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[singing]
I don't want that. Leave me alone.
[loud banging]
You can keep your diseased chickens!
You leave my chickens out of this!
We made a bargain!
But the terms weren't settled.
We drank on it!
[indistinct arguing]
Quiet! Quiet!
Cut!
All right, hold it there.
Hold it there just for a second.
All right, print that one, please. Good one.
[piano music playing]
[Raim] Why does the film mean a great deal to you?
Well, it's because I think of the challenge
of taking someone,
a play that was so popular in the theater...
♪ To life, to life, I'chaim ♪
and transferring it to film
and making it believable.
♪ Here's to the father I tried to be! I
♪ Here's to my bride to be! ♪
And bringing it out into the real world.
It's always a challenge for a director.
[upbeat music]
I've been fascinated by Fiddler on the Roof as a phenomenon.
When the creators were putting this together,
everyone said, "This is gonna fail on Broadway."
"There's not enough people who are gonna care about this."
"It's only for a small Jewish audience.”
"It's gonna die."
And not only did it not die on Broadway,
it turned out to be this phenomenal international success.
Fiddler on the Roof was the best version
of the Sholem Aleichem stories that we could possibly come up with.
I always look for a good story
that will lend itself to music and theater.
And we found a series of short stories
that Sholem Aleichem wrote called Tevye's Daughters.
It's not just about a dairyman with five marriageable daughters.
It's more than that.
There's something else that gives these shows their power.
["Tradition" plays]
♪ Tradition! ♪
It's about the changing of tradition.
Tradition was changing all over Western Europe
and those changes were making their way to Eastern Europe,
and the shtetls were changing.
♪ Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Plan me no plans [
[Jewison] Tevye's problems in life
all stemmed from the fact that he had five daughters
trying to find a husband, trying to find a marriage.
Trying to find--
They all had problems.
[Turan] It's the battle between what the parents want for the children,
and what the children think is important for them.
Each one has a conflict
over love and romance with their parents.
[crying] Thank you!
First daughter, parents want her to marry someone wealthy.
She falls in love with a poor tailor.
Second daughter, she falls in love with a political radical,
where the parents would rather she married somebody more conventional.
She's dancing with a man!
I can see that she's dancing with a man!
The third daughter, the worst of all,
falls in love with someone who is not Jewish.
So, there are three different areas of conflict with the parents,
where, in many ways, you side with both sides.
And I think even in a musical comedy kind of template,
like Fiddler on the Roof, you still feel the pain.
And I think that's, you know, the heart of the thing.
["Shabbat Prayer" intro playing]
[Jewison] Themes of family is universal.
Everybody has a family,
good or bad, right or wrong.
We all have a family,
and we all have our little problems.
But we all end up sitting around a table.
And this happens in Fiddler. It happens in Moonstruck.
♪ May the Lord protect and defend you
[Jewison] And I thought, "This is so common.”
This is something people can understand.
They can understand a family.
They can understand Golde.
Even a poor girl without a dowry has to look at a husband sometime.
A husband is not to look at. A husband is to get.
But, Mama, I'm not yet 20 years old, I don't think I have to--
They can understand Tevye.
They can understand his problems with life.
We have received orders that sometime soon
this district is to have a little unofficial demonstration.
And his relationship to God.
Dear God,
was that necessary?
Did you have to make him lame just before the Shabbat?
I think all of these things,
all put together, make the story
of Fiddler on the Roof so...
compelling.
[upbeat music]
[Williams] I very well understand how
United Artists and Walter Mirisch would have chosen this man
to do Fiddler on the Roof.
He is so musical.
He had fantastic sense of rhythm, musically,
which a musician can pick up right away.
[Narrator] Norman Jewison, a born performer,
mounted satirical musical revues
while earning his B.A. at the University of Toronto's Victoria College.
He carved out his own path in the helterskelter world of early television.
When he went to CBS in New York in 1957,
his work impressed a multimedia superstar.
Harry Belafonte's Calypso album
was the first LP to sell a million copies.
♪ I don't know but I've been told A gopher really don't live in a hole ♪
♪ He don't!
And then came Tonight with Belafonte,
the first special on American television
starring a Black performer.
♪ Who picked a bale of cotton? ♪ ♪ Who put a bale of water? [
[Narrator] Jewison writes:
"As Harry saw it,
the point was to give Americans back a part of their culture
they were not able to see anywhere else on television.”
"When the camera scanned the faces of the actors,
they were both Black and white.”
"Years later, Harry told me he thought we showed life
as it should be in America.”
I came from live television and the theater.
And much like John Frankenheimer
and Franklin Shaffner and Sidney Lumet,
we all came from television, we came from New York.
♪ You made me love you
♪ I didn't wanna do it I didn't want to ♪
[Williams] I knew him as a director of variety television,
high level musical work on television.
Well, it certainly prepared Norman from the point of view
of what do you do with the camera
when musical performances are taking place?
Do you want to be in a close-up of a singer
who's doing a big vocal performance that might even distort the face?
Do you want to pull it back?
Knowing how to shoot music, knowing how to shoot dance.
For me it has to come from musicality.
And then, lo and behold,
he became a famous movie director a year or two later.
[Jewison] When I came to Los Angeles,
Tony Curtis got me involved in 40 Pounds of Trouble
which was my first film.
[Narrator] Universal Pictures pegged Jewison as their light comedy man.
That pigeonhole depressed him.
"I was wretched,"” he writes.
So he found a way out of his contract,
and came into his own as a filmmaker.
Jewison imbued topical movies
with a playful, liberating spirit.
In the Cold War comedy
The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming!
Alan Arkin, as a Soviet officer
whose submarine gets stranded in New England,
had a warmth and humor almost as winning as Tevye's.
What would the Russians be doing on United States of America island
with so many animosities and hatreds between these two countries?
It is too funny an idea, is it not?
[laugh]
No, we are, of course, Norwegians.
[Jewison] I was skiing in Sun Valley
and Bobby Kennedy had his family up there skiing.
And my kid broke his leg in a ski race.
And Bobby Kennedy's kid broke his leg in the same race.
So we end up at the hospital in Sun Valley.
And there was kind of an awkward silence,
I knew who he was, he didn't know who I was.
Now, we were sitting there and
he says, "What do you do?"
And I said, "I'm a filmmaker."”
"What kind of films do you make?"”
I said, "Well, I'm gonna make a film this year."”
"It's about a black detective from Philadelphia
who gets caught up in a murder investigation in Mississippi.”
And I told him the story.
And he says, "This could be a very important film, Norman."
Was Mr. Colbert ever in this greenhouse?
Say, last night, about midnight?
That's the first time anyone told me
that it could be an important film.
[soul gospel music plays]
And about a year later,
it won the New York Critics Award.
And I went to Sardi's Restaurant to receive this award.
