Medium Cool (1969)
Directed by Haskell Wexler
John Cassellis is the toughest TV news reporter around. After extensively reporting about violence and racial tensions in poor communities, he discovers that his network is helping the FBI by granting them access to his footage to find suspects.
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What critics compared Medium Cool to
The Chicago Seven chapter has inspired numerous films, from Haskell Wexler's docu-fiction treatment of the DNC protests, Medium Cool, through Woody Allen's satirical take on the trial in Bananas, to Brett Morgen's mix of archival footage with animated scenes based on court transcripts, Chicago 10.
He even weaves in footage from Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool.
Throw in the civic importance of Medium Cool as a cherry on top.
The Chicago DNC protests began peacefully and erupted into stunningly brutal violence, and Sorkin captures its horror here, weaving in some archival footage in the mode of Haskell Wexler’s groundbreaking 1969 fiction-nonfiction blend Medium Cool.
Sorkin’s camera doesn’t move a lot; he’s a front-and-center, time-for-a-closeup technician, and the way he stages and films the riot footage (interpolated with archival video from, among other sources, Haskell Wexler’s “Medium Cool” ) it’s routine chaos, desperately overscored by composer Daniel Pemberton.
As a media-dominated (or decimated, take your pick) society, we've rocketed way past A Face in the Crowd, beyond Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, and into some creepy, white-hot, prechopped, overshot, stage-managed hyperversion of world and national events.
And second, that in the decade from the late 1960s through the mid-'70s, filmmakers often hatched extreme, unique, original visions — among them Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend, Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, Dusan Makavejev's W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism, Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, Werner Herzog's Aguirre the Wrath of God and, we might say, Gerard Damiano's art-porno Devil in Miss Jones.
He’s the main attraction in “Nightcrawler,” a cynical, sick-soul-of-Los-Angeles movie that announces itself as a “Medium Cool” or “Network” for the TMZ era, but doesn’t have much to say beyond the familiar, shopworn hand-wringing about shutterbugs willing to do anything to get the shot and the desensitized voyeur audience — us — that laps it all up.
Nightcrawler hardly breaks new ground in its depiction of network news as a breeding ground for apathy and self-interest (see Network) or even in its study of a maverick newshound encountering violence against a sociopolitical backdrop (see Medium Cool); instead, it derives its strength in its utterly merciless portrayal of Louis Bloom, the type of guy who would not only sell his own mother but would chop her up into tiny pieces to facilitate the transaction.