Happy 100th Birthday to Haskell Wexler!

"If you are going to spend your time doing the best you can doing shit, then why do it? If you are going to spend your time giving to future generations some of the benefits of your knowledge, maybe that is a way of having a legacy, that is a way of having a kind of immortality...so that...something is gonna live and that I think is a pretty valuable thing."—Haskell Wexler in Daniel Raim's 2010 documentary, "Something's Gonna Live" (Haskell Wexler was born February 6th, 1922, and passed away on December 27th, 2015.) Today, February 6th, 2022, would have been the 100th birthday of Oscar-winning cinematographer and filmmaker, Haskell Wexler ("HW"). He was named one of film history's ten most influential cinematographers in a survey of the members of the International Cinematographers Guild. In September 2016, the George Lucas Family Foundation created the Haskell Wexler Endowed Chair in Documentary at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. "Haskell Wexler wasn't just one kind of artist, he had many different interests and brought them all to the way he told stories...His singularity was in the way his passion was evident on the screen," said George Lucas.  HW was also an activist who stood firmly when speaking truth to power on behalf of those who were powerless. Even into his nineties, Haskell fought to shorten the hours of filmmakers who worked long exhausting days and then sometimes fell asleep at the wheel driving back to their hotels. When oral historian Studs Terkel was asked near the end of his life who he felt was still fighting the good fight to make the world a better place, without hesitation, he named Haskell Wexler. Although HW preferred not being the center of attention, he endorsed the work of documentarian Pamela Yates who made a film about him called "Rebel Citizen."  Haskell was also rather shy. In one of the shortest acceptance speeches at an Academy Awards ceremony HW said when accepting the Oscar for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", "I hope we can use our art for peace and for love." No one knew him better than his loving wife, actress Rita Taggart Wexler. “Two of the most fundamental things you must know about Haskell are that he was fearless and tenacious,” she told me via e-mail. “He was considered a premature anti-fascist. He was known for his support of anti-lynching laws. He was harassed. Audited annually. He lost his passport. All of this told him he was following the right path. His fearlessness and tenacity only got stronger when he held a camera to his eye.” Today, we are paying tribute to him by looking back at some of Roger's most memorable coverage of Haskell, beginning with his interview with him on August 10th, 1969. Haskell had already made a name for himself as the Oscar-winning cinematographer of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", before helming his own breakthrough directorial feature, 1969's "Medium Cool," a narrative effort that famously filmed scenes during the violence that erupted during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, in which a TV reporter (played by Robert Forster) finds himself in over his head. Roger wrote that "Medium Cool" was "the best film ever made in Chicago [...] 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. It is a film about the nature of communication, about the shades of meaning that can be superimposed on the face of 'reality.'" During their conversation, Haskell argued that, in fact, nothing is "real," noting, "When you take a camera down to Michigan Avenue and point it at what's happening, you're still not showing 'reality.' You're showing that highly seductive area that's in front of your camera. But there's another element in the film. It has something to do with the professional, 'just doing his job.' The film opens with that shot of the accident on the Outer Drive, and the two TV guys photograph it first and then report it to the police. Their job comes before their involvement. That business of 'just doing my job' almost became a joke at the Nuremberg trials. But it's very much a part of our lives now. There are people with nice suits, air-conditioned offices, grammatical English, who use their education to plan the end of the world, the destruction of people. I mean literally. One of the things we have to deal with, I think, is whether 'professionalism' comes before individual social responsibility." In Roger's four-star review of "Medium Cool," he wrote, "Conventional movie plots telegraph themselves because we know all the basic genres and typical characters. Haskell Wexler's 'Medium Cool' is one of several new movies that knows these things about the movie audience [...] Of the group, 'Medium Cool' is probably the best. That may be because Wexler, for most of his career, has been a very good cinematographer, and so he's trained to see a movie in terms of its images, not its dialog and story. […] 'Medium Cool' is fin