Of course the script didn't specify long shots in Grant Park, or anything like that, because we couldn't know where the trouble would happen. It may appear that way, but in fact the film we made was very close to the script we took to Chicago. When things broke loose, did you decide on the spot to include that in your film?Ī. ![]() You knew you'd be making the film during the Democratic convention, but you couldn't have known there'd be the riots. Then he went in as a "real" cameraman and we photographed him. I gave my lead actor ( Robert Forster, who plays the TV cameraman) an inoperative camera - just a housing without a motor. We waded into the crowds and nobody even noticed. There were newsreel and TV cameras everywhere. There was total confusion and everybody had a camera. At that time, nobody could have cared less. Were you also keeping the project quiet because you didn't want the crowds - the police and the demonstrators - to know a movie was being made?Ī. It costs you money and wastes your energy, and you're inflating your balloon before you have a balloon. I don't believe in publicity before a film is completed. Why was "Medium Cool" filmed in such total secrecy last summer?Ī. When "Medium Cool" does come to Chicago, in late September or early October, It is hoped there will be a sheaf of favorable, "respectable" reviews to show the gumshoes. But Paramount had a small failure of nerve at the last minute and dropped plans to hold a world premiere in Chicago they feared the political repercussions and the gangbusters of the police vice squad. It is being distributed by Paramount, which gave Wexler complete artistic freedom and has promised not to cut or edit the final version. "Medium Cool" will open in New York during the first week of September. As Hollywood goes, 10 years is a short time. Within a decade, he had established himself as one of the best cameraman in the business. He made other, documentaries, about the packinghouse workers strike, about the Highlander Folk School, before going to Hollywood to break into feature films as the cameraman on "Stakeout on Dope Street." ![]() His brother Jerrold, who produced "Medium Cool," heads the giant Jupiter Corp., a major holder of air rights over the Illinois Central RR tracks.īut Haskell was always more interested in movies than finance he once had his own makeshift studio in Des Plaines, where he made a Chicago documentary called "The Living City" which got an Academy Award nomination. It is a film about the nature of communication, about the shades of meaning that can be superimposed on the face of "reality." In addition to being several other things, "Medium Cool" is the best film ever made in Chicago except possibly, Arthur Penn's neglected masterpiece "Mickey One." But it is not a "Chicago film" any more than it's a film about politics, hippies, cops, violence, sex, poverty, black militants or its other subjects. ![]() Many Chicagoans turn up as actors in the film: former Hull House director Bob Sickinger, Second City and Peter Boyle, a 13-year-old kid from Uptown named Harold Blankenship, lots of others. Wexler's technical consultant (listed in the credits as "our man in Chicago") was Studs Terkel. And he included a wealth of other Chicago locations: Uptown, the Roller Derby, the pool at Outer Drive East, the South Side, all over the city. But he plugged them into actual events, filming scenes during the Democratic National Convention at Lincoln Park, Grant Park and the International Amphitheater. Wexler's characters (a TV newsreel cameraman, a soundman, an Uptown poor white widow, and her young son) were drawn from his imagination.
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