Haskell Wexler - Early life, Film career, Selected filmography, Frequent collaborators

Cinematographer and film director, born in Chicago, Illinois, USA. After making industrial and educational films for some 10 years, he broke into feature films as cameraman for the semi-documentary The Savage Eye (1959). He went on to photograph a number of notable films, culminating in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), for which he won an Academy Award. He also branched out into writing, directing, and producing films, most of which were documentaries that allowed him to express his own progressive political sympathies. The best known of his own films, Medium Cool (1969), mixed a fictional plot with documentary footage. He won another Academy Award for cinematography for Bound for Glory (1976).

Haskell Wexler (born February 6, 1922 in Chicago, Illinois) is an Academy Award-winning American cinematographer, and a film producer and director. Wexler was judged to be one of film history's ten most influential cinematographers in a survey of the members of the International Cinematographers Guild.

Early life

Wexler was born in Chicago, Illinois to Simon and Lottie Wexler, who also had Jerrold, Joyce (Isaacs), and Yale.

Film career

He briefly made industrial films in Chicago, then became an assistant cameraman. Notwithstanding their personal differences, the film was attractive, and Kazan was nominated for a Best Director Academy Award, and Wexler worked steadily in Hollywood thereafter. In 1965, Wexler replaced cinematographer Harry Stradling during the shooting of Mike Nichols' screen version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? after Stradling and Nichols had a falling out over the look of the film. Wexler won an Academy Award for the film's brutal, black-and-white cinematography in 1967. He won a second Oscar in 1976 for Bound for Glory, a biography of Woody Guthrie (whom Wexler had met during his time in the Merchant Marine). Wexler believed that both he and Almendros should have jointly received an Oscar for his contribution instead of Almendros winning the award by himself.

One of the central aspects of Wexler's career has been his prickly relationship with directors and producers, especially those he considered—rightly or wrongly—less talented than himself. Cuckoo's Nest producer, Michael Douglas, stated in the Mark Wexler documentary (see below) that he thought Wexler an extraordinarily talented cinematographer—but would never work with him again. Wexler was also fired by Francis Ford Coppola after a week of shooting The Conversation, reportedly over clashes with Coppola.

Wexler has directed only a handful of movies, but among them was the influential Medium Cool, a film written by Wexler and shot in the cinéma vérité style.

In 1988, he won an Independent Spirit Award for his cinematography on John Sayles' Matewan (for which he was also nominated for an Academy Award), and in 1993, he won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographers.

Selected filmography

The Secret of Roan Inish, 1994 Blaze, 1989 Matewan, 1987 Days of Heaven,1978 Bound for Glory, 1976 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 1975 Medium Cool, 1969 (also director and screenwriter) The Thomas Crown Affair, 1968 In the Heat of the Night, 1967 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 1966 The Best Man, 1964 America, America, 1963 Face in the Rain, 1963 Angel Baby, 1961 Hoodlum Priest, 1961 The Savage Eye, 1960 Stakeout on Dope Street, 1958 (credited as Mark Jeffrey due to problems with his guild membership)

Frequent collaborators

John Sayles Hal Ashby Norman Jewison