It is surprising to watch CBC’s The Greatest Canadian and find Toronto-born filmmaker Norman Jewison absent among the top 100 finalists.

It is true that the director of In the Heat of the Night, Fiddler on the Roof and Moonstruck enjoyed his greatest successes for Hollywood. But so have performers Mike Myers, who finished at number 20, and Jim Carrey (29). Yes, Myers and Carrey are stars, and yes, their work is fresher in the minds of those who voted for them. But is it going out on a limb to suggest that Jewison’s aforementioned films will be remembered long after The Cat in the Hat and Bruce Almighty have faded from memory?

In addition to achieving loftier peaks than any other director from this country, Jewison’s greatest legacy to Canuck culture was founding the Canadian Film Centre in 1988, with backing from Mel Lastman, then mayor of North York, benefactor E.P. Taylor, the provincial and federal governments, and various other public and private contributors. The nation’s preeminent training ground for directors, producers, writers, editors and more recently new media artists, the CFC has been instrumental in launching the careers of filmmakers such as Clement Virgo, Vincenzo Natali and Steven Surjik.

‘I’m very proud of that place,’ says Jewison, sipping noodle soup in his office in a 100-year-old converted loft in downtown Toronto. It is the same building that houses the office of Shadow Shows, the shingle of Bruce McDonald (who was his driver on Agnes of God), as well as that of Virgo. Both filmmakers look up to the ever-bearded and bespectacled and oft-ballcapped 77-year-old director as a mentor.

‘Seven hundred graduates in 15 years – that’s pretty good,’ he says of the CFC. ‘It was a place that was needed. We were the only country that didn’t have a film institute, a center for advanced film studies. There were courses at universities – Ryerson and York and stuff like that, but I’m talking about an AFI or the British Film Institute. I think it’s probably one of the best things I can leave behind.’

Jewison is in a reflective mood these days with the release of his autobiography This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me, from Key Porter Books, which recounts his illustrious six-decade career in film and television. It makes for a fascinating read, impressing with how closely involved the director has been to many of the people and events that helped shape the times.

One of his big breaks was directing an anxious Judy Garland in her legendary 1962 live CBS comeback special, with guest spots featuring Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. His entree into movies came later that year thanks to Tony Curtis, who hired him to direct the comedy 40 Pounds of Trouble. In 1966, he became one of the first western filmmakers to travel behind the Iron Curtain, accepting an invitation to screen his Oscar-nominated Cold War satire The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming in Moscow for the Soviet Filmmakers Union. However, the young director quaked in his boots when John Wayne, introduced to him at a Hollywood New Year’s Eve party, barked, ‘What are ya? One of those goddamn pinkos?’

Jewison was called back to live television to produce ABC’s 1981 Academy Award broadcast, which was subsequently postponed when President Ronald Reagan was shot. A couple of years later, while shooting A Soldier’s Story in Arkansas, he befriended 37-year-old governor Bill Clinton, who, during his presidency 11 years later, would invite Jewison and his wife Dixie to stay at the White House and sleep in the Lincoln bedroom.

But the biggest honor of his career came in 1999, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented him the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for producing a high-quality body of work. It made up for the fact that he had lost out on the directing Oscar three times.

What also makes Jewison deserving of an honorary maple leaf is that, unlike many Canucks who went southside for showbiz glory – he left his CBC directing gig for CBS in 1957 – the nomadic filmmaker returned to his home and native land in 1978, buying a farm in Caledon Hills, northwest of Toronto, where he lives to this day. He would later shoot his films Agnes, Moonstruck and The Hurricane here. In fact, he physically left Hollywood back in the late 1960s, despite a string of hits there including Russians, Heat and The Thomas Crown Affair.

The socially conscious director who tackled civil rights issues in Heat, A Soldier’s Story and The Hurricane became disillusioned with the U.S. after the assassinations of Martin Luther King, at whose funeral he marched, and Robert Kennedy. Kennedy, then a New York senator, had shown support for Heat and its groundbreaking racial themes while running for leadership of the Democratic Party. In fact, Jewison and Dixie were waiting to meet up with Kennedy and wife Ethel at a house party the night the senator was killed.

In a move he would later regret, Jewison decided to protest the state of the union by returning his and his family’s green cards to the U.S. Department of Justice with the proclamation that they no longer wished to live in its country. The clan packed its bags and moved to the U.K., where Jewison was to direct the movie version of the musical Fiddler, and that remained his base until he had a yearning to come home.

In the book, Jewison speaks of his drive to be in showbiz starting early on in school. ‘I loved to perform,’ he writes, ‘loved the applause and the attention, never tired of it from my first days on stage when I was only six…’

But he did not get as much applause and attention as he would have liked for his most recent effort, last year’s The Statement. The thriller stars Michael Caine as a Frenchman who aided the Nazis during World War Two and finds himself pursued four decades later by a mysterious assassin. It marked the first time Jewison collaborated with his son Kevin, a cinematographer based in France. According to Variety, the $27-million Canada/France/U.K. copro has grossed under US$800,000 in Canada, the U.S., Australia and the U.K., with releases upcoming in Spain and Mexico.

Film didn’t catch on

The director says he is satisfied artistically with the film, but understands why it hasn’t caught on with moviegoers.

‘There was nobody to root for,’ he says. ‘I knew going in it wasn’t going to be commercial. How can you make a film about a despicable murderer and expect people to really respond to it? But it exposed a lot of things I wanted to talk about. [Box office risks] come with the territory.’

Serendipity Point Films’ Robert Lantos, The Statement’s Canadian producer, told Playback several months ago that another factor that hindered the film’s success was the decision to release it last December.

‘The initial strategy was that the film should be in the marketplace during awards season in case Michael Caine’s or Norman Jewison’s work attracted interest,’ Lantos said. ‘But [last] year was particularly crowded. It was the most crowded any distributor that I know can remember. But we decided that this is what we’d do. And frankly, it resulted in an extremely hurried post-production schedule, because the film was in the theaters five months after we finished shooting.’

Undeterred by the reception to The Statement, Jewison has two new features on the go, both seeing him returning to genres that have worked for him before. High Alert, the script lying on his desk, is a political comedy which he compares to Russians.

‘It plays off the paranoia of Americans towards terrorists,’ he explains. ‘Because of the timing, this film has to be made as soon as possible.’ He is looking to produce with his son Michael and U.S. producer David Jablin (The Don’s Analyst) from a screenplay by a pair of scribes who have written for David Letterman.

Further along in development, The Waltz of the Tulips, a remake of the Italian film Bread and Tulips (2000), sees the director reuniting with writer John Patrick Shanley, who contributes the foreword to Jewison’s book and with whom he shared a great success on Moonstruck. The pair hopes to recapture some of the flavor of their Oscar-winning romantic comedy. Jewison spoke to his first-choice actress about the lead role at the recent Toronto International Film Festival.

‘It’s a magical, poetic romance, and I would like to do that,’ he says. ‘I’m in the mood for it.’

The future of both projects, developed for MGM/UA, has recently been thrown into doubt, however, with the sale of the company to Sony a couple of months back.

But Jewison seems more than happy to continue navigating through the treacherous financing waters that make movies a ‘terrible business.’ When asked about his plans to ever hang up the bullhorn, Jewison recalls a 1960s Malibu cocktail party encounter with William Wyler, the great director of The Best Years of Our Lives and Ben-Hur.

‘He was in his late 60s and suffering from emphysema and wheezing away,’ Jewison recalls. ‘He was looking out to sea and smoking a cigarette, and I walked up to him and said, ‘Willy, when is it all over?’ He kind of growled and he said, ‘It’s all over when your legs give out.”