Politics & Power Quote by Norman Jewison

Jewison’s line lands like a weary shrug from someone who’s spent a lifetime turning personal vision into corporate property. It’s not a romantic complaint about “selling out” so much as a blunt description of how the American film business actually allocates power: authorship is celebrated in press tours, but ownership lives in contracts.

The intent is surgical. By saying “no rights for the artist,” Jewison collapses the myth of the director-as-author into a labor reality. In the U.S., the studio system and work-for-hire doctrine treat films less like novels and more like commissioned architecture: you may design the building, but you don’t get the deed. The subtext is a warning to younger filmmakers who assume creative credit guarantees creative control. It doesn’t. Final cut, distribution, restorations, marketing, even the ability to keep a film from being recut for TV or streaming can be negotiated away long before a camera rolls.

“Kind of belong” is doing heavy lifting, too. It’s the language of someone who knows the work is spiritually his and legally not. That tension mirrors the broader American posture toward art: we talk about culture as self-expression, then organize it as an IP pipeline. Jewison, a director associated with socially conscious, message-driven cinema, is quietly pointing out how even “important” films get folded into balance sheets.

Context matters: he’s from a generation that watched the auteur idea bloom in the 1970s, then saw conglomerates and franchise logic tighten the leash. The quote isn’t nostalgia; it’s a postmortem on ownership disguised as a casual aside.