And they said, "Presenting the award
is the senator from New York, Robert Kennedy."
And I went up, and he looked at me and he says,
"See? I told you the timing was right."
"Cause he told me it's all about timing.
He said, "Timing is the most important thing in life,
in politics, and in art,
and in life itself.”
[gunshot]
[Narrator] Jewison writes:
"The night Bobby Kennedy was assassinated,
I sat outside in the garden
staring at the night sky,
thinking that Bobby had been a beacon for all of us
in the civil rights movement.”
"His assassination meant that America was so violent a society,
it could not abide its best.”
"First John Kennedy, then Martin Luther King,
now Bobby Kennedy."
[Jewison] When he was assassinated,
and I thought he was going to be the next President.
I felt totally... lost.
[Narrator] Jewison writes,
"I didn't have to tell Dixie
that the night Bobby Kennedy was assassinated,
I realized that I had to get out of the United States
to preserve what joy and hope I had about life.”
"She knew."
"And she knew that I wouldn't be able to make Fiddler without that."”
[Jewison] Arthur Krim,
who was the head of United Artists,
called me up in Hollywood and said,
would I come to New York and have a meeting with him?
So I went to the meeting and Arthur Krim looked at me
and he says, "What would you say
if we were to say, we want you to produce
and direct "Fiddler on the Roof?"
And my heart came up into my mouth.
And I thought, "Oh my God!"
And I looked over and I waited,
and they waited, and they all kind of leaned forward.
They thought, "What he is waiting for?"
And then I said,
"What would you say...
if I told you... I'm a Goy?"
And I saw a few faces go like this...
And Arthur Krim was very calm,
he put his hands together and he said,
"What does that matter?
We don't want a Second Avenue Yiddish production.
We want a film for everybody."
In the book that I wrote
about my life, the first line is,
And that is true,
because my name is Jewison,
Son of a Jew.
So, naturally,
everybody assumes I'm Jewish.
Even the Gentiles assume I'm Jewish.
And I thought I was Jewish.
And so, when I was five or six,
and going to public school in the East end of Toronto,
which was a little antisemitic...
It was mostly Irish and Polish,
I could feel it.
And there was only two Jewish kids in the school,
or in my class.
There was one kid...
Sidney Zahn.
His parents ran a dry-cleaning store.
And then there was myself.
And so, at recess,
somebody would start saying, you know,
"Jew boy. Hey, Jewy! Hey, Jewy."
They called me Jewy.
And I knew a lot about Jewish life,
simply because I went with Sidney
to an orthodox temple on Kenilworth Avenue.
And I'll never forget, the Mel a med looked at me and he says,
"Where do you live?”
I said, "Well I live up here.
My parents own a dry goods store.”
"Oh yes.
I never see them in temple.
Why is that? I never see them on the Sabbath?"
And I said, "Oh no, that's because we go to church up--"
[laughs]
And so that's when he knew I was treif.
So, he said: "That's fine.
But I don't think you should come here
to study Hebrew."”
When the Mel a med at the temple told me to leave,
I thought,
[melancholic music plays]
[Narrator] Jewison signed on to produce and direct Fiddler on the Roof
when Hollywood was coming apart.
♪ The hills are alive with the sound of music ♪
[Narrator] In a mad rush to duplicate the success of The Sound of Music,
the studios financed a string of inept and overproduced musicals
that nearly bankrupt the industry.
These films featured stars who could not belt out a tune.
♪ But suddenly my words reach someone else's ear
Or stars of stage hits
who couldn't act for the camera.
♪ 'Old it, flash, bang, wallop, what a picture ♪
♪ What a picture! What a photograph
[Jewison] You know, whether you're doing West Side Story
or whether you're doing Hello, Dolly!, whatever.
It's always a challenge to make something powerful out of it.
And I said, "The casting has gotta be right in this film."
♪ Matchmaker, matchmaker
♪ Make me a match ♪
[Jewison] I started to get these phone calls
Like Danny Kaye.
Danny Kaye wanted to play Tevye.
Then I get a phone call from Frank Sinatra's manager.
I think: "Frank Sinatra wants to play Tevye?!"
I couldn't believe it!
Couldn't believe it.
[Turan] I saw the original Broadway run,
I bought standing room when I was in high school or college,
to see Zero Mostel on Broadway.
Oh my God! Zero Mostel was like,
I don't even know how to describe it.
I mean, he was just a great theatrical actor.
We've seen him in films, but he's one of these actors
that's almost too large for films.
Film tries to contain people,
and onstage you can be as big as you can be.
And he was enormous,
but in a very light-hearted way,
in a very nimble way, he wasn't
like Laurence Olivier enormous.
But he had such a great energy, such a great spirit.
He was almost like twinkling on stage.
I can still see him hopping along the stage, you know,
doing "If I was a wealthy man."
♪ If I were a rich man ♪
♪ Ya ba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dum ♪
[Jewison] Zero Mostel really threw me off.
I really felt that he was bigger than the play.
He was doing everything for laughs.
I felt he was too American.
I felt that he wasn't
what Sholem Aleichem had in mind.
I didn't feel he was a Russian dairyman.
[upbeat music]
Sheldon Harnick said,
"You know, there's an Israeli guy, Topol.
"And he is playing the lead in London."
[Topol] I was very lucky in Fiddler on The Roof
to be directed by a genius, Jerry Robbins.
When Jerry auditioned me,
he was a very clear director.
For example, when he talked to the cast in "Tradition."”
And he said to them,
"All I want from you that you'll all be proud of your tradition.”
Now, how do you express pride with your body?
He said, "I want long necks."”
Up. No gravitation.
I mean, up, up, up, up.
And that will...
will project pride.”
Which he was right.
♪ Tradition, tradition
[Jewison] I flew to London and I saw Topol.
And I saw the play, and all of a sudden
I felt truth.
I felt believability.
I felt that I wasn't looking at an American Production
with a guy from Brooklyn or something.
I felt he was proud
of being a Jew.
[Topol] When Norman Jewison came in February '68,
which was the last month I did a show in London,
and I didn't know he was there.
And the company manager came after the show and said,
"Mr. Norman Jewison would like to come backstage and see you."
I said, "With the greatest pleasure."
And then he sat down and said,
"I want you to play the part in the film."
I grew up on Sholem Aleichem.
Sholem Aleichem stories were my bedtime stories.
My father knew it all by heart,
so he didn't have really to read it.
Really from the day I remember myself,
I remember Sholem Aleichem.
[Turan] I feel a connection to Sholem Aleichem's stories
the Tevye stories, for a variety of reasons.
I mean, I come from a Yiddish-speaking background.
My parents were native speakers, they were immigrants.
Tevye is really a quintessential Eastern European Jew.
That was the heart and soul of Sholem Aleichem's work,
writing in Yiddish, dealing with those people.
