360 - Medium Cool, United States, 1969. Dir. Haskell Wexler.

Tuesday, December 26, 2017

360 - Medium Cool, United States, 1969.  Dir. Haskell Wexler.

Summer of '68.

John and Gus work for Channel 8 News in Chicago.  John is a cameraman.  Gus is a sound man.  They drive a station-owned station wagon.  They each wear a Motorola Pageboy on their belt.

They cover the news.  Social unrest in Chicago.  Marching on Washington.  Car crashes.  Race riots.  War protests.  The Hippie scene.  The Democratic National Convention.

In the opening scene they record a car crash.  The woman is lying on the freeway, still alive, in need of immediate care.  They stand over her.  Filming.  Recording.  Without emotion.  After they get their footage they walk back to their car.  At a normal pace.  Then they announce that they should call an ambulance.

John and Gus get into conversations about the ethics of journalism.  Is it right to be a neutral bystander and record while people are dying around you?  Do you have a responsibility to get involved?  Are you even neutral?  Do you merely report the news or do you sensationalize it?  Do you only report people and events that are loud, extreme, and violent?

Eileen Horton and her son Harold live in an apartment building in a poor neighborhood in Chicago.  Harold raises homing pigeons on the roof.  Like Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) in On the Waterfront (1954).  He rides the L.  Opens his basket.  Lets the pigeon fly free.  He knows it will return.

John is dating a nurse.  Ruth.  Someone is stealing hubcaps and antennas from his station wagon.  She tells him not to worry about it.  Channel 8 has plenty of resources.  He says that is not the point.  Journalists resent that wherever they go, in the course of doing their job, they are made into a target.

John catches Harold stealing his hubcaps.  He chases him through the parking lot.  Harold drops his basket.  Harold loses John.  John picks up Harold's basket.  He takes it home.  Gus and Ruth are sitting in the car waiting for him.  What is in the basket?  Dinner.

John takes Ruth to a Roller Derby.  Violence as entertainment.  Back at the apartment they talk more about his work as they make love.

Later he takes the pigeon back to Harold.  The address is on the basket.  He and Ruth are no longer dating.  He begins to see Eileen.

Everything culminates at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.  The fictional story.  The real convention.  The real riot.

The narrative is a work of fiction filmed during, in, and on top of real footage.  The actors step into real demonstrations and riots as Wexler's camera watches.  Sometimes the people at the real events, unknowing extras, interact with the cameras.  Both cameras.  John and his prop camera.  Haskell and his real camera.  Wexler anticipated that a riot would break out at the DNC Convention, so he prepared for it.  The result is a cinema-verite fictional narrative interwoven with a documentary of the time.

The journalist is a human being.  The cameraman is a person.  At times he is working.  At times he is living his life.

Sometimes what is filmed and what is lived come together.  Crash together.

And the cameraman experiences life.

On the other side.


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Haskell Wexler was a great American cinematographer.  He was nominated for five Academy Awards and won two.  He was known for his work on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), In the Heat of the Night (1967), The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Bound for Glory (1975), Coming Home (1978), Matewan (1987), Colors (1988), Other People's Money (1991), The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), and Mulholland Falls (1996).  Throughout his career he also made documentaries and shorts about subjects that were important to him.

Robert Forster plays John Katselas, the cameraman.  (IMDb lists it as John Cassellis and Wikipedia repeats it, but in the movie it is clearly Katselas.)  He got his start as Private L. G. Williams in Reflections on a Golden Eye (1967).  Not long after this film he got his own television series and became a household name as Miles C. Banyon on Banyon (1971-3).  He got another series as Deputy Nakia Parker on Nakia (1974), and later had recurring roles on Karen Sisco (2003-4), Heroes (2007-8), Last Man Standing (2012-15), and now Twin Peaks (2017).  Forster worked steadily throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, but he flew below the radar until Quentin Tarantino made him a star again with his role as Max Cherry in Jackie Brown (1997).

Peter Bonerz plays Gus the sound man.  He became known in American households as the beloved dentist Dr. Jerry Robinson on The Bob Newhart Show (1972-78) and went on to become a prolific director of television while also continuing to act.

Verna Bloom plays Eileen, the mother of thirteen-year old Harold.  Eileen and Harold moved to Chicago from West Virginia, where Harold's father lost his job when the coal mine shut down.  They say that Harold's father is fighting in Vietnam, but they do not know where he is.  Verna Bloom worked with Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter (1973) and Honkytonk Man (1982).  She played Marion Wormer in Animal House (1978), June in After Hours (1985), and Mary the Mother of Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).

Marianna Hill plays Ruth.  She also appeared in High Plains Drifter, as Callie Travers, as well as Deanna Corleone in The Godfather: Part II (1974).

Peter Boyle plays the "Gun Clinic Manager."  He had a prolific career in film and was known to American households as Frank Barone, the father of Ray Romano on Everybody Loves Raymond (1996-2005).

Jesse Jackson appears in real footage, as well as Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr, in archival footage.

Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention provide songs for the film, but the band seen playing is a different band, called The Litter.

The title comes from a concept by Marshall McLuhan.  You may remember him from Woody Allen's film Annie Hall (1977).  While Alvy Singer and Annie Hall are standing "on line" for a movie, they overhear a man pretentiously pontificating about Marshall McLuhan's ideas.  Alvy Singer then produces the real Marshall McLuhan from behind a sign so that McLuhan can set the man straight.  McLuhan published a book in 1967 called The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects.  His concept is that a hot medium involves more interaction with the audience while a cool medium involves less interaction with the audience.  TV, and TV news, is a Cool Medium, because it requires little interaction.  The audience is passive.