 "I thought that violence for the entertainment of the masses was an obscene idea. That's what I saw coming and that's why I made the film," says Rollerball director Norman Jewison. "In Europe, they bought into that idea. In America, they just wanted to play the game, man."

Despite the dark messages about corporate power and violent sport the film wanted to convey, Rollerball's popularity was rooted in the frenzied action of the game itself. In fact in most playgrounds (American, European or otherwise) in 1975, the film's cult-status boiled down to one thing: the spiked gloves.

As soon as the schoolboys of the world saw the posters of James Caan holding up his fist with its lethal-looking spikes they were sold on the film, regardless of what the director might be trying to say. And once they saw the gloves in action, interest became obsession: high-speed jousting on roller skates, exploding motorbikes and armed assault: a game with no rules and no penalties, where extermination is the goal.

Beneath the mayhem lay an elaborate vision of the future. In Jewison's world of 2018, mankind has achieved all the material comforts of a well-ordered society. Peace and tranquillity have broken out in a world governed by powerful corporations. Rollerball is a brutal game televised worldwide to sedate the masses and satisfy their appetite for violence. But the boat is rocked by Jonathan E (James Caan). The shadowy corporate rulers fear that, as an international star of the game, he has become too individual a force in this faceless world. So he must be retired, by any means necessary.

Corporate power and sporting violence were real sources of paranoia in the seventies. William Harrison was professor of creative writing at the University of Arkansas. He became obsessed with the disturbing social and economic changes he saw, and what he described as "the startling business pages of our newspapers." Around the same time he witnessed a brutal fight at a university basketball game. Out of these twin influences, in 1973 he wrote the short story Rollerball Murder, which was published in an American magazine.

Jewison, high-profile director of the musicals Fiddler On The Roof and Jesus Christ Superstar, had been affected by similar experiences. He had attended an ice-hockey game between Philadelphia and Boston which had descended into chaos. "There was blood on the ice and 16,000 people were standing up screaming," he recalls. Moreover he was living in west London and had become a regular at Stamford Bridge, where he'd witnessed football hooliganism in its heyday. All of this led to him contacting Harrison, who was by this time also living in London on a sabbatical with his young family.

"When my agent called up and said he thought we had a movie deal, I can't tell you how extraordinary it sounded. He flew over for lunch and said: "Jewison's going to offer you $50,000 for the short story." Daringly, Harrison demanded more money, plus a crack at writing the script. He also insisted that his name wouldn't appear on the screen in smaller type than anyone else's.

Six weeks passed and he was beginning to assume his attempt at playing hardball with Hollywood had backfired. "Then I got this call," he remembers. "It was an American's voice asking if I knew where he could find some oriental rollerskaters." The voice turned out to be that of Jewison's assistant, who casually told Harrison that all his demands had been met and they were in pre-production.

Days after Harrison had discovered he'd got himself the break of a lifetime, a limousine pulled up outside his semi-detached in north London and whisked him to Pinewood Studios where he had his first script meeting with Jewison. The two hit it off and stayed in London all summer, working on the screenplay and the rules of the game.

"We decided we had to work on a circular track because of the rollerskaters and the motorcycles," says Jewison. "The British production designer John Box built a scale model of the track. Then the British art director, the German track architect and I sat down with John and his model. We took a little ball, put a little spring behind it and shot it around the track to try to figure out the moment of gravity pull."

With a bound set of rules, they set about looking for a place to recreate the model, eventually securing the Olympic basketball stadium in Munich. United Artists had given Jewison "an average budget for the time - about $5-6m", and they spent a large part of it on the track. It had "all the specifications: a banked surface of 40ft and total circumference of 190ft. Everything was pneumatically operated - there were two doors built into the banked area and a six-inch steel barrier around the top of the track."

Assembling his cast, Jewison chose a famous Swedish model with almost no acting experience, Maud Adams, for the female lead of Ella. "I decided that all the women should be models," he explains. "It must be very stylish when you look into the not-too-distant future."

