week via the ultimate communications medium of Multi-vision. Each major city will, of course, avidly support its own Rollerball team, playing the game under the corporate colors of the major conglomerate with which the city is allied.

Houston, Texas, for example, is an Energy city and, at the time the film begins, the city which sponsors the World Champion Rollerball team, led by a battle-scarred veteran named Jonathan E., played by James Caan. Rollerball has been his entire life for more than eight years and he enjoys all of the privileges accorded to the top player of the game. Because he is becoming an international folk hero, however, Jonathan is asked to retire by the corporation executives, who feel that his stubborn independence of spirit is a threat to their carefully controlled comfort-motivated society. When he refuses, out of loyalty to his team, the executives decide to let the game itself take care of him, by eliminating enough of the rules to change Rollerball from a rough sport into mayhem.

Rollerball is based upon William Harrison's original short story published in Esquire. The screenplay, written by Harrison, is the author's first attempt at screen-writing.

In Jewison's opinion, Rollerball concerns several pertinent aspects of contemporary life - the increasing violence and brutality in audience sports today, as well as the diminishing threshold of individual shock and outrage at the creeping depersonalization of life that has accompanied the rapid development of our comfortable materialistic, computerized and franchised society. He honestly believes, although he hopes it never happens, that the possibility of a vicious game like Rollerball becoming popular is far from fantasy.