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The 58th annual Academy Awards–presented by ABC on March 24, 1986 and celebrating the (alleged) best films of the movie year 1985–were watched by approximately 37.8 million television viewers. The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where the ceremony was hosted by the odd-throuple pairing of Alan Alda, Jane Fonda and Robin Williams. The evening’s big winner? Out of Africa, now regarded as one of the most turgid Best Picture winners of all time.

Two days earlier, March 22, a very different awards ceremony had taken place across town. The venue this time had been the rear ballroom of 385 North–a La Cienega restaurant. Here, amid a constellation of potted ficus trees and gold lamé drapes, unfurled the very first edition of the Film Independent Spirit Awards, hosted with casual luncheon hunkiness by Jagged Edge actor Peter Coyote.

The big winners? Martin Scorsese’s subversive black comedy After Hours and the Coen Brothers visually arresting...

During the Christmas season of 1997—still hot from Pulp Fiction and a media blitzkrieg that might make a Kardashian blush—Quentin Tarantino dropped the hipster video-clerk attitude and made a “late” movie way ahead of his years. Tarantino was only 34 when Jackie Brown was released, and yet this is a film that’s quite persuasively about the pain and mixed blessings of aging. Correspondingly, Tarantino slowed down his approach to filmmaking, prioritizing lived-in textures over the shock and awe that marks the violence of his earlier work.

The difference in sensibility between Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown can be encapsulated by two respective scenes in cars. In the former, a young man getting his head accidentally splattered against a rear window is treated by Tarantino as comedy. And it is funny, as another display of Tarantino’s brash insistence that moral posturing isn’t a concern of his. Like an...

When he first became a physician for film and TV sets in Massachusetts as a side gig in 2006, Paul Heinzelmann admits he was star struck by the energy and excitement of the lights and cameras.

But in the years that followed, he got a firsthand look at the physical wear and tear that many entertainment workers suffer, which triggered a decades-long fight among members of IATSE for stricter safety rules to curtail preventable accidents.

“I’ve seen plenty of concussions,” Heinzelmann told TheWrap. “I’ve gotten requests for medication to stay awake for late night shoots. I met a gaffer who completely tore his quadricep and continued to work for a month to finish the shoot despite needing surgery.”

And after the 2021 death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of “Rust,” Heinzelmann decided he needed to do something. The result is “Safe Sets: Dying to Work in the Film Industry,...

Peter Yates' "Bullitt" is one of the most stylish cop flicks ever made. Those multi-screen opening credits designed by the great Pablo Ferro, that jazzily urbane Lalo Schifren score, those wildly cool outfits donned by Steve McQueen at the height of his laconic sexiness (some inspired by the suits sported by real life detective Dave Toschi) –- it's a stone groove punctuated by spasms of violence and, of course, a raucous car chase through the hilly streets of San Francisco. It's so ineffably pleasurable, you don't mind that the narrative is a sketchily plotted afterthought. Who needs an intricately structured story when you're watching, as Quentin Tarantino wrote in his book "Cinema Speculation," "one of the best directed movies ever made?"

You throw on "Bullitt" for the 1968-ness of it all (it's the apolitical flip-side of the coin to Haskell Wexler's roiling docudrama "Medium Cool"), as well as the...

For comedy fans of a certain age, watching VHS copies of the 1982 concert film “Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip” until the tape fell off of the spools was a rite of passage. Until Eddie Murphy‘s “Raw” dethroned it later in the 1980s, it was the most successful stand-up special of all time, and understandably so; marking Pryor‘s return to the stage after the freebasing accident that almost killed him, it was not only hilarious but revealing and poignant — the passage toward the end of the film in which Pryor personifies his crack pipe and acts out his own struggles with it is one of the most potent depictions of addiction ever put on screen.

The problem is that those VHS copies, as well as the blurry transfers on cable television where “Sunset Strip” was a staple for years, captured the greatness of Pryor’s performance but...

“I directed the best political movie never released.”

Filmmaker Haskell Wexler thus described Medium Cool, his violent feature set during Chicago’s riotous 1968 Democratic National Convention. His movie opened (sort of) exactly 55 years ago this week.

The Paramount release won ardent support from critics and (briefly) from ticket buyers but was renounced by leaders of the Democratic Party and the Chicago police. Their criticism was short-lived because the negative would quickly disappear. A Paramount spokesman was reluctant to confirm it had ever been made.

The mysteries of Medium Cool seemed relevant to cineastes this week as history threatened to repeat itself in Chicago. As in 1968, the chaos at the Democratic convention would be triggered by an overseas conflict – Gaza now, Vietnam then. But the police this week showed they’d learned from the bitter lessons of ’68 when violence jeopardized the political process and the election itself.

Despite forecasts of a...

The sky above Chicago is bright and blue as Democrats gather this week to pitch their vision for America on live TV over the next four nights.

But no matter how high the hopes of the faithful, there are clouds hanging over this particular Democratic National Convention that have been there for more than 50 years. Ghosts from the last time the Democrats convened for a DNC in Chicago were evident Sunday as delegates and other attendees arrived in the Windy City.