Topol was many things, but no one would ever confuse him
with an Eastern European Jew.
And that didn't work for me.
That was a sticking point for me.
I mean, Israeli Jews have a different physicality,
a different relationship to the world.
They wouldn't take any guff from anybody.
And I think Topol as an actor is very much in that tradition.
Topol was a universal Jew.
He was a Jew from everywhere.
Big and strong and a great father and a great farmer,
and confident.
I see how he fits in with Norman Jewison's conception.
But Jewison's idea was to universalize the story.
He wanted everyone to see it.
I hope the Canadians like it.
I hope the Gentiles like it.
[laughter]
Okay. Alright.
[Harris] I realized that if I wanted what I wanted
I had to do it from my soul
and I had to go after it in a way that
was not gonna follow the rule book, because
I was a Semitic-looking actor
and, you know, there weren't a lot of roles for people like me.
Once Barbra Streisand became famous,
I remember, I used to walk around the halls like this,
covering up my nose, you know.
Like walking profile.
And then when she became famous, some said,
"Roz, there's someone on the Ed Sullivan Show looks like you."
And I went to the TV,
"Oh my God!"
And suddenly the hand came away and I was proud.
Look!
[Marsh] I had done a production
of Tevye and his Daughters in high school
and I played Bielke,
one of the younger daughters.
[Small] I started doing theater.
And I had done some television,
including some kind of version of Sholem Aleichem's stories.
So, I come to New York. I'm studying acting.
And I'm auditioning.
I get a call, "Rosalind, we want to see you for the understudy to Tzeitel”
who was, at that time, Bette Midler.
And I get the role. I'm understudying Tzeitel.
One day Bette said to me backstage,
"Roz, did you get an audition for the film?
Listen, they don't want me,
get your ass down there."
I go, "Really?"”
I go down to the audition, no appointment,
everyone there with their agent, their manager.
And I just sat there and every time they came out I said,
"Hello, I'm understudying Tzeitel on Broadway
and I'd like to read. I am Tzeitel."
I read and I sang "Matchmaker”
and they said, "Get Jewison, he's at the hotel."
Norman says, "Go ahead sing”
and I sang all three roles to "Matchmaker”
'cause I really didn't know what else to sing.
|I was in the show! So I'm singing, you know,
Chava's role and Hodel's role:
♪ Papa! [I ♪ Oh, Hodel! ♪
I'm running around like a mad woman.
He's going, "Roz!
Sit, sit on your hands.
Sit on your hands and just sing to Yente.
Just in one. Just sing to Yente.
♪ Matchmaker, Matchmaker, make me a match
And he's walking around me like this.
You know, all around, like with the camera.
I was 22.
Yeah, I was 22.
At that time I was 17, going on 18.
I sang in New York for Mr. Jewison.
And I sang for Mr. Williams.
Then, they flew me out
for two screen tests.
Because I'm such a strong singer,
they tested me for Chava,
and they tested me for Hodel.
[Marsh] I was in Oh! Calcutta!
The whole cast walked across the stage
and we had bathrobes on, but we--
[laughs]
I was raised very conservatively.
You don't raise your voice, you don't cause a scene
in public or anything like this.
We were all arrested for indecent exposure
and we were mugged and fingerprinted.
I went in. John Williams was there at the piano.
And Norman was there and he gave me some adjustments after I read,
and he liked that I took his direction.
And then the inevitable question came,
"So, what have you been doing lately?"
And I said,
[sighs]
"I'm in Oh! Calcutta! but I hate it."
And Norman just looked at me...
And he leaned back,
and he said,
"I was there opening night."
"Hilly Elkins is a friend of mine."
That was the producer, Hilly Elkins.
And I thought, "I'm screwed. That's it!"
I remember, I was in-between shows, it was a matinee day.
And I came home. I was exhausted.
And the phone rings.
"Hello Rosalind, this is Lynn Stalmaster.”
"How would you like to be Tzeitel in the film of Fiddler on the Roof?
And I said, "Just a moment, please."
"I would love that."
And I put it down and screamed blood--
[screams]
And screamed bloody murder.
He gets back, "Are you okay?"
I said, "I'm fine."
[Marsh] I got a call from my agent saying,
I was Norman's choice, but he wanted to hear me sing one more time.
He worried about my voice being too breathy.
Norman sent Johnny and I into sound stage
so he could work with me.
About half an hour later, Norman showed up
and I sang for him.
And Johnny says, "No, we can make this work."”
"We can make her voice work."”
Norman walked to one end of the sound stage and walked back...
pensively... and said,
"You've got the part.”
"You're going to be a star."
And I went "ah!"
[Williams] A polished, professional,
experienced, vocal performance from these kids
may not be exactly what you want.
These are village kids.
You know, you want to sit down on a chair
and rock and sing something that
is simple and believable, and... felt.
John Williams managed to harness my singing,
especially singing of ballads.
And almost make the verse that I do with the shawl
kind of ballad-like,
very whimsical.
♪ Matchmaker, Matchmaker, I'll bring the veil ♪
♪ You bring the groom, slender and pale &
♪ Bring me a ring for I'm longing to be ♪
♪ The envy of all I see ♪
The first thing would be my going to the piano
with that particular actor, with Norman
and finding a key for the song
that fit that particular person.
♪ Matchmaker, Matchmaker, make me a match
♪ Find me a find ♪
♪ Catch me a catch
♪ Matchmaker, matchmaker look through your book [
♪ And make me a perfect match ♪
Ah, can we do it once more, please?
[Williams] And the next thing to do would be to sit with Norman
and discuss how he wanted to plan the shooting of the scene.
Because he wants to make these camera moves
which might elongate a shot,
or he may particularly want to take
a certain line in the song
in a close-up,
and the camera was going to pull back this way,
which may affect the way you kind of vocalize that line.
You may want to project it a little bit more.
[vocalizing]
So it's almost like asking the director
to storyboard what you're gonna do with musical numbers
as much as possible.
[Small] We sang the score in the recording studios.
[Williams] The singer would then go home
with his or her tape and practice for days.
[Small] We were given a cassette version of the score
and asked to master our delivery.
Then come onto the stage
to a pre-agreed upon choreography for the scene.
And Norman would shoot it.
All right. Rehearsal.
["Anatevka" playing]
♪ What do we leave? ♪
♪ Nothing much ♪
♪ Only Anatevka ♪
Bringing Fiddler to the big screen
was certainly one of my great challenges
and also Norman's.
In early discussions about what to do for the credits of the film,
the beginning of the film,
for which there was no music from the Broadway show,
we had to create some music, based on Bock and Harnick's score.
And Norman and I said, "Who is the greatest fiddler?"
At that time in the world, we would only say it would be Isaac Stern.
[Jewison] The Mirisch Company said,
"You can't hire Isaac Stern.”
