Monday, December 28, 2015

Haskell Wexler, 1922-2015

Cinematographer Haskell Wexlerhas died at the age of 93. Wexler worked with many of Hollywod's great directors from the 1950s on, winning two Oscars for his work on the movies Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Bound For Glory. Among other recognizable feature films Wexler did, there's:

The Best Man, the interesting political drama looking behind the scenes of a brokered political convention;
In the Heat of the Night, with black Philadelphia police detective Sidney Poitier helping white southern cop Rod Steiger solve a murder;
The caper movie The Thomas Crown Affair; and
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Miloš Forman's disturbing look at a mental facility.

Wexler was also the director of a number of documentaries, with probably the most famous of these being Medium Cool, about the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

I presume TCM is going to run a programming tribute to Wexler sometime in January, but I haven't looked at the website yet to see if they've announced anything. Probably not, since Wexler's death was just announced yesterday evening and there's nobody around to schedule it and get the rights to the movies on a Sunday evening.

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