The events in and around the 1968 DNC in Chicago have endured as a landmark moment of political chaos and social change for America. Inside the convention hall, Democrats struggled mightily to coalesce around a consensus nominee after the upheaval of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision not to run for reelection and the assassination of his most likely Democratic successor, Robert F. Kennedy. Those two events happened in the...

Nestled between the epic sprawl of the first two Godfather films, The Conversation allowed Francis Ford Coppola to engage in a more personal style of storytelling. With it, he crafted a small-scale character study steeped in minor-key melancholia, as well as gave free reign to his infatuation with the international arthouse cinema of the time.

A shout-out to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up, The Conversation perfectly encapsulates the disaffection, alienation, and paranoia infecting America’s body politic in the era of Watergate, the wiretapping scandal that brought down the Nixon administration, though the timing of the film’s release was coincidental. By some act of synchronicity, Coppola opted to focus on a surveillance expert, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman at his most buttoned-up), who utilizes the same sort of hardware as G. Gordon Liddy and the other Watergate “plumbers” while in the employ of a corporate bigwig known only as the Director...

“All this filming isn’t healthy,” says blind but perceptive Mrs. Stephens (Maxine Audley) late in Michael Powell’s resolutely disturbing Peeping Tom, and every aspect of the film’s rigorously self-reflexive construction seems to bear her out. From the opening shot of an opening eye, to the final shot of a blank screen swathed in black and blood-red gel lighting, Peeping Tom obsessively examines the social and psychological ramifications of overactive cinephilia. This situates Powell’s film as a direct precursor to later 1960s autocritiques along the lines of Federico Fellini’s 8½, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, and Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool.

Powell and screenwriter Leo Marks originally wanted to make a film about Sigmund Freud and his theories, but word of John Huston’s upcoming Freud biopic put the kibosh on those plans. So instead they came up with the story of Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), who works...

Plot: In the United States, amid a brutal civil war, a team of journalists drive from New York to Washington D.C, where they’ve been promised an interview with the president.

Review: A24 is the only movie studio I know of that’s picked up a cult following of its own. Their brand has become one of the most trusted among discerning film fans, delivering a slew of interesting, provocative movies that fit all genres. In some ways, they are a throwback to an older kind of filmmaking in that they’ve never focused on chasing franchises and have always been filmmaker-focused. They’ve always taken risks, and it’s paid off more than it hasn’t. However, their latest film, Civil War, is arguably their riskiest movie, sporting their biggest budget (north of $50 million) and subject matter that could be seen as a bit of a political powder keg.

Everyone involved with the film adaptation of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” had a lot riding on its success. For star Elizabeth Taylor, this was perhaps her first chance to prove that she could act (certainly the middle-aged Martha was the most demanding role she had ever had). For first-time producer Ernest Lehman, the movie could make or break him as he moved away from writing classics like “North by Northwest” and “Sweet Smell of Success.” And for director Mike Nichols, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” his feature film directorial debut, would either burnish his growing reputation as a boy genius after several smash Broadway hits or prove that he was out of his depth.

The impetus to play things safe must have been strong, and yet none of the film’s major players shied away from choosing the riskier paths. Filming in black-and-white in 1966 was not the indicator of...

Don Murray, the venturesome actor who earned an Oscar nomination for playing a rodeo cowboy smitten by Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop, then spurned Hollywood’s attempts to mold him, has died. He was 94.

Murray’s son Christopher announced his dad’s death to The New York Times without providing details.

The actor was also known for the interesting parts he went after in such serious films as A Hatful of Rain (1957), The Hoodlum Priest (1961) and Advise & Consent (1962).

Fresh off a starring role in a 1955 Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, Murray was sought by director Joshua Logan to portray Bo Decker, the naive Montana man who falls for the chanteuse Chérie (Monroe), in Bus Stop (1956). It was his first movie, and he was 26 at the time.

“No one could have been less equipped for the job,” he once said. “I was a New...

Chicago – It was another city in another time when Andrew Davis directed his first film “Stony Island” in 1970s Chicago. The film was released in 1978 to acclaim, but faded into the mist of cinema. Andrew Davis is back in his hometown to introduce “Stony Island” at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Friday, November 17th, 2023. For tickets and info, click Stony Island.

Rating: 4.5/5.0

Lovingly filmed on the gritty 1970s streets in the Chicago of Andy Davis, the film features his brother Richard Davis as Ritchie, a white boy guitarist trying to break into a Southside rhythm and blues band that cooks with its own brand of Windy City soul. Based a bit on his brother’s actual circumstances, the film features actual singers and players of the era, including a magnificent performance by Gene Barge as Percy Price, the centerpiece cat in the story who ends up in a fate of celebration.

The evolution of cinematic language in the 1980s was, in large part, due to an invention born in the 1970s.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, “New Hollywood” looked to challenge the audience, nudging studio filmmaking away from strict adherence to classical storytelling conventions. They embraced a looser approach to narrative that was matched by a rough-around-the-edges filmmaking style, in which a premium was put on “realism.” Directors and cinematographers embraced a grainy, unglamorous look, trading in the locked-down cameras and studio cranes for a more handheld approach to shooting on location.

