James Caan in Rollerball (1975)

Rollerball lobby card set image courtesy Heritage Auction Galleries

Director Norman Jewison and United Artists delivered the hard-hitting Rollerball to movie theaters in 1975. James Caan plays the futuristic superstar, with John Beck as his teammate and John Houseman as the big boss. Jon-a-than! Jon-a-than!

William Harrison’s Roller Ball Murder

Rollerball is based on the short story “Roller Ball Murder” by American writer William Harrison, which first appeared in the September 1973 issue of Esquire. Harrison came up with the idea for his “little experimental story” after watching an especially raucous basketball game at the University of Arkansas, where he was a professor of English and Creative Writing.

Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, the story later appeared in a collection of 13 short stories by Harrison titled Roller Ball Murder, published by Morrow in 1974. Warner Books released the movie-tie in paperback one year later, with an illustration of a spiked rollerball player gracing the cover.

Norman Jewison Directs Rollerball

Norman Jewison produced and directed Rollerball for Algonquin Productions and United Artists Pictures. William Harrison was credited with the screenplay, though the writer later remarked that Jewison “did everything to my script except use it.” Musical director Andre Previn coordinated the movie’s soundtrack, which features classical compositions by Tchaikovsky, Bach, Shostakovich and Albinoni.

James Caan heads the cast as the legendary Jonathan E., whom Norman Jewison had selected after seeing Caan play doomed Chicago Bears running back Brian Piccolo in Brian’s Song (1971). Other players include John Houseman (Mr. Bartholomew), Maud Adams (Ella), John Beck (Moonpie), Moses Gunn (Cletus), Pamela Hensley (Mackie), Barbara Trentham (Daphne), John Normington (Executive), Shane Rimmer (Rusty), Burt Kwouk (Japanese Doctor), Robert Ito (Houston Strategy Coach) and Ralph Richardson (Librarian).

Rollerball Filmed in Europe

Rollerball was filmed primarily in Germany, with the futuristic BMW Building and Museum in Munich serving as the headquarters for the Energy Corporation. The gaming sequences were staged at the Olympic Basketball Arena in Munich, the city that had hosted the terrorist-scarred 1972 Summer Games in which 11 Israeli athletes were slain. Citizens of Munich occupied the fenced-in stands, playing the role of rabid, bloodthirsty spectators.

During filming, the sport of rollerball – a cross between roller derby, football, hockey and lacrosse – became so popular that in between takes cast members, extras and stuntmen played the game for fun. Following the movie’s release, some audience members found the game so irresistible that talk began about forming rollerball teams and leagues. That kind of thinking horrified director Norman Jewison, who had intended Rollerball to be a statement against mindless violence.

Rollerball: The Future of Sport

Rollerball is set in the year 2018, where huge, multinational corporations have supplanted governments as the supreme leader. One of the ruling entities is the Houston-based Energy Corporation who, with its various other corporate brethren, control all access to the world’s goods, transportation, housing and energy needs.

Rollerball, an ultra-violent sport owned by the corporations, has replaced war as an outlet for the citizenry’s anti-social tendencies. Clad in padded uniforms, helmets and spiked gloves, the players traverse an oval track on roller skates and motorcycles, crashing into each other as they attempt to deposit a metal ball into a magnetic goal. The game is an international phenomenon, with teams representing such cities as Houston, New York, Madrid, Rome, Manila, Tokyo and Pittsburgh. Before each contest, the P.A. announcer asks that everyone please rise for the playing of “our Corporate Anthem.”

The Houston club, owned by the Energy Corporation (a precursor to Enron?), is led by the flashy Jonathan E., the game’s reigning superstar whose name is chanted in reverence by his fans. Jonathan E.’s popularity, however, is seen as a threat in a society where individualism is secondary to the collective goals of the global corporate state. That is why Mr. Bartholomew, powerful head of the Energy Corporation, wants him to retire, offering rollerball’s glamour boy a lucrative severance package in the form of his own television highlights show and certain “privileges” in society.

Rollerball Opens in New York City

Rollerball opened at New York City’s Ziegfeld Theater on June 25, 1975.

“It’s as if Mr. Jewison, and William Harrison…really believed that things like war, poverty and disease could be so easily wiped away and that something like Rollerball could be inflated into such an effective soporific. The Romans threw Christians to the lions, but that didn’t keep the lower orders quiet for long,” observed Vincent Canby of The New York Times (6/26/75).

“There’s really not much more serious violence here than in a good Three Stooges comedy – mostly a lot of head-spinning close-ups of body blocks, gang tackles, drop kicks, kidney punches and elbowed eyeballs, accompanied by whopping and whacking and bopping and grunching sounds…” reported Sports Illustrated (7/7/75).

Rollerball Notes, Remake, DVD

• Rollerball did lackluster business at the box office.
• Some sports fans of the era compared James Caan’s Houston club to the extremely physical Philadelphia Flyers of the National Hockey League (indeed, the two teams share the dominant color of orange), who as the vaunted “Broad Street Bullies” had captured the Stanley Cup in 1974 with their rough, intimidating “rollerball” style of play.
• Other movie reviews: Time (7/7/75), The New Yorker (7/7/75), Saturday Review (8/9/75), Mademoiselle (9/75), Christianity Today (8/8/75).
• Remake: Rollerball (MGM, 2002) starring Chris Klein, Jean Reno and LL Cool J.
• On DVD: 1975’s Rollerball (MGM, 1998).