"It's gonna cost too much money."
And I said, "What are you talking about?”
"He's the best violinist in the world,
and he's a Russian Jew!"
[stutters]
"I'm telling you, it will mean something to him."
So I flew to Chicago
where he was appearing with the Chicago Symphony.
["Violin Concerto in D minor"]
And I said, "I want you to be
the fiddler on the roof.
He says, "I can't climb up on a roof!"
I said, "No, no. You don't have to play it."
I said, "I will get an actor to play it."
"I'll get a musician, a violinist,
and he will sync with your recording,
but I want your sound.”
"I want your talent. I want your love.”
"I want your devotion to this."”
So I got back on the plane
and flew to Los Angeles.
And I was so excited.
I called John Williams and I said,
"I met with Isaac Stern!"
"I think he's going to do it!"
["Prologue” playing]
[Jewison] And John Williams,
the conductor and arranger on the film,
was very excited to have Isaac Stern.
And so, John wrote this wonderful
cadenza in the opening music.
My musical chore was to write something
in a Jewish tradition for Isaac
to accompany five, six, or seven minutes
of a camera probe of a Marc Chagall painting
which could have been very beautiful.
Marc Chagall was famous for Fiddler on the Roof and that image.
But sadly, we never got the painting,
but we got the cadenza and variations.
In the years since then, I put it into a kind of concert version
which we played all over the world.
There's a...
a tear, there's a tear,
there's pain.
In Polish, Russian, Romanian,
I want to say Yiddish music.
I know we had him for two days in London.
[Jewison] And I'll never forget when Isaac Stern came in,
all the orchestra went,
"Maestro, Maestro."”
And he walked in with his fiddle.
And then I had bought, at auction in Sotheby's,
a Chagall.
And it was a sketch of The Fiddler.
So now, as Isaac Stern walked into the orchestra
to record, I held up The Fiddler
and I tapped on the glass
and he looked, and he says, "We have Chagall here?"”
"We have The Fiddler here?"”
And he says,
"I'm going to play it a quarter tone flat."
Because, he said,
"Chagall's uncle used to get drunk
and climb up on the roof
and play the fiddle. That's where he got the idea!”
["Prologue” plays]
[Jewison] The production designer
is the one relationship that a director has
that starts long before the film begins
and doesn't end until the last shot.
And the good ones can have a great effect
upon the look of the film itself.
[door closes]
[Tevye sighs]
And all this from killing innocent animals.
-Don't touch anything. -All right.
[Jewison] Bob, as a production designer,
could bring to each story
a look that seemed to be organic,
that seemed to be part of those people and their lives.
With Norman, you get together and you talked a lot.
And you discussed mostly these human values.
What were we after? What were we trying to say
about this situation or this person?
[Jewison] I was in awe of Robert Boyle
because he had done all those films with Hitchcock.
[Narrator] Robert Boyle had recently designed
another movie version of a Broadway smash:
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
♪ This book is all that I need {
[Narrator] The big numbers were choreographed for studio sets
and shot as if the camera were facing a proscenium.
[cow mooing]
[Narrator] /In Fiddler, Jewison aims to stage the numbers
throughout his own little piece of the Old Country.
He wants Topol to sing "If I Were a Rich Man"
as Tevye feeds his horse, in a barn.
Working with John Williams and choreographer Tommy Abbott,
Boyle lays out the barn
so Topol can climb to the loft
at a precise moment in the song.
♪ There would be one long staircase just going up ♪
♪ And one even longer coming down ♪
♪ And one more leading nowhere, just for show ♪
♪ I wouldn't have to work hard ♪
♪ Ya ba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dum ♪
♪ If I were a biddy biddy rich ♪
[Williams] Just parenthetically,
just showing me that little bit of Topol up on the barn
that's worth the price of the ticket.
Just watching just that little... piece!
The collaborative process of making a musical number
fit all the choreographed action in the scene
is sort of basically... arithmetic.
Like Topol going up the ladder in his barn.
How many beats do we need to get from here to there?
We've got to take one step off the ladder so he gets up quicker.
Or we've got to add two beats of music
so that he can get up there a couple of beats later to make his turn.
Jewison is one of the few directors who understood that.
How do we do that musically?
[Boyle] The idea of Fiddler on the Roof is very concrete.
We understand the idea,
but to make it understandable in a physical sense,
we have to organize all of the different things that go into it.
Tevye's house.
Tevye's synagogue.
Tevye's relation of the religion to the community.
All of this has to be synthesized in such a way
That it becomes dramatically... involving.
What is important about a community? It's the people within it.
Look at this!
Look what it says in the paper!
[Boyle] So we have to make it physically possible
to bring all of the people into focus
so that they don't become too confusing.
We have to understand the people.
So we have to make it possible
for them to be understood.
"In a village called Rajanka,
all the Jews were evicted,
forced to leave their homes."
For what reason?
It doesn't say.
Maybe the Tsar wanted their land.
Maybe a plague.
May the Tsar have his own personal plague!
Amen!
The research for the film was,
a lot of it was right in this house.
My wife, Bess, had been a child actress
in the Yiddish theater in New York
and was steeped in the Yiddish language.
She could speak it.
She knew all about Sholem Aleichem,
and all of these stories, so
I didn't come to this without some previous knowledge.
[Jewison] I remember Bob bringing me a whole book
of photographs by Vishniac.
And he came to me and he says,
"I have found it."
"I have found the answer to the whole film."
He said, "We've got costumes, we've got everything.”
Because he was taking photographs of shtetl life.
This became our bible, Vishniac,
those photographs, because they were so honest.
They were so real.
And I based all my costume design
and everything on these photographs of shtetl life.
[Narrator] The Russian-French artist Marc Chagall
inspired the creators of the Broadway show
with paintings of a fiddler floating just above the roof,
or standing with one foot on the roof
and the other on the ground.
Jerome Robbins and his production designer Boris Aronson
emulated Chagall's sprightly and often surreal visual style.
The fiddler became the show's key metaphor.
Tevye says:
Could we have Tutti on the roof?
Dick, tell Tutti to get on the roof!
[Narrator] Jewison wanted to make Chagall's
archetype fiddle and dance in the real world.
Go on, children. Another story tomorrow.
[Jewison] I felt the ambience and the reality
you found on location, where a story actually took place,
put the actors into a different mode.
[Boyle] When we looked for locations,
we know we're going to do a musical play.
So we carried the music from the musical
with us on tapes,
and whenever we go into a village,
we'd turn on our tapes,
and try to feel how this music
or how this village was reacting to the music.
If it felt wrong, we'd pass up that town.
I'm not a dancer nor do I sing.
But I had this tape recorder,
and I would try to pace out the distances
according to the musical beats.
Because in doing a musical,
we were dependent upon the choreography.
