Politics & Power Quote by Norman Jewison

Jewison’s line has the weary candor of someone who’s spent a lifetime making culture inside a system designed to own it. The casual “as you know” is doing work: it treats the premise as settled fact, a shared industry joke that isn’t funny. By framing the absence of “rights for the artist” as a national trait - “in America” - he’s not just complaining about one deal; he’s pointing to an ethos where art is routinely treated like an asset class. The filmmaker supplies the vision, the studio holds the deed.

The subtext is equal parts resignation and warning. “Whatever films I’ve made kind of belong to the studio” sounds soft, even polite, but it’s a hard statement about power: authorship becomes honorary once the paperwork is signed. “So if they want to remake it they can” lands as an uncluttered conclusion, stripping remakes of their supposed reverence. This isn’t about creative conversation across generations; it’s about permissions and revenue streams.

Context matters. Jewison came up in the studio-era aftershocks, when directors were gaining public prestige but not always legal leverage, and he worked on films that became part of the cultural bloodstream. His quote anticipates today’s IP obsession, where studios mine libraries and recognizable titles because familiarity lowers financial risk. The intent isn’t romantic self-pity; it’s an insider’s diagnosis: in the American film business, “ownership” is the real auteur.