From his perch in Philadelphia, budding filmmaker Garrett Brown loved the visceral immediacy that filmmakers of his generation, like Martin Scorsese, were injecting into Hollywood films. As a camera operator himself, that instinct to grab the camera and be in the middle of the action was not only strong but “helluva a lot of fun.” But there...

It’s a scorching hot July day in Manhattan, but Anna Delvey wants to walk to her scheduled check-in with New York parole officers. All 40 blocks, that is.

Who can blame her? The infamous fake heiress, whose twisty tale of conning some of Wall Street’s biggest sharks became the inspiration for the hit Netflix series “Inventing Anna,” has been confined to a 470-square-foot apartment in the East Village for the past 10 months as she fights deportation to Germany, her most recent country of residence. Not surprisingly, she seizes the opportunity to be outdoors, her weekly Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-ins and trimonthly parole meet-ups providing her only escape. Wearing all black — a tight-fitting T-shirt, a bubble skirt and Roman sandals that obscure her ankle monitor — the notorious Russian swindler stands out from the sweaty masses rushing to their next air-conditioned stop.

Delvey isn’t perspiring and seems oblivious to...

As we approach another anniversary of August 9, those who participated in “the decision” are all but gone.

But the reminders are with us, thanks to a new book by Evan Thomas, “Road to Surrender,” the forward for which reads “To save lives, it was necessary to take lives — possibly hundreds of thousands of them.” And, of course, Christopher Nolan’s epic portrait of the man who was never allowed to forget, Robert Oppenheimer.

We can’t hide under our desks anymore, but we can view ten other works that scared the hell out of us.

“On the Beach” (United Artists)

“On the Beach” (1959)

As a little girl in 1959, I found my parents watching this black and white film on TV. Excited, I asked if it was the latest with Annette and Frankie Avalon. Uh, no. They allowed me to stay, and two hours later, I was shaken to the core.

Harlan County, USA

Filmmakers loves an underdog and movies have a long tradition of supporting the rights of workers, dating all the way back to the silent era. Here are some classic movies that celebrate workers’ right to strike for better wages and safer working conditions and the sometimes unlikely allies they find along the way. Many are based on true stories, including John Sayles’ masterful “Matewan,” about a coal miner strike in West Virginia, as well as Barbara Kopple’s Oscar-winning documentary, “Harlan County, USA.”

Photo credit: Disney

“Newsies” (1992)

“Headlines don’t sell papes, Newsies sell papes!” In this exuberant and pro-worker musical, Christian Bale’s Jack Kelly leads a group of newsboys in a strike against penny-pinching newspaper owner Joseph Pulitzer. They’re aided by Bill Pullman’s kindly, reform-minded journalist and, of course, Teddy Roosevelt, who was then governor of New York.

Photo credit: 20th Century

“Norma Rae...

For those who treasure a sense of place in movies, the new trailer for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, a film set for release by Paramount in October, brings a flicker of hope. (Pete Hammond’s Cannes review is here.)

True, it looks a little stagey, like Gangs of New York but out on the prairie. Still, for a few fleeting seconds—wedged among a scowling De Niro, a maundering DiCaprio and all those mortified Native people–tantalizing traces of the real Oklahoma peep through. Acres and acres of buffalo grass. Old brick facades. The kind of sky that hangs over Pawhuska and Bartlesville, where a 1982 tornado marched right up Frank Phillips Blvd. to the doorstep of Phillips Petroleum.

Maybe, just maybe, this film will find it: That wondrous, increasingly rare, cinematic sensation of actually being there.

In the current era, our blockbusters have taken a markedly...

We’ve lost another Hollywood legend. The Hollywood Reporter has broken the news that cinematographer Bill Butler, best known for his work on the 1975 Steven Spielberg classic Jaws, has passed away at the age of 101. Butler died on Wednesday evening, according to the American Society of Cinematographers. He would have turned 102 on Friday – today.

Born on April 7, 1921 in Cripple Creek, Colorado, Butler earned his first entertainment industry credit by working as a camera operator on the 1959 film 1001 Arabian Nights. His first cinematographer credit came when his friend, director William Friedkin, hired him to shoot the 1962 TV movie The People vs. Paul Crump. He never attended film school, he just taught himself cinematography by watching movies and referring to the ASC manual. That approach definitely worked out for him. Over the next fifty-four years, he served as the cinematographer on eighty-four more projects, including Jack Nicholson’s Drive, He Said; The Bold Men,...

Oscar-nominated Cinematographer Wilmer C. Butler, whose work included a series of landmark films such as The Conversation (1974), Jaws (1975) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), has died. He was 101. The American Society of Cinematographers confirmed Butler’s passing.

Butler was the ASC’s most senior member, and he had a resume to match. He worked with directors such as Philip Kaufman, Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Richard Donner, Jack Nicholson, Sylvester Stallone, Ivan Reitman, Tobe Hooper, Joseph Sargent, Mike Nichols, John Cassavetes and Steven Spielberg.