In other words, how long it took to get from point A to point B.
If, according to the music,
let's say Miracle of Miracles or one of those,
you would sort of do a dance!
♪ Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles ♪
♪ I was afraid that God would frown ♪
♪ But like he did so long ago in Jericho ♪
♪ God just made a wall fall down [
[somber music playing]
[Jewison] ] said to Bob Boyle,
"Our biggest problem is to make this film
and make it look like we're in Russia."”
Now we can't go to Russia
because of the political system.
Let's get as close as we can to that look.
So then, someone said,
"You should try Yugoslavia
because Tito has the biggest standing army in Europe
and he has his own independence,
the Russians won't come in to Yugoslavia
because Tito was too strong."
And I said, "Does he like movies?"
And they said, "Oh yeah, yeah, he does like movies."
So we flew to Zagreb.
And then we went out into the countryside
and we found this little village called Lekenik.
And I said, "You know, this could be Anatevka, right here."
"Look at this village."
"These little old houses, barns."
"Look at this place.”
"We can build our own synagogue,
we can build Tevye's little barn."”
Bob Boyle says, "You know,
this looks exactly like it would
150, 200 years ago.”
So that's when we started to negotiate with Tito.
There were no wooden synagogues left
in Europe after the Holocaust.
Those had all been burned.
We found records of the old wooden synagogues
and we managed to build a synagogue based on those records.
We relied on peasant workmen.
People who were used to building barns
and houses out of wood.
And we found that the systems of construction
and even the kind of wood that was used in the building of the synagogue
were almost identical.
[Narrator] Critic and professor Alisa Solomon, in her book
Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof,
was the first to note how critical the synagogue was
to defining tradition in Jewison's movie.
Solomon marvels at Boyle's 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."”
"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."
As Solomon concludes,
"It made the movie's shul lovely and strange:
an old-world relic of quiet grandeur.”
Now, it would be nice...
What if we just went opposite?
We follow them around with a hand-held this way.
Then they come back into us this way.
-Yes -Now they're tight to us.
Now they start that way.
And we go this way. And all you would get is just--
That's right. Yes. That would be fine. Fine.
It's excitement, even if it's only good for--
["Wedding Celebration And The Bottle Dance" plays]
[Jewison] Ozzie Morris
was one of the most brilliant cinematographers in England
at that time.
And I knew he had worked with John Huston
and I knew he loved challenges.
[Morris] Fiddler was a cinematographer's dream.
It really was. I mean, it had everything in it, you know,
dawn, day, dusk, sunset, night,
winter, autumn and summer.
I went out early with Norman Jewison
to look at the locations
and he said, "I want you to come up with a color style for the film."
[Jewison] I said, "It's got to have a faded look to it."
"It's got to have browns
and no vibrant colors,
no hot colors.”
[Morris] So I said, "Look, I'll get a crew and I'll go out
and we'll do some tests.”
Now, I noticed that where we did it,
a place called Lekenik,
everything was the color of the soil, a rich brown.
All the people, the men that worked on the soil
had it ingrained in their faces, in their hands.
The houses had this sort of gray,
brown veneer on it almost.
And the interiors are the same.
It's the dust from the soil.
And I thought, well this is an idea,
but how do I make everything sort of brown?
[Jewison] So he said to me,
"Maybe I should shoot it through something?"
And he looked at a girl walking
down the... hall
and he said, "You know, if I had a...
maybe a silk stocking...
and I could cut a piece
and put it in front of the camera--"
I said, "Put it in front of the lens?!"
"Are you crazy?"
"You can't put it in front of the lens!"
[Morris] In those days, they didn't have seamless stockings,
They had a seam down the back and we had a big lens.
The front lens was very big,
so I needed a bit of stocking
that would cover the whole of the lens.
So I sent a clapper boy into Zagreb
to buy a whole bundle of ladies silk stockings,
the largest size there was.
So the clapper boy comes back with all these stockings.
And we did some tests.
And we sat and ran them.
And I remember Norman saying,
Let's go.
"Ozzie, that's the way I think Fiddler on the Roof should look."”
And the world was my oyster then.
[Jewison] I was an actor myself,
and that's helped me a great deal in my relationship with actors,
in the way I work with them.
But I don't think a director's ego should ever get in the way.
It's about Lazar Wolf, the butcher.
A good man. A fine man.
And I don't have to tell you he's well-off, no? Yes!
[Harris] On stage, I don't think I did a characterization of Yente.
I think I did it as Tzeitel.
But when Norman saw me do it, he said,
"No, no, I want you to impersonate Molly Picon."
♪ Hodel, oh Hodel! Have I got a match for you! ♪
♪ He's handsome, he's young! »
♪ Alright, he's 62
♪ But he's a nice man, a good catch, true?
♪ True!!
[Harris] And that was new for me.
I wish I'd even done it bigger.
♪ Tzeitel, oh Tzeitel! Have I made a match for you! ♪
You know. So, I was young.
But it was enough, it was enough.
[Small] Sometimes, Norman Jewison would actually--
Not so much in the dramatic scenes,
but sometimes in the fun scenes,
I think maybe he couldn't help himself,
and he would become a girl
and become one of the daughters and kind of
do the reading.
Not that he was giving us line readings,
but it was such a delight
to see him turn into a 16-year-old girl.
[Harris] Part of his genius is that he hires actors
that know their part,
and that are magically connected to their role
and just work.
And then he kind of stays out of the way.
[Marsh] Norman was a very gentle,
supportive director.
And then he would give suggestions
of what you were missing.
I felt insecure, not being Jewish.
I felt insecure that he was gonna change his mind.
I have a couple of letters,
notes that Norman wrote
to me that just mean the world to me.
Let me see, I have to--
It says,
"Dearest Michele,
something to carry you through this film and always."
"I hope this will be one of the most memorable experiences of your life."
"You are everything I wanted Hodel to be."
I'm going to tear up now.
"Much success and joy attends you always."
"Love, Norman."
I mean...
I'm a very good teacher.
I heard once that the rabbi who must praise himself
has a congregation of one.
[laughter]
Your daughter has a quick and witty tongue.
I think that Hodel really has kind of a mind of her own.
And she's not afraid to go with it.
I believe she was very brave.
In many ways I was... I still am,
insecure.
But that's where I found some confidence,
or I found my strength,
when I was playing a character.
So I discovered Hodel
as I was discovering myself
playing Hodel.
[Small] The chemistry with the sisters came pretty naturally.
We were all young women
and we were all living in the same place.
[Harris] The girls were my family. They were my sisters.
Michele and I were closer in age
and we would do girl talk.
It was very much like the family dynamic, to be truthful.
It didn't feel like acting.
[Marsh] Getting to know the actresses who played my sisters,
I would hang out with them and compare notes
on how a scene is going for you or not,
I think that brought us close together,
which gives you the sense of family.
