National Arts Club pays a warm tribute to Norman Jewison

By Kevin Lally

Last night, New York City's 101-year-old National Arts Clubpresented veteran Canadian producer-director Norman Jewison with its Medal of Honor for Film at a warm and sometime raucous dinner ceremony at its ornate headquarters, the Tilden Mansion at Gramercy Park. Among those paying tribute to the 82-year-old Oscar winner (looking hardyand healthy) were producer David Picker, famed screenwriter William Goldman, Whoopi Goldberg, Olympia Dukakis (an Oscar winner in Jewison's comedy classic Moonstruck), and Jewison's close friend Harry Belafonte. Professor Richard Brown of the long-running New York film class/interview session "Movies 101" guided the audience through the highlights of the director's career (The Cincinnati Kid, The Russians Are Coming, In the Heat of the Night, Fiddler on the Roof, ...And Justice for All, A Soldier's Story, etc.) and composers Alan and Marilyn Bergman serenaded the crowdwith "The Windmills of Your Mind," their Oscar-winning song from Jewison's hit The ThomasCrown Affair.

Goldberg, who starred in Jewison's perhaps most unrememberedmovie, Bogus (1996), joked, "I did not make a deep, heavy film with Norman. Most black people in the room did." Race relations and Jewison's role in bridging the races were themes of the night. Belafonte, whose affection for Jewison was palpable, told a very long anecdote about how the two met during the Canadian's early years as a TV director. Jewison helmed Belafonte's two critically acclaimed TV specials of 1959 and 1960, sponsored by Revlon in a move to regain some prestige after the cosmetic company's involvement in the "$64,000 Question" quiz show scandal. But then Revlon CEO Charles Revson made one request of Belafonte--to stop mixing the races of his supporting singers, dancers and musicians. Belafonte and Jewison jointly rebuffed Revson, and that was the end of Belafonte's award-winning series. The legendary singer-actor-activist concluded his remarks by telling Jewison, "There's hardly a black artist you haven't given a shot to... It's my turn again."

Jewison himself recalled his first exposure to racism in America as a young Canadian sailor on leave in Memphis, sitting at the back of the bus and gruffly being ordered to move up front, away from the "colored" section. "It wasn't logical," Jewison said of a country in which black men died on the battlefront defending America but couldn't sit in the same diner or drink from the same fountain as whites.

Several speakers commented on the moment in Jewison's 1967 Best Picture winner In the Heat of the Night when Sidney Poiter's Philadelphia cop returns the slap of a white racist. It was a slap African-American moviegoers would never forget, and a bracing corrective to years of demeaning stereotypes. Norman Jewison laughed heartily throughout the ceremony, with the joy of a man who's put his social consciousness into his art and helped America see a better image of itself.

Pictured: Harry Belafonte and Norman Jewison. Photo by Ben Gabbe.