Friedkin convinced Butler to be the cinematographer on The People vs. Paul Crump, a documentary about a prisoner slated for execution in Illinois. The project got Crump’s death sentence commuted.

He got his start in features with Philip Kaufman’s 1967 film Fearless Frank. Two years later, Friedkin introduced Butler to Francis Ford Coppola, with whom he shot The Rain People before going on to...

Emmy-winning cinematographer Bill Butler, who was Oscar nominated for shooting “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and was also the D.P. on Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” died Wednesday, according to the American Society of Cinematographers. He was 101.

Spielberg remembered Butler in a statement, saying, “On ‘Jaws,’ Bill Butler was the bedrock on that rickety, rocking boat called the Orca. He was the only calm in the middle of that storm, and as we went into a battle against nature and technology that wore both of us down, the audience eventually won the war. Bill’s outlook on life was pragmatic, philosophical and so very patient, and I owe him so much for his steadfast and creative contributions to the entire look of ‘Jaws.’”

In addition to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Butler served as d.p. on a number of other high-profile films of the 1970s, including Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation,...

Bill Butler, the self-taught, Oscar-nominated cinematographer whose work on the landmark 1975 horror film Jaws unleashed a wave of anxiety for beachgoers that lasts to this day, has died. He would have turned 102 on Friday.

Butler died Wednesday evening in Los Angeles, according to the American Society of Cinematographers. He is survived by five daughters and his wife, Iris.

During his five-decade career, Butler also shot Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People (1969) and The Conversation (1974); Peter Hyams’ Capricorn One (1977); Randal Kleiser’s hit musical Grease (1978); and Rocky II (1979), Rocky III (1982) and Rocky IV (1985), all written and directed by and starring Sylvester Stallone.

On another noteworthy 1975 release, Butler replaced the fired Haskell Wexler midway through production on Milos Forman‘s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Both shared an Oscar cinematography nomination for their work.

Butler also had replaced Wexler on The Conversation after creative differences forced Wexler off that production early on.

American show business lore famously suggests that few actors can make the leap from television to cinema. There are exceptions, like the occasional Bruce Willis or Clint Eastwood, but this jump, so memorably portrayed in "Once Upon A Time In Hollywood," is one many actors have failed to land. But not John Travolta.

By the end of Travolta's breakout years in the late 1970s, it's hard to imagine anybody associating him exclusively with "Welcome Back, Kotter," which premiered in 1975. The warm-hearted sitcom about a teacher returning to his alma mater to teach a group of remedial students, the Sweathogs, featured Travolta, who had then landed just a few small film roles, in a major role. There he played Vinnie Barbarino, an Italian-American kid whose good looks and magnetism made him wildly popular. But Travolta had his sights set higher than the constraints of a sitcom.

Stardom was in his sights.

Exclusive: “I love my cast, I love what I’m getting each day, I am on schedule and on budget, and that’s what is important to me,” Francis Ford Coppola told Deadline from the Atlanta set of Megalopolis.

The iconic filmmaker disputed a trade report that conflated turnover in the visual effects and art departments to paint a picture of a runaway train, using words like “peril,” “ballooning budget,” “crew exodus” and “chaos.”

Coppola acknowledged there has been some turnover, but he believes the high drama has been reserved for what he sees each day in dailies. He has seen budgets balloon on some of his past films, and he once famously replaced Harvey Keitel with Martin Sheen weeks into the production of Apocalypse Now. None of what is happening on Megalopolis meets that category. The elimination of the VFX department during production is something he engineered to keep...

Click here to read the full article.

Michelle Yeoh, the veteran Malaysian actress who is currently generating Oscar buzz for her performance in this spring’s breakout A24 hit Everything Everywhere All at Once, will be conferred with a Doctorate of Fine Arts by the American Film Institute “for contributions of distinction to the art of the moving image,” The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

The presentation of that honor to Yeoh, as well as a Doctorate of Communication Arts to AFI Trustee Emeritus Lawrence Herbert — the inventor of a variety of color systems who joined the AFI Board of Trustees in 1987 and served until 2017, and who made possible the 2020 establishment of the Lawrence Herbert Alumni Center on the AFI campus — will take place during the AFI Conservatory’s commencement ceremony celebrating the Class of 2022 on Saturday, August 13, 2022, at the Tcl Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

“Michelle Yeoh and Lawrence Herbert have...

Sterlin Harjo, co-creator of FX’s Reservation Dogs, discusses a few of his favorite movies with hosts Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Mekko (2015)

Boy (2010)

Cool Hand Luke (1967) – Larry Karaszewski’s trailer commentary, Randy Fuller’s wine pairings

Being There (1979) – Alan Spencer’s trailer commentary, Charlie Largent’s Blu-ray review

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) – Josh Olson’s trailer commentary

A Woman Under The Influence (1974)

Husbands (1970) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

Stand By Me (1986)

Hamburger: The Motion Picture (1986)

This Is Spinal Tap (1984) – John Landis’s trailer commentary

The Princess Bride (1987) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

Friday (1995)

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) – Adam Rifkin’s trailer commentary

Dead Man (1995)

Powwow Highway (1989)

Airplane! (1980) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

Ghost Dog: Way Of The Samurai (1999)

Stalker (1979) – Glenn Erickson’s Criterion Blu-ray review

Come And See (1985) – Larry Karaszewski’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Criterion Blu-ray review

A Clockwork Orange...

