FIDDLER'S JOURNEY TO THE BIG SCREEN

Fiddler on the Roof, the film Pauline Kael (The New Yorker) called “the most powerful movie musical ever made,” will mark its 50th anniversary on Nov. 3, 2021. In an interview conducted for the documentary, Topol, who plays Tevye, estimates that one billion people world-wide have seen Jewison's Fiddler on the Roof.

For two decades, Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker Daniel Raim (Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story and Image Makers: The Adventures of America’s Pioneer Cinematographers), has been chronicling Jewison’s quest to bring a beloved stage musical into “the real world” and preserve the spirit and the culture of Eastern European Jewry.

In 1964, director-choreographer Jerome Robbins and his crack team wove Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye stories into a collective dream of shtetl life in Czarist Russia.

In 1969, producer-director Norman Jewison and his collaborators – production designer Robert Boyle, cinematographer Oswald Morris, composer John Williams, lyricist Sheldon Henrick, and Israeli star Topol, all heard in original interviews – rooted that dream in reality. They open up the material, ditch the show's ultra-stylized design, and film it on locations close to the historical sites where Jewish shtetls took root and pogroms swept them away.

Using behind-the-scenes footage from the early 1970s as well as interviews conducted by Daniel Raim in 2000, 2009, 2016, and 2021, the documentary puts us not just in the director's chair, but also in his heart and mind. We see how the experience of making Fiddler on the Roof deepens Jewison as an artist and revives his soul.

Director Norman Jewison is 94 years old. His favorite movie, Fiddler on the Roof, celebrates its 50th anniversary in November 2021. To paraphrase Hamlet on his father, “We shall not look on their like again.” We must tell his story now. FIDDLER'S JOURNEY TO THE BIG SCREEN will be the first feature documentary to explore the life and art of Norman Jewison, whose films address the themes of sustaining family and individual integrity at times of social and political change.

During my final year at the AFI, I met Jewison when I started making a documentary about my professor, Robert Boyle, who collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock on several classics (including North byNorthwest) and with Jewison on major movies like The Thomas Crown Affair and Fiddler on the Roof. I interviewed Boyle and Jewison about their epic collaboration on Fiddler for my Oscar-nominated profile of Boyle, The Man on Lincoln's Nose (2000). Bob and Norman became friends and mentors to me. I was blessed to learn directly from two masters about the art of cinema.

I continued exploring Fiddler with the movie's cast and crew, including Topol, lyricist Sheldon Harnick, and Jewison (again) at his Malibu home in 2017. After our interview, Jewison signed his autobiography, and his inscription moved me deeply: "For Daniel, Keep shooting those wonderful films! Thanks for a wonderful interview on my favorite film, Fiddler!”

My documentaries depict the art, craft, and soul of cinema through the eyes of artists who work behind the scenes. Just as making these films has enriched my own "movie love" and craft, I aim to deepen and widen everyone’s passion for movies——and pass the creative torch to rising generations. By treating the subjects of FIDDLER'S JOURNEY as complex stories and the people I interview as rounded characters, I hope to illuminate the struggle to create lasting art while living a full and engaged life. - Daniel Raim