News and Events
FTT Talks presents
Haskell Wexler, Filmmaker and Cinematographer,
Academy Award winner
Browning Cinema, DeBartolo Performing Arts Center
Who Needs Sleep? (2006)
Wed 4/11, 7:00 PM
This is a FREE but ticketed event. Call the Ticket Office at 574.631.2800 to reserve tickets.
Presentation: "Social Justice through Documentary Filmmaking"
Who Needs Sleep? documents exploitative working conditions in Hollywood and highlights the failure of OSHA and industry unions to sufficiently protect film workers. After the film, FTT professor Jill Godmilow will lead a discussion on the role that documentary filmmaking can play in advocating social justice.
"...The world premiere of Who Needs Sleep? showed to a packed and enthusiastic audience at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. The lively post-screening discussions made it obvious that people do not want to accept “uncivilized working hours.” Present was Roderick E. Stevens, founder of the 12on/12off Foundation, which is devoted to bringing awareness to labor practices in the motion picture industry.
This warm reception in Park City, Utah was followed by festivals in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and recently at Edinburgh, Scotland. Screenings organized by the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild, and the Cinematographer’s Union, have proved the fundamental importance and universality of the sleep and long work hours issue.
Since its premiere in January, from Germany to Australia, people from around the world have been expressing their appreciation for the filmmakers of Who Needs Sleep?, and go out of their way to share their own stories of long hours in the film-making business. Mike Fox from The Guild of British Camera Technicians has noted: “Working conditions for camera crews here, even on major features, are the same as those faced by technicians in the States, since we are all working under the same appalling schedules.”
The growing grassroots movement of all working people to reduce excessive hours spent at work became not only a positive feedback, but also a support for the need to bring change."
-The Institute for Cinema Studies
Medium Cool (1969)
Thur 4/12, 7:00 PM
$6 public, $5 faculty/staff, $4 seniors and $3 all students
Presentation: "Five Decades In and Out of Hollywood"
Medium Cool, a film set during the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots that Mr. Wexler wrote, photographed and directed, is among the most important American films ever made. After the film, Mr. Wexler will discuss his lengthy career as both a Hollywood insider and an indie maverick.
One of the landmarks of independent film, as well as one of the primary celluloid artifacts of the 1960s, Medium Cool (based on Thomas Couffer's THE CONCRETE WILDERNESS) stars Robert Forster as John Cassellis, a television cameraman in Chicago. John is so proud of his detached professionalism that he and soundman Gus (Peter Bonerz) even go so far as to stop and film a car crash before calling an ambulance. However, after John films a protest by black activists about racism in the media, the film is seized by the FBI, and his resistance to handing over the footage gets him fired from his job at the television station. While idle, John becomes better acquainted with 13-year-old Harold (Harold Blankenship) and Harold's mother, Eileen Horton (Verna Bloom), a West Virginia native whose husband is in Vietnam. As the 1968 convention approaches, John picks up a freelance assignment and is thrust headlong into the anarchy of the Chicago streets and the convention floor. His prized detachment falls away as he watches Mayor Daley's cops clubbing unarmed protestors.
Shooting with handheld cameras, Wexler's unerring eye moves seamlessly between the actors and the unplanned events exploding in front of them. His pitiless dissection of the media's role in the shaping of reality spares no one. Medium Cool remains one of the seminal films of the 1960s and 1970s.
Haskell Wexler sought to achieve the utmost possible realism by putting his actors into the heart of the historic 1968 Chicago convention. Some of Wexler's footage was subpoenaed by the government. Chicago-based blues artists Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield, along with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, provided music for the score.
Haskell Wexler Biography
Haskell Wexler initiated his feature filmmaking career as a cinematographer in the late 1950s, having previously shot educational and industrial films. The Chicago native had traveled to California to attend Berkeley, but dropped out after one year. He served as a merchant seaman during WWII and then returned to Illinois. Wexler and his father purchased and refurbished an armory in Des Plaines, turning it into a film studio. The venture was unsuccessful and Wexler set out to learn about film production, beginning as a cameraman and eventually working up to cinematographer.
