The Movie That Accidentally Became a Documentary

[00:00:00]Get up and get up.

[00:00:06]>> This is a real riot taking place inside a fictional film called Medium Cool. The woman in yellow is not a protester.

[00:00:15]She's an actress named Vera Bloom.

[00:00:17]>> Do you still want to show me your cucumber?

[00:00:20]>> And she's playing the role of Eileen, a mother pushing through the crowd of protesters looking for her missing son.

[00:00:26]But no one around her knows they're in a movie. So when Eileen walks up to a real military barricade and tells the soldier she's looking for her son, they let her through. But when the cameraman tries to follow, he gets stopped. And a few moments later, the soldiers put on gas masks and throw a real canister of tear gas to disperse the crowd. Then from behind the camera, someone yells, "Look out, Haskell. It's real."

[00:00:53]>> Haskell is Haskell Wexler, the director of Medium Cool. and the person operating the camera during the shot. And it was real.

[00:01:03]>> When you think about tear gas, well, you think, well, it makes you cry. It makes you uncomfortable. It makes you think you're going to die because you can't you can't breathe.

[00:01:12]>> But the line, look out, it's real, was recorded later, which raises the obvious question. Why add that line? Why jolt us out of the fictional story and into something closer to a documentary where we're aware of the camera, the person operating it, and the real canister of tear gas at his feet.

[00:01:32]>> I was oblivious to the actual physical intensity that was existing there. I knew it was a good scene. I was watching a good movie until I got tear gas. When we're shaken out of the movie along with Wexler, we suddenly realize that the streets of Chicago have tanks and machine guns and the National Guard. And this experience parallels Wexler's own experience while filming. Wexler was a cinematographer by trade, so he was used to seeing the world as a cameraman, not a participant. Medium Cool was Wexler's directorial debut and his attempt to wrestle with that tension. And that's why Medium Cool opens with a news crew filming the aftermath of a car crash. We see the driver lying on the pavement barely alive while the cameraman walks around getting different angles. Only after he's done shooting does he finally say, >> "Better call an ambulance."

[00:02:33]>> And this scene was not just a metaphor.

[00:02:35]It came from personal experience.

[00:02:37]>> I remember when I was shooting in Vietnam. I was shooting a pastoral scene of a guy out in a rice patty. While I was rolling, he stepped on a landmine and he just went up in the air. Two guys ran out and helped bring him in and I kept shooting. I couldn't see the end of that scene as short as it was cuz I was crying and it was completely involuntary. I couldn't shoot anymore.

[00:03:02]At that moment, I felt the strongest division between being a voyer, being a shooter, or being a human being, being a participant. The tension between the cameraman as observer and the cameraman as participant is a tension that many filmmakers try to resolve by simply denying that it exists. The direct cinema movement, which Wexler was both a part of and pushed back against, was built on the belief that filmmakers could capture reality directly without changing it. The ideal was to remain invisible. Don't direct or intervene or even speak. The Mas brothers made that belief explicit in an interview about salesmen. When asked if they ever accompanied the salesman without equipment as a kind of control to see whether the camera was changing what happened, they rejected the premise.

[00:03:56]>> We know very well that that equipment is not going to change things materially.

[00:04:00]And maybe that's why it doesn't.

[00:04:01]>> For Wexler, that was exactly the illusion. The camera was never neutral.

[00:04:06]The person holding it was never absent.

[00:04:09]and pretending otherwise didn't remove the filmmaker's responsibility. That may be why Medium Cole created some friction with direct cinema filmmaker DA Penny Baker. Wexler offered him a small acting role in the film, even naming the character Penny Baker and making him another cameraman, but he turned it down. As film historian Paul Cronin says, >> Penny Baker said he felt no great sympathy with the on-screen representation of the news media in Medium Cool, specifically the insensitive and detached cameramen in this scene.

[00:04:41]>> And then, almost as if Medium Cool had staged a test, Penny Baker found himself in a situation that looked uncomfortably close to Wexler's critique. Around the same time Medium Cool was being filmed, he found himself working as a cameraman on Norman Mor's 1970 film Maidstone. In a now legendary sequence, Penny Baker filmed actor Rip Tor attacking Maylor with a hammer and stood filming as Tor started strangling Maylor, even shifting the camera to get a better angle of this faux assassination.

[00:05:13]>> The fight only stopped once real people had a real reaction to what was really happening.

[00:05:19]>> WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

[00:05:21]WHAT HAVE YOU DONE, YOU MOTHER?