Combining electrifying cinema-verite documentary footage shot during actual events (including the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago) with a more conventional story featuring actors, director-cameraman Haskell Wexler tried to illuminate the splintering of the American psyche at the height of the war in Vietnam. The resultant film, incongruously distributed by Gulf + Western’s Paramount Pictures, both exasperates and astonishes. Some felt it trivialized serious issues, others applauded its hand-held snapshot of a tumultuous time. Originally rated what Wexler labled a “political X” by the MPAA, later downgraded to an R.

The post Medium Cool appeared first on Trailers From Hell.

Walter Mirisch earned his Oscar for this Sidney Poitier hit directed by Norman Jewison. The tense mystery thriller was also a significant cultural step for Civil Rights, Hollywood-style: Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs claims the right to not turn the other cheek. Stars Rod Steiger, Lee Grant, Warren Oates and Larry Gates are in top form. Kino’s new 4K release maximizes the impact of Haskell Wexler’s steamy cinematography and Quincy Jones’ rich music, and includes bonus Blu-ray encodings of the two sequels made a few years later.

In the Heat of the Night 4K

4K Ultra HD

Kl Studio Classics

1967 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 110 min. / Street Date April 19, 2022 / available through Kino Lorber / 39.95

Starring: Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger, Warren Oates, Lee Grant, Larry Gates, James Patterson, William Schallert, Beah Richards, Peter Whitney, Matt Clark, Scott Wilson, Timothy Scott, Quentin Dean, Anthony James, Alan Oppenheimer.

Cinematography: Haskell Wexler

Art Director: Paul Groesse...

Charlie Chaplin in A Dog's Life It was World Sleep Day yesterday - read more about that here Dropping off is the last thing most people want to do at the cinema but sleep stories remain a constant in cinema, whether it's in children's fairy tales, Charlie Chaplin using a dog for a pillow or deep space. So this week, our Streaming Spotlight is catching some shut-eye, or perhaps just trying to.

Who Needs SleepVimeo

Who Needs Sleep? If you're looking for a few facts about sleep and why it's so important to us then Haskell Wexler's documentary (co-directed by Lisa Leeman) - which is free to watch on Vimeo - is a good place to start. He comes at the issue of long and irregular hours from the...

Sunday marked the 25th anniversary of the death of Brent Hershman, the second assistant cameraman on Pleasantville who was killed March 6, 1997, when he fell asleep at the wheel and slammed his car into a utility pole while driving home after working a 19-hour day – which had been preceded by four 15-hour days in a row. His death sparked industry-wide demands for shorter workdays and inspired a 2006 documentary by legendary filmmaker Haskell Wexler.

Wexler, the labor activist and Oscar-winning cinematographer of Bound for Glory and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, took up the cause of set safety in the days immediately following Hershman’s death, placing an ad in Variety calling for the “humane treatment of humans,” and setting out to make his documentary film, Who Needs Sleep?

Watch Wexler’s film below.

Hershman’s widow, Deborah Eden, recalls that her husband “was a family man and he wanted to get home,...

It's 88 days until the Oscars and since we've suffered so much lost the past couple of years which we'll only be reminded of during the In Memoriam section in three months, we thought it was time to update our Oldest Living Oscar Nominees/Winners list. Time to celebrate enduring life! Our very best wishes of good health and happiness to the following actors, directors and craftsmen who nabbed at least one Oscar honor in their career...

100 Oldest Living Oscar Nominees/Winners

Ready?

100 Years Old

Bill Butler (4/7/21) Oscar stats: 1 nomination

The cinematographer's only nomination was for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), which he shared with Haskell Wexler but '75 also featured a gig as Director of Photography on a tiny picture called Jaws ... maybe you've heard of it?  He later swerved into less prestigious fare like the wildly popular Grease (1978) and multiple Rocky sequels. He worked regularly from the early 70s through the Aughts.

It’s a very musical episode! Director and Tfh Guru, Allan Arkush, returns to talk about his favorite rock and roll movies with hosts Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

No Nukes (1980)

Amazing Grace (2018) – Dennis Cozzalio’s Oscar nominee reactions

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) – Glenn Erickson’s Criterion Blu-ray review

Get Crazy (1983) – Allan Arkush’s trailer commentary

Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979) – Eli Roth’s trailer commentary

Blackboard Jungle (1955) – Allan Arkush’s trailer commentary

Rock, Rock, Rock! (1956) – ​​Jesus Treviño’s trailer commentary

Mister Rock And Roll (1957)

Go, Johnny, Go! (1959) – Allan Arkush’s trailer commentary

Hail Hail Rock And Roll! (1987) – Allan Arkush’s trailer commentary

The Girl Can’t Help It (1956) – Dan Ireland’s trailer commentary

Hellzapoppin’ (1941)

Innerspace (1987) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

Almost Famous (2000) – Allan Arkush’s trailer commentary

Wayne’s World (1992)

The Graduate (1967) – Neil Labute’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Criterion Blu-ray review

Scorpio Rising...

