Beware of autobiography, biographers will tell you: Memoirs are automatically suspect; no one can see himself in the round. Or, to borrow from the tools of director Norman Jewison’s trade, too many camera angles disappear in the self-told story. Crucial details drop onto the cutting room floor.

I’ve been in control booths with television directors and have appreciated how the director has to have a sense of split-second timing. Norman Jewison thrived in the live television of the 1950s, demonstrating a talent for making the small screen scintillate with superb camera-switching. He caught all sides of performers such as Judy Garland and Harry Belafonte.

But Mr. Jewison was more than a technically proficient professional. He was a groundbreaker. He stood up to Lucky Strike when its parent company balked at featuring a black singer on the sponsor’s show “Your Hit Parade.” What if, Mr. Jewison countered, the story got out to the national press that a black man had been banned? Was Mr. Jewison threatening his own sponsor? Not at all, he replied. The story was bound to get out, and he was just “worried about the reputation of the American Tobacco Company.”

The show aired as Mr. Jewison had planned it, proving to him that “the lesson, though I didn’t quite see it then, was to push back, to not let injustice persist, to understand that bigots often don’t like the light to shine in their dark corners.” Mr. Jewison challenged the racist status quo again when he persevered with his Harry Belafonte special, even though 20 CBS affiliates would not air the show.

Mr. Jewison is Canadian, and he is not Jewish – two points he makes in his autobiography. Even as a child, however, he identified with minorities, pretending to be a Jew – a performance that apparently remained effective, since he was offered and accepted the job of directing “Fiddler on the Roof.” He responded to his Jewish producers with the question: “What would you say if I told you I was a goy?” Fortunately, it made no difference to them, since their aim anyway was to reach a worldwide audience, not just Jews.

After his discharge from the Canadian navy, Mr. Jewison toured the American South in the late 1940s and saw segregation firsthand. He got off a bus after a bus driver stopped the vehicle, insisting that Mr. Jewison leave the section in the back set aside for blacks. Such encounters drove him to make daring films like “In the Heat of the Night.”

As an autobiographer, Mr. Jewison is entitled to set boundaries: One is that he says very little about his marriage (apparently happy) or other aspects of his personal life. Instead, he rewards us with illuminating story after illuminating story about how he worked as a director and how he handled an industry in which most movies that ought to get made never do.

This tack is precisely what leads him to the book’s one huge disappointment. Mr. Jewison had his heart set on filming William Styron’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Confessions of Nat Turner.” The novel had come with a blurb from no less than James Baldwin, who said Styron had “begun the common history – ours.”

But this was the late 1960s, the heyday of the Black Power movement. Styron, a Southerner, drew fire not merely from black militants but also from several black historians and intellectuals. “Ten Black Writers Respond,” a book-length collection of essays, aimed at nothing less than demolishing Styron’s reputation.

His main offense was to work into the plot of his novel Nat Turner’s love for a white girl, Margaret Whitehead. Styron extrapolated from Thomas Grey’s interview with Turner, published under the title “The Confessions of Nat Turner.” Grey, a white man, reported Turner telling him that he had personally killed (with great difficulty) only one white person, Margaret Whitehead.

Black critics pounced on Styron for perpetuating the myth of blacks lusting for white flesh. Yet Styron’s novel is one of the most beautifully written and exalted novels in American literature. James Earl Jones initially agreed to star in Mr. Jewison’s film, only to withdraw as the inferno enveloped Styron.

Most of what I have related is absent from Mr. Jewison’s account. Indeed, the name of James Earl Jones is not even mentioned. Nor is that of Eugene Genovese, the renowned historian who heroically defended Styron in the pages of the New York Review of Books. Mr. Jewison, a self-avowed liberal, apparently lost heart, and in his autobiography he declares that not making the film was the “biggest disappointment of my career.”

But what happened, Mr. Jewison? Was it impossible to get a replacement for James Earl Jones? Did you fail to raise the money for the film? Or does the fate of this unproduced film in fact show the demise of liberalism because of its inability to sustain its conviction when challenged by bigoted blacks? Mr. Jewison had no problem with white racists, but the very idea of black racism – in this case, judging a work of literature by the color of the writer’s skin – seems to have been more than Mr. Jewison could handle. What happened to Mr. Jewison’s desire to “push back” and to “shine a light in dark corners”?

“The Confessions of Nat Turner” was indeed an incendiary book, and it should have been a film that honored the power of art to transcend racial lines. But it is difficult for autobiographers to see the irony of their own stories, and that is why biography will always be autobiography’s nemesis.