TALKING TAXI TALES TO TINSELTOWN - George Jonas

It would be presumptuous of me to call Norman
Jewison a friend, but we've had some pleasant dinners
over the years, and when I ran a motorcycle racing
team in the 1980s, the maker of Fiddler On The Roof
was a sponsor.

This doesn't colour my view of his recent
autobiography, This Terrible Business Has Been Good
To Me, but as an old-fashioned editor put it once, if a
journalist has broken bread with someone he writes
about, he should let the reader know.

So now the reader knows -- somewhat superfluously,
for this isn't going to be a review of Jewison's
autobiography. Book reviews run in another section of
the paper. Here I'm only noting a couple of thoughts
the book has triggered in me.

The first has to do with driving a taxi in Toronto,
which the director of Jesus Christ Superstar did in
1950. This had all sorts of echoes for me, having done it myself a few
years later. In those days, the
meter started at 35 cents. After 10 to 12 hours on the night shift, a
driver might clear $15 or $20 --
about $100 in today's dollars, enough for a young man's needs, or some of
them.

Driving a taxi, like tending bar, was supposed to offer great opportunities
for learning about people.
Inebriated passengers provided especially instructive lessons about human
nature. Along with flexible
hours, this was what made pushing a cab the job of choice for budding
writers and actors.

The creator of Moonstruck recalls his stint as a taxi driver as "a
fascinating period" in his book. As he
puts it: "If you ever wish to study human behaviour up close, drive a cab."
He writes that "I would use
these observations of human behaviour time and time again in the course of
my career as an actor,
writer and director."

No doubt Jewison did just that, as did a handful of other ex-cabbies who
happened to be gifted and
perceptive. I'll suggest, though, that the same educational opportunity
won't turn most taxi drivers
into film directors. As academies for the performing arts, taxies are
vastly overrated.

For all the good pushing a cab will do for most people's careers as
writers, they might as well take a
creative writing course at a university. They won't learn much about
writing there either, but at least
their instructors are less likely to be sick all over them.

The fact is, people aren't shaped by their experiences, but by what they
bring to their experiences
before they ever have them. A born actor-writer-director like Jewison
benefits from driving a cab.
People who aren't, won't. Which is why they should go to accredited
acting-writing-directing schools
that give them diplomas, and leave driving cabs for genuinely talented
people like Jewison.

On to the next point. The director of The Russians Are Coming! The Russians
Are Coming! describes his
business -- show business -- as "terrible" in the title of his
autobiography, but then adds that it has
been good to him.

One takes the first proposition for granted, but the second begs the
question of why a terrible business
should be good to some people.

In Jewison's case, it's tempting to say: Well, because his story-telling
instincts and capacity for hard
work are coupled with a steely will underneath a jovial personality. But
while this might describe the
maker of In The Heat Of The Night accurately, it doesn't explain why show
business has been unkind to
some who share his qualities -- or kind to others who don't.

Luck? Well, luck plays a part in most lives, but rarely amounts to an
explanation. I kept reading
Norman's book with the uneasy feeling that I was missing something. It was
when I tried the answer
that show business has probably been good to Jewison because (keep it
simple, stupid) he has made
good shows, that the coin suddenly dropped.

The title of the book is misleading. Jewison's movies weren't uniformly
successful, either critically or
at the box office. Even his undisputed hits weren't always suitably
recognized. The Academy Award for
Best Picture and Best Director eluded both Fiddler On The Roof and
Moonstruck. In fact, until he
received the Thalberg Award for lifetime achievement in 1999, Norman never
got an Oscar.

Jewison made 25 feature films between 1962 and 2003. His terrible business
has been good to him --
really good -- in relation to six. Some of the rest did respectably; others
barely so. A few sank without
a trace.

It isn't, then, that his terrible business has been so good to Norman. It's
rather that he has had the
capacity to take his business in his stride. He could meet triumph and
disaster and treat the two
impostors just the same. "Never mind the gross," he could honestly say in
his Thalberg Award
acceptance speech. "Top Ten or Bottom Ten, just tell stories that move us
to laughter and tears."

I'd argue that Jewison's lifetime achievement has been to remain what the
poet Rudyard Kipling
famously called "a Man." No small accomplishment in a terrible business.

мй National Post 2005

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TALKING TAXI TALES TO TINSELTOWN by George Jonas National Post February 28, 2005

TALKING TAXI TALES TO TINSELTOWN
by George Jonas
National Post
February 28, 2005