Isabella Rossellini has a connection to two Hamptons Doc Fest selections: Roger Sherman’s The Soul Of A Farmer and Stina Gardell’s Movie Man: “She is Stig Björkman’s very good friend over many many years.” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

In the second instalment with Artistic Director Karen Arikian we discussed Lisa Hurwitz’s The Automat; Lifetime Achievement Award honouree at the 12th edition of Doc NYC Joan Churchill and her short Shoot From The Heart with Haskell Wexler, Chris Hegedus, and Da Pennebaker; Asaf Galay’s The Adventures Of Saul Bellow; Tasha Van Zandt’s After Antarctica (recipient of the Andrew Sabin Family Foundation Environmental Award); Dom Aprile’s Farming Long Island; Roger Sherman’s The Soul Of A Farmer with a connection to Isabella Rossellini, who is in Stina Gardell’s Movie Man, starring Stig Björkman, director of the Opening Night film Joyce Carol Oates: A Body In...

An array of the most acclaimed documentaries of the last 50 years bear the stamp of one singular talent: Joan Churchill, filmmaker and cinematographer.

Her first credit, in 1970, came as a camera operator on Gimme Shelter, the classic documentary about the Rolling Stones at Altamont directed by the Maysles Brothers and Charlotte Zwerin. She’s been shooting films ever since, including Jimi at Berkeley (1971); Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll (1987); Kurt & Courtney (1998); Biggie & Tupac (2002); Shut Up & Sing, the 2006 doc about the Dixie Chicks, and the Oscar-nominated Last Days in Vietnam (2014).

She also co-directed a number of award-winning films with her former husband Nick Broomfield, including Soldier Girls (1981); Lily Tomlin (1986); Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003), and 2011’s Sarah Palin: You Betcha!

In honor of her career in cinema, Churchill is being recognized with the Lifetime Achievement Award at Doc NYC, the country’s largest all-documentary festival, which opens today.

Celebrating its 70th anniversary this year, the International Film Festival Mannheim-Heidelberg (Iffmh) is for the first time taking place in cinemas across both cities, introducing new sections, and looking back at its rich history with a special retrospective.

“Being 70 in a way is a starting point for reflection,” says festival director Sascha Keilholz. “What was the festival like in the past? What is it now? Where do we want to go in the future? The festival is in a transformational process that we started last year and was actually quite successful.”

Indeed, after adopting a new brand image last year, the Iffmh won the 2021 German Brand Award for brand strategy and design.

After being forced online last year amid the pandemic, going back into theaters was one of this year’s main goals, Keilholz says. “This is more important than ever.”

In celebrating its return to cinemas as well...

Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler is the subject of Shoot from the Heart, a new documentary short by Joan Churchill and Alan Barker. Shot over a ten-year period, it follows Wexler as he works on a music video, interacts with film students, and accompanies Jane Fonda to a festival screening of Coming Home. A highlight of Shoot from the Heart is a dinner Wexler shares with documentarian D.A. Pennebaker. The meal extends over hours, with additional footage supplied by Chris Hegedus. As the two reminisce about Sally Rand and […]

The post “We Were Inspired by Haskell the Activist, the Person, and Not the Hollywood Legend and Cinematographer”: Cinematographer and Doc NYC Honoree Joan Churchill and Sound Recordist Alan Barker on Their Wexler Doc, Shoot from the Heart first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Morgan Neville will introduce Doc NYC highlight Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Lifetime Achievement Award honoree Joan Churchill and Alan Barker’s Shoot From the Heart on Haskell Wexler; Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground; Morgan Neville’s fast-paced Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, and Liz Garbus’s revealing Becoming Cousteau on Jacques-Yves Cousteau are four of the early bird highlights of Doc NYC 2021.

The three highlights in Doc NYC’s Short List programme shed light on the workings of adventurous, troubled men who have been idolised by many and put on a pedestal as role models of independent masculinity. The fourth, the...

Chicago – Day Five of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival (Ciff) will present a documentary on Oscar Micheaux, the originator of black filmmaking, who began in Chicago. (click Oscar Micheaux for details), as well as a whole slate of films and events.

The 57th Chicago International Film Festival Day Five features screenings in theater, at the drive-in and virtual/online. Click here for a complete how-to guide on navigating the 57th Ciff. And click Day Five for the complete line up of films.

Oscar Micheaux – The Superhero of Black Filmmaking

Photo credit: Chicago International Film Festival

Events Of The Day: 10:00am: “Coffee Talk: “Pandemic Cinema: Film Art in the Age of Contagion” (click here).

Appearances Of The Day: 12:00pm: “For the Left Hand” … Special Guests Scheduled to Attend. 12:00pm: “White Building” … Special Guests Scheduled to Attend. 5:00pm: “Shankar’s Fairies” … Special Guests Scheduled to Attend. 7:...

