Towards Rollerball

This chapter discusses the origins of Rollerball (1975) in the context of science-fiction cinema in the late 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, when the genre began a move to the centre of the commercial film business. It also took a distinctly dark turn as the impact of the Vietnam War, economic recession, the OPEC oil crisis, debates about overpopulation, environmental destruction, and, in the US, urban decay, and the political corruption revealed by the Watergate scandal worked their way into public consciousness. These concerns were all reflected in 1970s science fiction, and particularly percolated up in the decade's dystopian offerings. They also gave rise to the paranoia cycle of Hollywood thrillers that appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the context of which aspects of Rollerball can be viewed. The chapter then outlines some of the broader cultural debates William Harrison and Norman Jewison found themselves part of during the same period, principally concerns over increasing violence in professional American sport and society more generally, technological change, and growing corporate power.

Making Rollerball

This chapter examines the making of Rollerball (1975). It starts with an overview of the cast and crew and the filming locations, principally Munich, West Germany, where Norman Jewison shot the film's game sequences and also utilised other aspects of the city's modernist architecture. For the making of Rollerball, Jewison brought together three of the leading lights of British post-war cinema — production designer John Box, Douglas Slocombe as director of photography, and Julie Harris as costume designer. Acclaimed European conductor André Previn scored the soundtrack, largely comprised of classical music. The chapter then presents a detailed scene-by-scene breakdown of the film, considering the interplay of their various contributions to Rollerball and how this influenced the final look and feel of the film, including how it blended the film's signature violent action with an examination of more sophisticated dystopian social themes.

‘This Was Never Meant to be a Game’: Rollerball’s Reception then and Now

This chapter focuses on Rollerball's reception, the immediate critical reaction and box office performance and more recent critical commentary. It studies how the publicity efforts of the film's distributor, United Artists (UA), helped to pump prime controversy over the film's violence. In the United States, at least, this overshadowed Norman Jewison's desire to make a picture critiquing corporate power and rising violence in sport, contributed to its poor critical reception as an exploitation film, and even fuelled short-lived speculation that Rollerball might become a real sport. The chapter then looks at the film's cultural influence, concluding with some brief remarks on Rollerball's place in the broader body of murder game films. This is a broad cinematic output that spans reality TV parodies, Italian exploitation cinema and B-movies, mainstream science fiction, and YA dystopian films.

Introduction: ‘History Really is Gone’

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Rollerball, the 1975 dystopian science fiction film of Canadian-born director and producer Norman Jewison. Rollerball was based on a short story in Esquire magazine, ‘Roller Ball Murder’, by William Harrison. While the increasingly extreme nature of reality television remains a central framework within which to critically analyse Rollerball, the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States in November of 2016 opens up new ways of watching the film and heightens other ways in which it remains relevant. The most obvious of these is Rollerball's depiction of unchecked corporate power. Another aspect of Rollerball's narrative highlighted by the Trump presidency is the rise of so-called ‘fake news’. This book examines how the film simultaneously exhibits the cinematic aesthetics of mainstream, exploitation, and art-house cinema, in the process transcending its commercial prerogative of action entertainment to be a sophisticated and disturbing portrayal of a dystopian future.