["Wedding Celebration And The Bottle Dance“ plays]
Doing the wedding scene, Roz and I were very close.
She was just following through an instinct to give me a hug,
Michele, Neva and I decided
that we are really Method Actors
and we should be real to the time,
turn of the century in Europe.
So we all decided to grow our hair, everywhere.
And we're filming "Matchmaker?”...
♪ Matchmaker, matchmaker, you know that |
And Norman says, "Stop the cameras.”
"What the heck's going on here?"
"Well, we want to be real.”
"We wanted to look like European women."
He says, "Okay."
"I'm going to stop filming. Go back to the hotel,
shave your pits."
When we were filming "Matchmaker”,
I was always stuffing my apron
with donuts and things, and iced donuts and cupcakes.
Fabulous food, you know, for the crew and the cast.
We gained weight,
and Norman said, "You're getting to be pudgy.”
He had to close down shooting for about a week.
[indistinct yelling]
What's your line? What's your line?
"If the terms..."
"We drank on it, but the terms weren't settled.”
"Once a butcher, always a butcher."
Stop. Stop. Stop.
[Topol] On top of being lucky
to be directed by Jerry Robbins,
I had the privilege of working with Norman Jewison,
who needed to make it now right for the camera.
Not for the last row in the theater.
But for the camera,
which is three yards away from you
or two yards away from you.
So what can we do?
So that was a process
that definitely helped me
not to overdo things which you're allowed on stage,
so to speak, but to minimize, really.
Golde?
♪ Do you love me? ♪
Do I what?
♪ Do you love me? ♪
I remember the feeling, you know,
of translating it, so to speak,
transferring it from scenes that I do on stage.
It's a retrospect that he sings:
"The first time I met you was on our wedding day."”
♪ The first time I met you was on our wedding day ♪
♪ I was scared 3 I was shy!
♪ I was nervous ♪ ♪ So was !'
"But my father and my mother..."
♪ But my father and my mother ♪
"Told me that we would learn to love each other.
Now I'm asking..."
So now I'm asking, Golde,
♪ Do you love me? [
[Topol] So you can do it in a hundred ways
especially if you are on stage
and we were not restrained by Norman Jewison
who says, "The camera sees every nod
and every blink in your eyes”
and so on and so forth.
Don't work too hard.
Well, Anatevka hasn't exactly been the Garden of Eden.
That's true.
[Topol] After we are told that we have to leave Anatevka,
Tevye says,
"Someone should have set a match
to this place long ago."
And that's my father.
Someone should have set a match to this place
years ago.
A bench.
A tree.
What's a house?
Every night, when I say it,
I know it's my father.
When I worked in Poland,
I went to Volomin, to the shtetl where my father came from,
near Warsaw.
I took a camera and I went to the house he lived in
and I photographed the staircase
from the point of view of a young child.
And I took photographs of the apartment
and of the house from the outside,
of the courtyard, and so on and so forth, of their shop.
And when I came back home,
I went to my father and I showed him the photographs.
And I remember his face. He looked at it, I said to him,
"Do you recognize it? This is your..."
And he looked at it
and he wiped
all the photographs... to the floor.
Obviously, I knew why he did it.
I mean, that's the place that his parents,
his sisters didn't want to leave when he left
and thought that he was nuts to leave.
And none of them have survived.
And he was saying,
"I knew that that was going to happen.”
So when I play Tevye,
it's commemorating my father,
my grandfather, and my grand grandfather.
It was quite possible, I was worried about it,
but I found it was quite possible for me to identify with Tevye.
And to identify with the Jewish religion.
The more I studied it and the more I exposed myself to
Jewish homes, more orthodox homes.
I spent quite a bit of time in Jerusalem and
I identify I think with certain aspects of the Jewish religion.
I find it a very personal religion.
And any deep feelings I have at all
about God and about my own religion
are very personal.
[Narrator] Jewison embraced Tevye's monologues
as dialogues with God.
Sometimes God is Tevye's straight man.
I know, I know. We are the chosen people.
But once in a while, can't you choose someone else?
[Narrator] And sometimes, Tevye is God's fall guy.
Really. Sometimes I think,
when things are too quiet up there,
you say to yourself,
"Let's see. What kind of mischief
can I play on my friend Tevye?"
[Narrator] But God is always present around him.
Whether Tevye is conjuring some serious mischief
about a graveyard dream.
Or beseeching God to explain injustice.
[Jewison] You know, Topol was wonderful.
And it was remarkable
how well he did.
[Raim] Was he really looking at-- on a boom poll, a white dot?
Yeah. And he said...
And I said, "For instance, you're always talking about God,
and you look up there and you see him."
"And you should be able to--
But you must always look at the same place.”
♪ You decreed I should be what I am ♪
♪ Would it spoil some vast eternal plan ♪
So, he said, "Well, how can we do that?"
And I said, "I'm going to put a stick."
So |I got a big pole
and I put a white card on it.
And I held it up.
And he would look at the camera
and then he would look up at God.
And that worked.
[drum resounding]
[Jewison] We were always looking for sunrises and sunsets.
And I'll never forget when we did the wedding scene.
I wanted it to be shot just at sunset,
just with candles
lighting everybody's faces.
That's the way I see it.
I said it would be wonderful if everybody brought candles
and we lit the whole thing with candles.
Isn't there some way if we shoot it the mystic hour?”
So Ozzie Morris got three candles,
put them together, lit them all,
and made enough candle power.
And I must say that whole scene,
the wedding scene is probably the best
lit scene in any film I've done.
I mean, it is just magical.
And we managed to get the right tone
for the song and for the wedding number.
[Tevye] ♪ Is this the little girl I carried? ♪
♪ Is this the little boy at play? ♪
[Golde] ♪ I don't remember growing older ♪
♪ When did they? ♪
[Jewison] "Sunrise, Sunset”
is probably in my opinion,
one of the best songs in the whole score.
The lyrics of the song that Sheldon Harnick wrote
are so beautiful.
He's now in his 90s.
He's still alive. He's the only one who's still alive.
[Harnick] "Sunrise, Sunset” is about being a parent
and watching your children grow.
And when I worked on "Sunrise, Sunset”
I wanted it to be a song that they could sing at that ceremony.
So I thought, I don't even think I thought about it,
it's just when I started working it,
I guess unconsciously, was the idea that this is about a parent
singing about the children who have grown up
and thinking about that process.
The music is played at every wedding
[laughs]
Since 1972.
[laughs]
[Harnick singing] ♪ Is this the little girl I carried? ♪
♪ Is this the little boy at play? ♪
♪ I don't remember growing older ♪
♪ When did they? ♪
♪ When did she get to be a beauty? [I
♪ When did he grow to be so tall? ♪
♪ Wasn't it yesterday When they were small?