In 2006, Haskell Wexler made a documentary about brutally long hours on film sets entitled “Who Needs Sleep?” The issue had become a flashpoint years earlier, when Brent Hershman died in a car crash after working a 19-hour day on the set of “Pleasantville.”

Wexler wanted to know why nothing had been done. In the film, he adopted a “Roger & Me” pose — only his villain wasn’t some big corporation. Instead, he hammered his own union, the International Assn. of Theatrical Stage Employees. He ambushed the international president at an awards banquet and accused him of neglecting the issue and of stifling advocacy about it.

“To this date,” Wexler said in the film, “leadership has been unresponsive.”

How things have changed. Long hours are now the central issue in talks between IATSE and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. The union is seeking meal breaks and longer “turnaround” times between production days,...

IATSE, which has made brutally long workdays a key safety issue in its negotiations for a new film and TV contract, says that between January and July of this year it “received well over 50 reports of workdays 14 hours or longer, and it is likely that is just the tip of the iceberg. Nobody should accept or defend 14-hour days as an industry standard.”

Earlier this week, IATSE president Matthew Loeb said that the contract negotiations have reached a “critical juncture,” and has been preparing his members for a possible strike or lockout.

“The science is clear,” the union says in a pamphlet distributed to members recently. “Long and irregular hours without adequate breaks and rest are unsafe. The IATSE Locals are unified in their recognition that no other industry demands its employees work without bathroom, meal, or relaxation breaks day after day. The IATSE Locals are unified in their understanding...

Chicago – Predicting the Oscars is like going on a blind date. You really don’t know what’s going to happen, and often you’re humiliated to boot. But here goes Patrick McDonald of HollywoodChicago.com, along with one million other online prognosticators. The 93rd Academy Awards are Sunday, April 25th, 2021, in Hollywood.

Through the last five weeks on the Morning Mess, Wbgr-fm on the Scott Thompson Show, McDonald put the Swami on for the top categories at Sunday’s ceremony … Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Picture (with a bonus Best Director prediction).

7pm Central Time

Photo credit: ABC-tv

Before the big 2021 prediction video below how about some appropriate quotes about the Academy Awards …

“Nothing can take the sting off the world’s economic problems like watching millionaires present each other golden statues.” ~ Billy Crystal

The best thing that winning those Academy Awards...

The most honored cinematographer of 2020 is Joshua James Richards, the British-born “Nomadland” craftsman who specializes in beautiful but complex images of the American West. The partner of filmmaker Chloé Zhao, Richards has shot all three of her features, plus the 2017 farm-life love story “God’s Own Country,” imbuing each with a mysterious sense of nature’s power and the rawness of the outdoors.

Now Oscar nominees, Richards and Zhao, both in their late 30s, could each collect trophies at next month’s ceremony. Zhao is nominated in four categories, a record for a woman in a single year. Though the two do tend to eschew the spotlight, they are both deeply immersed in movie history and eager with references to films and filmmakers that have shaped their own careers.

“The approach of the cinematography was always one towards classic cinema that also feels contemporary,” Richards said in a video interview exclusively available on TheWrap.

The riot scenes in “The Trial of the Chicago 7” posed the biggest challenges to the re-recording mixer, Julian Slater, and the supervising sound editor, Renee Tondelli, in getting the sounds aspects just right. “The riot scenes and the demonstrations had a certain rhythm to them. You start a slow build and don’t want to reach the end too quickly,” Slater tells Gold Derby in our recent webchat (watch the exclusive video above). He specifically cites the score composed by Daniel Pemberton as an accelerant but needing to be a counter to that on the mixing end. “You need to balance that with the energy of the crowd yet whilst hearing everything that’s being said.” Tondelli concurs, saying that, “It was a chaotic score and we went against that, we didn’t go for chaos.”

SEEDaniel Pemberton interview: ‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’ composer

“The Trial of the Chicago 7,...

Closing out a year in which we’ve needed The Criterion Channel more than ever, they’ve now announced their impressive December lineup. Topping the highlights is a trio of Terrence Malick films––Badlands, Days of Heaven, and The New World––along with interviews featuring actors Richard Gere, Sissy Spacek, and Martin Sheen; production designer Jack Fisk; costume designer Jacqueline West; cinematographers Haskell Wexler and John Bailey; and more.

Also in the lineup is an Afrofuturism series, featuring an introduction by programmer Ashley Clark, with work by Lizzie Borden, Shirley Clarke, Souleymane Cissé, John Akomfrah, Terence Nance, and more. There’s also Mariano Llinás’s 14-hour epic La flor, Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time, Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning, plus retrospectives dedicated to Mae West, Cary Grant, Barbra Streisand, and more.

Check out the lineup below and return every Friday for our weekly streaming picks.

Chicago – The Chicago International Film Festival was founded in 1965 by Michael Kutza, and is the longest running “competitive film festival” in North America. So with that in mind it’s time for the 56th festival to confer those awards.

