In this election year, Ann Hornaday remembers Medium Cool, the great cinematographer ""Haskell Wexler's weird and riveting 1969 directorial debut", which he filmed during the summer of 1968, with the climax shot against scenes of actual political protest and street violence at that year's Democratic Chicago Convention. The movie stars Robert Forster (thirty years away from Max Cherry, the bail bondsman he played in Quentin Tarantinio's Jackie Brown) as a TV news cameraman, and Verna Bloom as a single mother from the South who's struggling to keep her nose above water. The movie's "story" is little more than a peg for the set pieces that Wexler and his cast improvised in documentary locations, and the characters have only as much life as the actors could breathe into them on the fly, but the film retains considerable interest for the history it captured and for its then-radical mixture of staged drama and nonfiction backdrop. Its most famous line was delivered, impromptu, by a member of the crew to the director as the tear gas was released and the cops unholstered their billy clubs: "Look out, Haskell, it's real!"
A few years ago, Wexler appeared in the documentary Tell Them Who You Are, directed by his son, Mark; though his place in film history is secure thanks to his work for other directors, Tell Them made it clear that Wexler was deeply disappointed at not having had a substantial directing career of his own, something that he wanted to ascribe to his politics. (Others --such as Michael Douglas, who fired him from the production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest--ascribe it to his being a pain in the ass. The true answer might involve a little from column A and a little from column B.) His only other nonfiction feature as a director is another political drama, 1985's Latino, set in Nicaragua during the Contra war; it was made with a more conventionally scripted approach than Medium Cool, and, well, it's a dull fucker. The older movie meanwhile, continues to pass over from a record of and comment on a tumultuous time in recent American history to a piece of history itself. The new documentary Chicago 10, about the conspiracy trial of war protesters that grew out of the disrupted convention, contains documentary footage from the period that's said to have been partly drawn from Wexler's outtakes.