3 Sunrise, sunset Sunrise, sunset
♪; Swiftly fly the years ♪
♪ One season following another ♪
♪ Laden with happiness and tears ♪
You're not crying. What, how come?
What a lot of people may not know about Norman Jewison
is that he's a man who is fiercely committed to social justice.
I've met very few people who have his kind of passion,
where it's just in every aspect of his life.
[Jewison] I was in the Canadian Navy
and I joined up when I was very young, I was only 17-and-a-half.
And I only served a year-and-a-half or so, or two years.
And then the war was over.
But they gave you leave at the end.
So I got very excited because I thought,
"Well, I'll take a trip!"
I've always wanted to go to the States.
Go all the way to New Orleans.
I love jazz.
So I got on this bus.
And I sat at the back of the bus.
And then I heard the bus driver,
and he was looking in his rear vision mirror
and he says, "You trying to be funny, sailor?"
I said, "What's the problem?”
And he says, "Can't you read the sign?”
And I looked up, and there was a sign in the bus.
And all it said was, "Colored people to the rear.”
So I looked around me, and
there was a couple of African American people sitting there.
And then I looked, and then sure enough,
the whole front of the bus was white.
And they were all looking at me.
And I didn't know what to do, and I was very embarrassed.
"Cause I was a kid, you know,
I was very young, 19 years old.
I didn't know.
So I didn't know what to do, so |
picked up my sea bag and I said,
"Let me off the bus.”
He opened the door very...
[laughs]
Thankfully, I would imagine,
and put me off the bus.
And I stood there in the sun,
watching the bus pull away.
And I thought to myself,
of all the thousands of African American soldiers,
sailors, airmen,
all of those men and women
many of them who gave their lives defending America.
And I thought, "This isn't right.”
"When they come home,
they have to sit at the back of the bus?"
"They can't sit where they want?"
I thought, "This isn't right."
I was totally disillusioned in America
It was the politics. It was the fear
of what was going to happen to America at that time.
And there was problems in Israel, there was problems in Europe.
And unfortunately, two actors that I was supposed to audition,
Hanna Maron and Assaf Dayan,
were injured on trying to get to me
when the plane landed in Munich
and there was a terrorist attack.
So, there were things happening in the world.
And there was things happening in the world of Anatevka, in the story.
So I think it all started to churn together
as I was making the film.
On my way.
Where are you going?
Chicago. In America.
Chicago, America?
We are going to New York, America.
The exodus
of all the people in Anatevka,
going to different parts of the world,
some going to Israel, some going to America.
It's the history, in a way,
of the Jewish people moving
out of Eastern Europe and out of Russia,
at a period in history where they were being forced out
through antisemitism and pogroms.
[people screaming]
[glass shatters]
And so I wanted to put up a pogrom into the film.
I thought we could do something that they could never do in the play.
I wanted to show the Cossacks.
I wanted to show a little bit of the violence.
I wanted to take Perchik,
I wanted him to wave a red flag
and to show the rise of communism
against the Tsar,
against the establishment at that time.
[crowd cheering]
The time has come.
And the time is now.
Now we stand here before you
Not one, but many.
Many like you.
Students, workers,
striving for a better life.
Your father is coming.
Chava, let me talk to him. Let me tell him about us.
No, Fyedka. That would be the worst thing. I'm sure of it.
But let me try!
No. I'll talk to him.
I promise.
[Harnick] Chava, in one of the Sholem Aleichem Tevye stories,
she marries a Russian.
She marries outside of the faith.
Good afternoon, sir.
Good afternoon.
[Harnick] And in the original Tevye stories
and in our show, Fiddler on the Roof,
at that time, Tevye had to declare her dead.
That was what it meant to be a truly, deeply orthodox Jew.
If the daughter married out of the faith
you declared her dead.
[Topol] I can tell you that this is the point
that I cherish in the second act.
I'll tell you more than that,
I deliberately kill the jokes there.
Fyedka is not a creature, Papa.
Fyedka is a man.
Who says he isn't?
It's just that he is a different kind of man.
As the Good Book says,
"Each shall seek his own kind."”
When he says, "A bird may love a fish,
but where would they build a home together?"
That's a very good joke.
But I stretch it in a way
that they'll get the humor, but won't laugh.
The world is changing, Papa.
No, Chaveleh.
No.
Some things do not change for us.
Because I don't want them to laugh there,
I want them to be with Tevye
who in a few minutes will say, "Chava is dead to us.”
I want them to cry together with me.
Chava.
[Harnick] In one of the Sholem Aleichem Tevye stories,
when Tevye and the other children who are still with them,
when they have to leave Anatevka,
Chava comes back.
She has left her husband.
The relationship has not worked out.
And I was so glad we didn't know about that
because originally,
Joe Stein had to figure out how to end the Chava story.
What Joe did, he had Chava marry Fyedka.
Papa?
We came to say goodbye.
And they come to say goodbye
to Tevye and Golde and the family
when they're leaving for America.
Tevye, who has declared her dead,
just goes on with his packing and ignores her,
and ignores her and ignores her.
Goodbye, Papa.
Mama?
And then finally, just before they leave,
he can't stand it anymore, and he turns to them and he says:
And God be with you.
And it's so moving.
She's his child.
And God be with you.
We will write to you in America, if you like.
We will be staying with Uncle Avram!
Yes, Mama.
And no matter what's happened, she remains his child.
And he loves her and he has to connect with her.
So that's the last thing he says to her.
And then they leave.
[Raim] That's Joe Stein?
And that's Joe Stein.
Joe invented that ending.
We need the first light snow,
which I'm hoping we'll get, you know
just a very light November snow.
I found that if we used marble dust very lightly,
didn't try to make it look like there was a heavy snow...
I think it's fairly successful in the film
because we only shot on days where the sky was darker
than the snow itself.
Which really gives you an indication of winter.
They insisted I shoot the Hodel farewell scene
when she goes to Siberia and Tevye takes the railway.
And they insisted I shoot that
regardless of the weather in Yugoslavia.
But I refused and came back to London.
[Narrator] According to Oswald Morris,
the wedding celebration precipitated a crisis.
The cinematographer writes in his memoir:
"The shindig called for men to prance around with bottles on their heads."
"By now the nights were getting colder.”
["Wedding Celebration And The Bottle Dance“ plays]
"The dancers approached Norman,
who decided that the set should be rebuilt at Pinewood Studios,
where they would feel safe
and so perform much more spectacularly.”
["Wedding Celebration And The Bottle Dance“ plays]
"We spent over two months at Pinewood
completing the wedding and bottle dance sequences,
the famous dream scene,
and the confrontation in the bar."”
"When our small nucleus returned to Yugoslavia
in mid-February for the farewell scene,
what did we find?"
"Bright, crisp sunshine, and not a speck of snow!"”