[00:05:24]GET OFF OF HIM, YOU SON OF A WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

[00:05:31]>> Mailor was deeply disturbed by the event. He not only felt that he could have died, he felt betrayed that Penny Baker had kept filming instead of intervening. Years later, Penny Baker tells the story with a detached nonchalance that feels eerily similar to the cameraman in Medium Cool. But before we keep going, I need to talk about today's sponsor, Incogn. Your personal information can end up on data broker sites. Companies that collect and sell your data without your consent. And when that happens, your address, phone number, email, and social security number aren't just being leaked, they're being actively bought and sold by bad actors. I tried Incogn myself, and it found my information on 406 different sites. Then incogn automatically sent removal requests for me. The whole process took about 5 minutes. And that's the whole point. Incogn automatically removes your personal information from hundreds of data brokers. And all you have to do is create an account and authorize them to act on your behalf.

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[00:06:50]>> I remember watching and thinking, "This isn't part of the movie, but the movie's over." And then I thought, "The movies, this is documentary. The movie's never over." I'm thinking, "What am I doing filming? I should be helping Norman.

[00:07:05]He's my friend." and rip. I think got his ear ripped off.

[00:07:10]>> And this is what the direct cinema movement could never fully acknowledge.

[00:07:14]The cameraman is not a silent observer of reality. Just by holding the camera, he changes the behavior of the people around him. Rip Tor never would have attacked Mailor if there was no camera to film it. He said as much in a 1971 interview. I wasn't about to do that scene if there wasn't a camera and sound on. It was a version of what historian Daniel Borston called a pseudo event, an event conducted for the purpose of being turned into media. Now, I'm not trying to single out Penny Baker as a villain.

[00:07:47]He seems like basically a decent person.

[00:07:50]But that's exactly what makes the story useful because John Cassellis, the cameraman at the center of Medium Cool, is also basically a decent person. And that's Wexler's point. The danger is not that people who work in media are uniquely cruel. It's that the camera separates people from reality, allowing them to suspend moral responsibility and call it just doing their job. That mindset is put rather succinctly by Gus, the television soundman, who works with Cassellis.

[00:08:22]>> Well, it's the difference between a person who uh types something and a typewriter. The typewriter doesn't really care about what's being typed on it. But a typewriter is a machine and you're not a machine.

[00:08:34]>> Uh, >> actually, I'm kind of an elongation of a tape recorder.

[00:08:39]>> Paul Cronin describes the meaning of this line better than I could. The implication being that like cameraman Cassellis, he routinely abdicates all responsibility for his job, claiming to be only a passive recorder of the world around him, oblivious to the notion that just by being present, the camera and microphone transform and even misrepresent events being recorded.

[00:09:02]Putting down the camera to help someone who's injured is really the bare minimum of moral responsibility. But Wexler is pushing the question further than that.

[00:09:11]As image makers, we have a responsibility because of the potential power of our presentation images to not just deliver beautifully other people's lives that we have a social responsibility. And that's the struggle that I'm trying to suggest in that character in medium cool.

[00:09:30]>> Casselis is forced to confront that responsibility when he's assigned a human interest story about a black cab driver who returned $10,000 that was left in his cab. He and Gus arrive expecting a simple, flattering news segment, but instead they're met with suspicion and outright hostility.

[00:09:48]>> Gas like you get y'all up. You know, >> nobody on the street knew they were being filmed except Gus and Casselis.

[00:09:55]So, these threats are actually real. And that tension carried into the stage scene.

[00:10:01]>> Frank Baker lived here.

[00:10:02]>> Frank Baker live here.

[00:10:03]>> Frank Baker, cab driver.

[00:10:05]>> Frank Baker, cab driver. The black actors in this scene only agreed to appear if they could improvise their lines and approve the final cut. So when they harass Cassellis and Gus >> Chicago cops are getting funnier looking every day.

[00:10:20]>> They're saying what they actually think of the media.

[00:10:22]>> I'm not a cop. I'm a sound man.

[00:10:24]>> I bet you got credentials, too.

[00:10:26]>> And ironically, they echo Gus's own description of himself.

[00:10:30]>> They give you orders on this.

[00:10:32]>> Earlier he said he was an extension of a tape recorder. Now they mock him for only taking orders.

[00:10:38]>> They talk to you and you can't even talk back.

[00:10:41]>> He means he's a receiver and not a sender.

[00:10:45]>> And they weren't actors intimidating other actors. This wasn't acting. I mean, I felt really intimidated. Just because there didn't mean that I wasn't going to get hurt.

[00:10:54]>> What you a white flunky or something?

[00:10:56]>> There was no hostility that they weren't in any any danger of course from us. It was real and serious. But we were acting, but it was real and serious. If you can understand that.

[00:11:07]>> It is fiction, but it's also a confrontation. Wexler really is letting the people in front of the camera challenge the people behind it.

[00:11:15]>> You came down here to shoot 15 minutes of what has taken 300 years to develop grief. You know, >> look, I'm not interested.