And the fest will be doing it live on their YouTube Channel (click here) at 10am Central Time on Friday, October 23rd.

To prove that anything can happen at the Awards Ceremony (when we were allowed to present them in person and attend the event), in 2013 I was standing in the bar at the Ambassador East hotel when an older gentleman started filming me with a high end video camera. After engaging in a pleasant conversation, I saw him again at the actual awards presentations – receiving a Lifetime Achievement honor. That gentleman was Haskell Wexler, the Oscar winning cinematographer for films such as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” “Bound for Glory,...

For cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, going from “Ford v Ferrari” to “The Trial of the Chicago 7” was more than merely shifting gears and genres within the period lane of the late 1960s. Shooting the timely conspiracy trial, showing Vietnam War protesters outside the 1968 Democratic Convention that turned horribly violent, required a new mindset and rapport with writer-director Aaron Sorkin, making his second outing behind the camera following “Molly’s Game.”

In fact, on “Chicago 7,” Sorkin’s technical inexperience demanded more visual heavy lifting from the cinematographer. Finally, Papamichael was able to facilitate Sorkin’s vision, just as he’s done all along with his frequent collaborators James Mangold and Alexander Payne (the Oscar-nominated “Nebraska”).

Papamichael realized on day one that “Aaron is all about the rhythm and the language,” he said. “And therefore he doesn’t want any shots that are not just on the person who’s speaking. And, you...

Aaron Sorkin tends to build movies around disturbing ideas rather than empathetic protagonists, thus revisiting tense courtrooms and raucous newsrooms. The price: Sometimes the characters get buried by the rhetoric.

His new movie, The Trial of the Chicago 7, opens this week at a propitious time when “serious” cinephiles are complaining about the absence of ‘serious’ films.

Sorkin’s provocative film will likely satisfy that appetite: Chicago 7 offers an unrelenting glimpse of 1960s turmoil, its yippies, revolutionaries and random exhibitionists, all of it steeped in contemporary subtext. The government heavies are Trumpian. The debates focus on the tactics and morality of protest.

Sorkin likes his actors to vent, and his cast is well suited for that exercise, Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne, Mark Rylance and Joseph Gordon-Levitt among them. The film’s release strategy itself is a unique exercise: Paramount shepherds the three weeks in theaters, leading to a Netflix...

The Republican convention this week delivered cool optics, sharp reality television and an ominous threat to public health, in the opinion of most media critics.

“A political convention is like a movie trailer; if a party messes up, it will likely mess up the election,” according to Franklin J. Schaffner, a politically savvy filmmaker (Patton) who was also a key adviser to the Democratic Party during its self-demolition in 1968.

The Democratic convention that year is, in fact, the setting for a new movie from another filmmaker, Aaron Sorkin, who became fascinated by “The Year the Democrats Lost Their Mind” – a famous Washington Post headline.

Ironically, the Post ran an almost identical headline about the Republicans in 1948 when, after a bungled convention, that party’s smug, overfunded candidate, Thomas Dewey, lost to underdog Harry S. Truman. “Dewey Defeats Truman,” the classic headline, is also the title of a perceptive new book by A.J. Baime.

Our 100th Guest! Comedy icon Martin Short joins us to discuss a few of the movies that made him.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Innerspace (1987)

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)

On The Waterfront (1954)

To Kill A Mockingbird (1962)

Terms Of Endearment (1983)

Moby Dick (1956)

The Exorcist (1973)

King Kong (1933)

A History Of Violence (2005)

A Song To Remember (1945)

Some Like It Hot (1959)

Annie Hall (1977)

The Oscar (1966)

Sleeper (1973)

Bananas (1971)

City Lights (1931)

September (1987)

The Harder They Fall (1956)

Bad Day At Black Rock (1955)

Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Schindler’s List (1993)

Kiss Me Stupid (1964)

The Ox-Bow Incident (1942)

The Bad And The Beautiful (1953)

Ben-Hur (1959)

Spartacus (1960)

The Ten Commandments (1956)

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

The Diary of Anne Frank (1959)

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

The Graduate (1967)

Klute (1971)

Blow-Up (1966)

Blow Out (1981)

The Godfather (1972)

The Godfather Part II (1974)

The Godfather Part III (1990)

Burn! (1970)

Reflections In A Golden Eye (1967)

Grease 2 (1982)

The Conversation (1974)

Back To The Future (1985)

Other Notable Items

Saturday Night Live TV...

With readers turning to their home viewing options more than ever, this daily feature provides one new movie each day worth checking out on a major streaming platform.

There are probably no worse people to quarantine with in the history of American theater than George and Martha, but that’s exactly what we’re invited to do in Mike Nichols’ 1966 film version of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” While Nichols opens up Edward Albee’s essentially one-room play to include scenes at a roadhouse, the film remains inescapably claustrophobic thanks to the powerhouse performances of Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Sandy Dennis, and George Segal, all of whom near closer and closer to a boiling point over the course of one dark night of the soul.

Few plays offer as full a meal for an actor as Albee’s 1962 howl of a dark comedy about middle-aged history professor George (Richard...