John Houseman, a friend of Jewison's who had written the screenplay for Citizen Kane, was drafted in to play Bartholomew, the sinister head of the energy corporation. Ralph Richardson, who had been earning £150 a week in a West End play, agreed to play the baffled librarian whom Jonathan E visits in Geneva for $250,000.

The real triumph was in securing James Caan, Hollywood's leading male at the time. "I thought the script was pretty good," says Caan, "but I was really persuaded to get involved by the jock in me." Jewison was well aware of Caan's taste for high-adrenalin pursuits: "That was one of the reasons I cast him - that love of physical confrontation."

Caan was teamed up with his fellow Rollerball players and sent to learn to play the game at a Californian arena four months before shooting was scheduled to begin. "We skated about seven times a week," says Caan. "We got to be pretty good and wound up playing soccer on skates." When they transferred to Munich, therefore, they were raring to go - until they saw the track. "We'd trained on a flat track," says Caan. "The one in Munich had a 12 or 13-foot bank, so when we tried to skate we'd just fall downhill."

However, Caan and the others soon adapted. It was a 10-against-10 game, each team containing five skaters and five motorcyclists. The steel ball would be fired around the rim of the track and the teams would pursue it at top speed, battling as they went. The objective was to score into a small, magnetic goal. Jewison more or less allowed the cast to go out and play for real while the cameras rolled. "When I got into the arena and started shooting, I was just terrified that I was going to kill somebody," he says. "Christ, I just kept telling them to slow down but they would go faster and cut each other up. We had one injury in California before we even started. Someone got injured training and he was laid up for six months; then there was a stuntman who got injured during filming and he ended up in hospital."

Caan insisted on doing all his own stunts. "Oh man, it was great," he says. "I separated a shoulder a bit and damaged a rib but I was pretty much luckier than most." Things were spiralling into mayhem: "Naturally, I don't want to die," said stuntman Roy Scammell, "but take that out of it and it's a terrific game. I'm sure it could catch on."

When the shooting ended, they arranged a full, no holds barred match and separated into two teams. "It never lasted more than 25 or 30 seconds," says Caan. "It was just one fight after another."

Caan was far less enthusiastic once they switched to London for what he describes as "all the walking and talking shit". Missing Rollerball wasn't the only problem: "I had to be true to the character and we were talking about a guy whose emotions had basically been taken away from him. So you couldn't all of a sudden try to be goddam Hamlet!"

Inevitably, the reaction to Rollerball centred around its violent content. Audiences loved it and it made a healthy financial return for UA. But the critics weren't so sure: "If a man's science fiction is a measure of his imagination then Rollerball suggests that Norman Jewison's is about the size of a six-pack of beer and a large bag of pretzels," wrote Vincent Canby in the New York Times. The London Evening Standard's Alexander Walker described it as "a film that relies on sustained and repeated violence for any success."

Jewison and Harrison were divided about the way violence had been portrayed. "Norman thought it was violent enough and he didn't want to celebrate it," says Harrison. "I had the idea that the violence had to be repugnant. I thought Rollerball was a bit scrubbed up, but people still complained." Jewison is unrepentant: "I'm against gratuitous violence in films but the violence here was in the game itself and the game had to be played. But I tried to stay away from blood and you'll notice there is very little."

But anyone searching for the secret of its commercial success should remember that kids amused themselves on the streets of California during the summer of 1975 by re-enacting scenes from the film on motorbikes. And, says Jewison, a Texan expressed keen interest in buying the franchise to the game. It also spawned a number of similarly violent and apocalyptic portrayals of the future: Death Race 2000 was an absurd take on the same themes; Schwarzenegger's 80s effort, The Running Man, was ostensibly a pastiche of Rollerball.

MGM is planning a remake with Jewison the likely executive producer. Harrison is sure it will be used as a pure action film, but Caan is more enthusiastic: "I'm ready for the revival - I'm in shape, pal. You better wear a lot of padding!"

Rule changes for tonights game: No timouts and no substitutions

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