[00:11:22]>> And all we're trying to explain to you is that you don't understand.

[00:11:27]>> I do something. You see, I do it well.

[00:11:29]That's my job. No, but you don't do it black enough. You can't because you're not black. We are.

[00:11:34]>> The very things that were said in those lines were things and feelings which they had about me personally. And there was a great deal of hostility and and a great deal of uncomfortable feeling in that room.

[00:11:46]>> But you are professionally exploiting that.

[00:11:48]>> Yeah, I guess you could say that.

[00:11:50]>> And you are the exploiters. You're the ones who distort and ridicule and emasculate us. In 1967, hundreds of race riots broke out across America and Lynden Johnson established the Kerner Commission to investigate why. Its conclusion became famous. Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal. The current commission also pointed a finger of blame at the news media. It said that the mainstream news media had not spent enough time either reporting on the problems facing African-Americans at the time. Nor had the major news media hired and employed enough African-Americans either as reporters, as photographers, as editors, or in any other capacity.

[00:12:37]The report itself put it plainly, "We believe that the media have thus far failed to report adequately on the causes and consequences of civil disorders and the underlying problems of race relations.

[00:12:50]And that I think perfectly captures what Wexler means when he says image makers have a social responsibility. An image may be factually accurate in isolation but not be representative of the overall reality of events. And Wexler is trying to represent that larger reality by allowing real people and real events to shape the fiction. And that method wasn't limited to the black neighborhood. He also filmed in the Appalachin ghetto in Uptown Chicago where Eileen and her son Harold live.

[00:13:24]And unlike Verna Bloom, Harold Blinkenship was not an actor. He was a boy who actually lived in that neighborhood. His family had moved from West Virginia to Chicago after his father lost his job as a coal miner.

[00:13:38]There was also an entire subplot eventually cut for time in which Eileen begins working with Peggy Terry, a real anti-poverty activist in Chicago who advocated for solidarity between poor black neighborhoods and poor white neighborhoods. To me, cutting that subplot is one of the film's great failures. The other is the way the film changes Harold. In Medium Cool, Harold likes reading more than watching television. But in real life, Harold was illiterate. And even as an adult, he never learned to read. Unlike the black actors who essentially just played themselves, Harold's character was more or less dictated by Wexler. In most fiction films, that would be expected.

[00:14:26]But medium cool is not most fiction films. And in Harold's Neighborhood, illiteracy was common. It was part of the larger reality the film was trying to represent. But even where I think the film fails, there's still a genuine effort made to adapt the story to the world instead of forcing the world to fit the story. Outside of letting real people represent their communities, he also allows real historical events to dictate where the story goes next. When the Illinois National Guard began training for the protests expected later that year, Wexler and his crew showed up to film it. When Robert Kennedy was assassinated, Wexler flew actors and crew to DC to film the funeral.

[00:15:10]>> Pascal called us up and said, "We're going to Washington." So, we were like Bob and I were like news reporters.

[00:15:15]>> When a shanty town sprung up on the Washington Mall as part of the Poor People's Campaign, Cassellis and Gus were there to film it. And of course, when riots broke out during the Democratic National Convention, the climax of the story became woven into that real event. But just as importantly, Wexler never lets us forget that this is his perspective of those events. He does this not only by making the main character a cameraman, but by repeatedly revealing the presence of the camera itself.

[00:15:47]>> Look at the guys with the camera.

[00:15:51]go.

[00:15:52]>> You ready again?

[00:15:53]>> You want me to start again? You are the exploiters.

[00:15:56]>> Look, they got film.

[00:15:58]>> Then in the final scene, the film echoes its opening image. A car wreck on the side of the road. But this time, the camera pulls back and reveals another camera operated by Wexler himself. And the crash takes on a different meaning.

[00:16:14]Even in the fictional world of the movie, it's not a real car crash. It was staged for the camera, but it's still a real car that's really on fire. Just like the protest is both real and staged for the camera. Not to say the protesters were actors. They were real protesters. But they took to the streets because they knew cameras would be present and the whole world would be watching.

[00:16:44]The protest was not a spontaneous uprising. It was a planned pseudo event.

[00:16:50]Like Rip Torren says, it never would have happened if there wasn't a camera and sound on.

[00:16:56]>> NBC, come back.

[00:16:58]>> Stay with us.

[00:17:01]>> Hey, come back. Stay with us.

[00:17:03]>> Cameras do not passively record reality.

[00:17:07]They transform it. And that's why the most truthful representation of that reality has to include the camera itself. Because the camera and the person holding it are not outside the world they're filming. They're part of it. The whole world is watching. The whole WORLD IS WATCHING. THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING. The hard watching.