![]() The unions would continue to hound him for the rest of career, as Wexler would often attempt to skirt the rules while shooting quickly with a skeleton crew on low budget projects.Īfter Cotton’s financial loss, Wexler was forced to close his studio. In addition, he was pressured to hire union workers, something he had originally wished to forgo. Wexler was forced to use the documentary’s profits for reshoots. He had thought Wexler was going to be filming the cotton process, with a special focus on some large harvesters he had recently bought. While the film received some praise, the owner of the farm was upset with the finished product. Wexler’s first film, A Half Century with Cotton, examined the family and social life on a cotton farm. A few years later, his father bought him a studio and became his business partner. In the early ’50s he led a protest against working and wage conditions at his father’s factory. A man of paradox, he was heavily engaged in bouts of struggle for the lower classes while driving in around in classic cars and living a playboy lifestyle. Having dual interests in film and social issues, he sought to bring forth the true nature of people and their predicaments. Wexler’s career as a documentary filmmaker began in the late ’50s. Enhanced by naturalist Method acting and existential narratives, Wexler’s filmmaking style blurred the lines between truth and fiction. A new realism, a sense of being there was instilled into features. His work in cinema verité brought a new style to Hollywood that attempted the wedding of documentary and feature. Among his credits are America, America (1969), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), In the Heat of the Night (1967), Faces (1968), Medium Cool (1969), American Graffiti (1973), The Conversation (1974), Days of Heaven (1975), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Bound for Glory (1976) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1977). Influenced by the New Wave, they searched for a new realism that reflected reality and moved beyond the spectacle pictures of the studio system.Ĭinematographer and director Haskell Wexler was key to the stylistic development of this movement. Added to this were concerns of disenchanted youth and the role of the media. Just as post-WWII Hollywood focused on docu-dramas, psychological noir and social conscious to reflect growing American unrest so did the filmmakers of the Vietnam Era. He was brave and gorgeous and I loved him.Movie audiences of the ’60s and’70s were privy to a group of auteurs that pushed the boundaries of cinematic form and content. ![]() “Even in an industry where, when you’re working on a movie, there is not much else you can do, he was always there for me.” Jane Fonda paid tribute to Wexler, writing, “He filmed Coming Home and a documentary with me and Tom Hayden in North Vietnam in 1973. ![]() I owe most of who I am to his wisdom and guidance,” said his son Jeff, a soundman nominated for Oscars for Independence Day and The Last Samurai. He was also the rare cinematographer known enough to the general public to receive a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. A liberal activist, Wexler shot some of the most socially relevant and influential films of the 1960s and ’70s, including the Jane Fonda-Jon Voight anti-war classic, Coming Home, the Sidney Poitier/Rod Steiger racial drama In the Heat of the Night and the Oscar-winning adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Haskell Wexler was one of Hollywood’s most honoured cinematographers and one whose innovative approach helped him win Oscars for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory.
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