"We completed the opening and closing long shots
at first light, before the sun had risen
and after it had set.”
"I used graduated filters
to give the sky an eerie effect.”
"I felt I had imbued the scene
with the right sombre, isolated quality."”
"Though I readily admit that having real snow
would have made it perfect.”
[Marsh] Probably before Perchik,
it never had dawned on Hodel that she would leave home.
It's a very difficult decision,
but... that's where her heart is.
And she has to go.
Will I even remember the words?
[laughs]
♪ How can I hope to make you understand ♪
♪ Why I do what !I do? &
♪ Once I was happily content to be I
♪ As I was ♪
I'm going to start crying.
♪ Where I was ♪
♪ Close to the people who are close to me ♪
♪ Here in the home |I love
♪ Oh, what a melancholy choice this is I
♪ Wanting home, wanting him ♪
The last day of filming was
"Far from the Home I Love".
Papa!
God alone knows when we shall see each other again.
Then... we will leave it in his hands.
[Marsh] And the last shot for me is climbing on the train
and waving goodbye to papa.
And then that was it.
It didn't feel real.
It didn't feel real, didn't want it to be.
It was the most important thing I've ever worked on.
And I don't think anything ever matched it again.
I don't think anything ever could.
I mean, what a gift I was given, what a gift.
[Harris] This film, for 30 years,
was a credit on my resume,
and that was a very good credit.
One day, I was taking a course
and it was a seminar, and I stood up and I said
"Look, some of you may remember me
from the film I did when I was very young,
Fiddler on the Roof, and I played Tzeitel."
I thought a bomb went off, because I went
"What's happening?"
Because there was this huge uproar of applause.
Wow! And I go, "What is that?"
And suddenly, it was a legend
and suddenly I was a celebrity.
And I went, "Wow!"
[Small] What Fiddler on the Roof means for me today
is the joy that I have when people tell me
"I saw the movie with my grandmother!"
"I played the part in high school.”
All of that.
[Turan] The film is almost of a piece.
It's almost like Brigadoon.
It exists in and of itself.
These actors came together,
and it wasn't a launching pad for anyone.
You know, it just existed in and of itself.
They created this world
and then like Brigadoon, they just went away.
One of the last things you see in the film
is it says, "Made in Yugoslavia.”
This is another place that is no more.
It is no more, you know.
Country is gone.
And it's just something very poignant about this kind of loss.
They didn't know that when they made the film.
They thought Yugoslavia was like Spain.
It would be there forever.
But now people say "The former Yugoslavia."
I mean, I guess that's one of the things that Fiddler is about.
Nothing is permanent.
They think they're going to be there forever.
They've always been there, and then one day
the authorities shows up and they say, "You're leaving.”
And the same thing happened with Yugoslavia,
I think those people thought that country would last.
And for variety of reasons it did not.
[Topol] I saw it in Yugoslavia.
I saw it in Turkey. I saw it in Tokyo.
And it doesn't matter whether they are Jewish or not Jewish.
I mean over one billion people saw the film.
So they couldn't all be Jewish.
And the issues
that Sholem Aleichem has brought in
and deals with are universal issues.
[Jewison] I'll never forget when United Artists called me,
and they said, "We just opened in Japan
and the Japanese love this film!"
And I said, "They love it
because it's the breaking down of tradition.”
"And they know all about that in Japan.”
"And I'm telling you,
Sholem Aleichem is going to speak to the Japanese
through Fiddler."
And they're going to understand
so much about not only about Jewish culture
and Jewish life,
but also about the problems
that have created Israel in the first place."
I'll never forget, when the film opened,
we had our first screening in Israel
for Golda Meir.
And Golda, the first half of the film,
she sat with Topol.
And then, for the second half,
I sat beside Golda Meir.
And I was waiting,
looking at her, out of the corner of my eye.
Does she like this?
And I was waiting to see what her reaction would be.
And then when they sang "Anatevka"
and everybody had to leave,
I was watching her and I saw...
she didn't want me to see that she was crying...
But she went, "Ah," like that.
I thought, "Oh I think she likes it."
And then she just put her hand out
and squeezed my arm.
And I thought...
Powerful.
And that was like a blessing.
And it meant a great deal to me.
In a way, I found myself in making the film.
I met Ben-Gurion in Israel,
because I was making Jesus Christ Superstar.
And I found that he was living
on the edge of the Dead Sea,
close to where I was shooting.
And I jumped in the jeep,
and we drove down to this tiny village.
Drove up and I went in
and a housekeeper came in with a little silver teapot,
poured me a cup of tea, with a little piece of sugar beside it.
And then in came Ben-Gurion
with the white hair all pulled out, you know.
And he says, "Norman Jewison."
"Norman Jewison."
"What kind of a Jew are you?"
I looked at him and I said,
"What is a Jew,
President Ben-Gurion?"
He looked at me,
got very quizzical.
"Anybody who is crazy enough
to want to be Jewish is Jewish!"
[laughs]
So I just thought,
"Thank God, I got it from Ben-Gurion."
"If I'm crazy enough to want to be Jewish, I'm Jewish."
"He told me that."”
"I accept that."
When I got married to Lynne
here in Malibu where we have a house,
I asked the local Rabbi,
which was a woman, if she would marry us.
And she said, "Well, I can marry anybody."
And I said, "We would like to get married under the chuppah.”
So we got a chuppah,
put it up, and we invited
some very close friends of ours to be the chuppah holders.
[laughs]
And we had...
a true Jewish wedding.
[Williams] I remember it as a great personal experience
working with Norman.
It was a life experience.
I haven't worked with him since, sadly, but he's a pal for life.
He said to me on the phone last night,
he said, "John, I'm older than you are.”
And I said to him, "Norman, you will never be older than I..."
"You'll always be younger than I am."
And he's younger than all of us, I think.
He's a very, very special, treasured man.
What is it about the fiddler and the fiddle
that we can't let go of?
I'm a musician.
We love the violin.
It's our inspiration as musicians.
It's the closest thing to a human voice that there is.
That's a fiddle.
That's why we need fiddlers.
[Jewison] When they're leaving in great despair
again it happens.
[Jewison hums]
And he turns and he looks and there's the fiddler,
standing all alone.
He says, "You're going to forget me?"”
"Are you going to leave me behind?"
"Are you going to leave your spirit behind?"”
So essentially the fiddler is the spirit of the Jewish people.
Whatever that is, whatever that means.
It's magic.
[loud applause]
Ladies and gentlemen
the The Irving G. Thalberg Award recipient
Mr. Norman Jewison!
["If I Were A Rich Man" playing]
[loud applause]
["If I Were A Rich Man" playing]
[Jewison sings] ♪ If was a wealthy man, ♪
♪ Oy! ♪
Oy!
Not bad for a Goy!
[audience laughs]