We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Séeaa
by Pat Annesley
God, how I miss the bush. The wide open spaces, and the solitude. The kind of solitude that one needs, that I think everyone needs. Or at least, that I need.
Tuesday He got off the plane looking like a kid, all hyped up for a big game. He’d already hit the high spots on this promotional tour: New York, Los Angeles. But Toronto, for Norman Jewison, is a special place. It was home for his first thirty-three years. It’s where he got his start, where they still look at his work with that merciless, hypercritical eye reserved for hometown boys who made good. Elsewhere they call him a success, and leave it at that. A film phenomenon. All of his movies, except the ill-fated Gaily, Gaily, have been box-office blockbusters. The Cincinnati Kid. The Thomas Crown Affair. The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming. In the Heat of the Night. Jewison, they say, is probably the most successful producer-director in the business.
In Toronto, his very success works against him. They call him slick, commercial. Sellout is what they’re really saying. Gone Hollywood. But then, he’s a native son. And in this country we’re tough on our own.
He’s forty-five now. At the apex. Fiddler is the most lavish one yet, and the toughest: a $9 million biggie. A lot is expected of him now. He’s no longer the boy wonder, and he knows it. He keeps saying things like, “I’m not that young anymore. I don’t know how many pictures I have left in me.” He’s forty-five, but he still looks like a kid. A small, grey-haired, Puck-faced kid in a leather jacket and bellbottoms, playing traffic cop in the airport customs office as a small squad of uniformed chauffeurs coped with the fifteen pieces of luggage.
Outside, there were two limousines waiting. One for the VIP’s, one for the luggage. Here was Norman, in his brown leather jacket with the zipper, unzipped as usual. He was clowning around with one of those fifteen-cent miniature Canadian flags. He and Topol took it to the hockey game in New York, to let the other 20,000 people know they were cheering for the Toronto Maple Leafs.
There was Dixie, an ex-model, the girl he married in Toronto nearly twenty years ago. During the Hollywood years he told Life magazine: “‘I’d like to move to Europe, do pictures over there. I don’t like this going off on a film and leaving the family. First thing you know you'll be messing around with another woman.”
They moved to London in 1970.
Topol, the star, and his dark-eyed wife Galia, were turtlenecked and sheepskinned against Toronto’s first snowstorm of the season. ““Norman promised us autumn leaves in colors such as we have never seen,”’ said Topol. ‘‘All ablaze in the sunlight. Are you sure this is Toronto, Norman?”
But Norman was in a huddle with the United Artists public relations man. ‘‘How’re we doing on advance sales? Yeah? Great. Listen, have you seen the L.A. Times review? Fan-tastic. I want to find out how the receipts are going in New York...”