"Stakeout on Dope Street" (1958) marked his first (although uncredited) work as a cinematographer. He went on to shoot several features, many, like "The Hoodlum Priest" (1961), noted for their social themes. Wexler has stated that Elia Kazan's "America, America" (1963) marked the turning point in his Hollywood career and includes "some of the best photography" that he shot. He went on to shoot the intense, claustrophobic black and white images of Mike Nichols' "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966), which earned him an Oscar, as well as providing memorable and distinctive looks to Norman Jewison's "In the Heat of the Night" (1967), George Lucas' "American Graffiti" (1973) and Milos Forman's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975). His beautiful rendering of the muted tones of the American Dust Bowl (including several storms) in Hal Ashby's "Bound for Glory" (1976) earned him a second Oscar for Best Cinematography. Wexler also lensed Ashby's Vietnam-era "Coming Home" (1978), John Sayles' union-busting tale "Matewan" (1987), the urban gang drama "Colors" (1988), the biopic "Blaze" (1989) and "The Babe" (1992), Sayles' Irish fable "The Secret of Roan Inish" (1994) and the period crime drama "Mulholland Falls" (1996).
Wexler has also produced, written, directed and/or photographed a number of documentary films in his long career. Among the highlights are "The Bus" (1965) and its sequel, "Bus II" (1983), the Oscar-winning short "Interviews With My Lai Veterans" (1970), "Brazil: A Report on Torture" (1971), "Introduction to the Enemy" (1974), co-directed with Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden and Bill Yahrans, "CIA: Case Officer" (1978) and "At the Max" (1991), which recorded the 1990 European tour of the Rolling Stones. Wexler was also one of several directors of photography interviewed for the superlative "Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography" (1992).
A passionate liberal, Wexler produced, directed, wrote and photographed one of the most devastating and technically sophisticated anti-establishment films ever made, "Medium Cool" (1969). Drawing on the stylistic and theoretical advances made by such vanguard figures as Jean- Luc Godard, and taking its title almost straight from the mouth of media guru Marshall McLuhan, "Medium Cool" was set and filmed during the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention. It chronicles-- in striking, neo-documentary style--the affairs, both professional and amorous, of a detached TV news cameraman (Robert Forster) as he becomes increasingly aware of the political ramifications of his work. The film remains a landmark of political cinema, and an insightful essay on the "cool medium."
Wexler also helmed "Latino" (1985), a taut drama about an Hispanic Vietnam veteran (Robert Beltran) assisting in the training of the US-backed Contras in Nicaragua. The film divided critics and audiences along partisan political lines.
For TV, Wexler shot footage of the Special Olympics included in the Beau Bridges- directed longform "The Kid From Nowhere" (NBC, 1982), worked with renowned cinematographer Robert Richardson on the second unit work of the thirty-minute film "To The Moon, Alice" (Showtime, 1990) and was primary director of photography for the Japan tour sequences of the documentary "Benny Carter: Symphony in Riffs" (A&E, 1992). Meanwhile, Wexler was the subject of the documentary, “Tell Them Who You Are” (2005), directed by his son, Mark. The film was shown at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival and was set to be released in theaters on May 13th.
Education
University of California at Berkeley Berkeley, California
Awards
American Society of Cinematographers Lifetime Achievement Award 1992
American Society of Cinematographers Award Best Cinematographer for Feature Films "Blaze" 1989
Independent Spirit Award Best Cinematography "Matewan" 1987
Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award Best Cinematography "Bound For Glory" 1976
National Society of Film Critics Award Best Cinematography "Bound for Glory" 1976
Oscar Best Cinematography "Bound For Glory" 1976
National Society of Film Critics Award Best Cinematography "In the Heat of the Night" 1967
Oscar Best Cinematography (Black-and-White) "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" 1966
Milestones
2001 Earned Emmy nomination for lensing of the HBO movie "61*"
1996 Received Star No. 2062 on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (February 28)
1976 First film appearance in "Underground" (documentary)
1969 Feature film writing and directing debut (also director of photography; producer), "Medium Cool"
1965 Co-produced (with John Calley) Tony Richardson's "The Loved One" (also director of photography)
1965 Documentary directing and screenwriting debut, "The Bus" (also producer; director of photography)
1959 First on-screen credit for cinematography, "Five Bold Women"
1958 First film as director of photography (uncredited), "Stakeout on Dope Street"
Merchant Seaman during World War II (spent two weeks in lifeboat after ship was sunk)
With father, purchased armory in Des Plaines, IL and started a film studio
Closed studio and began working as cameraman
Worked as cameraman and later cinematographer on industrial and educational films
Co-founded with Conrad L Hall, Wexler-Hall, Inc., a TV commercial production company, in mid-1970s
Sponsored by the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, College of Arts and Letters Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts and Learning Beyond the Classroom Program, DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, Department of Sociology, Higgins Labor Research Center, International Student Services and Activities, Mid America Filmmakers, and Saint Mary’s College Film Studies Program.