By Leonard Klady Klady@moviecitynews.com
Remembering Haskell Wexler
I was thinking about Haskell about a week ago. It might have been a movie or poster, it could have been one of any number of associations. He was certainly a part of our lives, especially my wives going back to the early 1970s.
In Los Angeles and the film industry you tend to lose contact with people for extended periods and neither of us had contact with him in a couple of years. He was indomitable and having survived literal and figurative close calls with mortality, death never really figured into one’s thinking about Haskell.
My wife worked with him on American Graffiti and I think I first met him with Connie Hall – another great eye – a few years later when they were partners in a company that made some of the great commercials of that long-ago era.
Haskell was famously difficult but that wasn’t my experience. He was combative and in your face and one can well imagine how unpleasant it would be to be on his bad side. I suspect my wife saw some of that on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, where he clashed with Milos Forman to the point that he got fired. But he’d shot enough of the film that regardless of who came in to complete it, it would be necessary to maintain his visual template.
Kazan also remembered his experience with Haskell on America, America as uniquely unpleasant. He vented about him in his autobiography but conceded in so many words that the sonofabitch did brilliant work. And his son Mark turned the camera on him in the documentary Tell Them Who You Are, a portrait that reflected a truly ambivalent relationship. There was love and respect, just not the sort or degree that he felt was appropriate.
Haskell always had a singular vision and that legacy can be seen in his Oscar wins Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Bound for Glory, as well as In the Heat of the Night, Coming Home and The Secret of Roan Inish. Directors who adored him like Norman Jewison, Hal Ashby and John Sayles gave him the space and authority he needed to work .
Unquestionably he wanted to direct his “own” movies and made fewer fiction films than he hoped, as well as a good number of documentaries. There was the moment in the late 1960s when Paramount opened the gates a crack let him in to do Medium Cool. Influenced by the work of Jean-Luc Godard. It has deservedly grown in stature over time and has influenced generations of filmmakers since.
I appeared Who Needs Sleep, one of the later doc. I’d written on sleep deprivation and its effect on productivity and functionality but was still surprised when Haskell called about being a talking head in the movie he was doing on the subject. He just said something like, when can I pop by? He showed up with his camera, looked around, showed me where to sit (presumably so he could best use available light) and curled up with his camera. It didn’t feel like I was being recorded. It was more like a friend coming over to jaw.
One of my wife’s tasks during American Graffiti was getting Haskell to the set each day. The production as filming nights in San Rafael and Petaluma outside San Francisco, and he was shooting commercials in Los Angeles during the day. So, she’d get him on a plane in the late afternoon in L.A. and he’d work until daylight and get back on a plane and be filming ads in the morning. It went on for weeks and, considering the perils he outlined in the documentary, never appeared to flag.
The image that burns in my mind is a photo of Haskell and my wife close dancing during a break in filming on American Graffiti. You can feel the tenderness and warmth in the beautifully silhouetted moment. I can’t think of a better way to remember him … or anyone.