At the outset, we see two men running up to a crashed car, only to pull out a camera and audio recorder. We see them spend several seconds setting up shots near the passenger door and trying out several mic positions. The sound recorders goes over to the front of the car and callously unplugs the stuck horn to silence the scene. He then points his long shotgun microphone down by the open passenger door. The closed captions read soft moaning. The shot pulls back to a wide and we see the form of a woman face down on the asphalt, clearly the human subject of this car accident. The captions imply that she is alive. The men seem to, after a moment, realize that they should do something. They head back to their car, which is branded with a new stations, call letters and radio, in that they've got coverage of a car accident, sent an ambulance, they arrange for a rendezvous to commute the film to the television station and they drive off. We, the audience, were meant to make a choice, an evaluation. And we have plenty of opportunity to Mull it over with a very clever tracking rig shot of the motorcycle messenger delivering the film to the station as the opening credits roll. Hi everyone, Mark D here. It's been a bit releases will be sporadic, a lot going on. However, I'm proud to say that I now know why more American Graffiti was in some ways not much of a movie, even though there were a lot of actors on screen. The reason for that is medium cool. If you have any questions about American Graffiti or its sequel, More American Graffiti, I'll refer you to this podcast feed, which features episodes about both movies in the past. The name you need to know, however, is Haskell Wexler, who was also discussed in at least one of the aforementioned episodes and was probably the first person to write, produce, direct, photograph, and operate on the same movie. That movie is 1960. Nine's medium cool innocence is a feeling. Awareness is a feeling. How does it feel to stop feeling? You may discover. Violence at a time when an entire country learns to feel nothing. America's wonderful, wonderful wonderful wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. It really makes it. Paramount Pictures presents medium cool. Every town must have a place where phony hit these main psychedelic dungeons, pop. The dynamics that are happening in society, We don't, we don't deal with the static things. We deal with the things that are happening. We deal with the violence. 5 cameramen have been killed. One guy in Germany, he was beat to death by a mob, just literally stoned. Beat to death for UPI. The cow thought he was taking pictures for the police. Wherever I go, I'm beat up. Get the guys with the cameras. I mean, I wouldn't want to teach in the schools in this neighborhood. Why not? People down in here use the sticks, rocks, guns and everything down in here. Nah, you don't use rocks, do you? Yeah, I don't. They do this one. The speed. We work on both, you see? Really. The object is to knock the other guys brains out. The third of the series was brought to you as a public service by station WHJP News Department. Stay tuned for the white show next on Channel 8. Now I know your husband can't come charging through the door. It'd be too corny, like the late you. The station's been letting the cops. And the FBI study our footage. You're you're putting me on. You're kidding me. What am I? I'll think. How can I go on and cover a story? It's one or more. Cameras haven't been smashed. Robert Forster and the cast of exciting newcomers star in a contemporary drama that bombards the senses beyond the age of innocence into the Age of Awareness. I'm not even going to bother with a By the Numbers for Medium Cool because it did approximately 0 numbers. This is definitely an art house movie that got recognition on its nature versus its mass appeal. I'm going to assume that you haven't seen it. I wouldn't have either if I didn't hear about Wexler from all the American Graffiti information I've digested over the years. I'm very certain that this is a complete and utter product of its time, because that was its intent from the outset. The movie goes a step further to engage with the audience's thoughts from the beginning, with a faux documentary and dinner party where several moral and ethical positions are taken and defended. It feels a bit like a punchline, I think. Instead, it's an echo to the end of the movie. This movie is quite political. It was originally rated X and I think it was a very political X indeed. They did revise it to an R rating in 1970 with no change to the film. The movie is set in 1968 Chicago, which is both recent and important to the release of the film. If you're still conscious, I would recommend suspending any play of the Marx movies Drinking Game for this episode. But counterculture was definitely a thing. Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis touches upon this. We've seen our own version of this with the 2020 riots. The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago had its own brand of that. You can check that out on Wikipedia. But it was a demonstration of heavy-handed police response to peaceful protest. It was characterized by some as a police riot. Due to the amount and intensity of violence against protesters, photographers, reporters and bystanders alike, Medium Cool is a mix of documentary footage, both real and fictional, woven in with some more conventional narrative footage, although sometimes the line blurs. I'll cut to the chase. I think this is an important movie, but I don't think that it's a necessarily a super enjoyable watch. I do think that it's good. It was intense and shocking at the time, but it's relatively tame in contemporary sensibilities. I saw worst violence on the news in 2020. The part that's shocking in 2023 is how our world still resembles 1968. It's civil unrest, the duty and responsibility of our elected government, racial violence, the duty and responsibility of our law enforcement. Gun control and the duty and responsibility of the media. We have all of the knowledge of the world at our fingertips in 2023, but we really can't settle in on any one of these things. They call this film a technical masterpiece, and I can see that as well, and we'll talk about it, but it certainly does tackle several aspects of the Society of that day. You aren't going to get a lecture for me at this point. I have my opinions, but that would be for a different podcast. I will, however, talk about the implications of the title of this movie. It is a slight dig at media theorist Marshall Mcluhan calling television a cool medium as opposed to a hot medium. This feels a bit backwards to me in 2023, but back in 1968, television left a lot to be desired technically. And according to Mcluhan, it required more participation in the audience to quote fill in the gaps. This is solely due to the nature and fidelity of the median. Isn't even a lowbrow versus highbrow distinction, although it feels like it very much could be that by proxy, based on the examples that are are readily given. But this engagement in question, right it can be. Undermined by outside activity or distraction, right? Film was considered a hot medium as a theater is a purpose built location designed to eliminate outside distractions and present film in the highest fidelity fidelity possible while filling the vision and attracting the attention of the audience. Television on the other hand was small. Low quality and usually located in a busy household, resplendent with distractions in life, this cool medium is only medium cool as it is the medium by which this happening. These happenings, I guess I should say, were communicated to the world. The 1968 DNC protests were the origin of the chant. The whole world is watching, and for the first time, that was potentially true. Mcluhan also posits, alongside his hot and cool media, outlined in the 1964 book Understanding Media, the extension of man, that the content of a medium is always another medium. This book is also the source of the message. The medium is the message and is it as it focuses on the form of media over its content, talking about how all media and and he counts. Really any technology as media doesn't really create anything new, so much as it expands or augments the human experience to what he claims would be psychic and social consequences, which is ultimately the real meaning or message of the media itself. I realize that this is quickly becoming an intro to media studies paper, but I didn't study media, so this is new and interesting to me. I'll go out on a limb and posit that the message of the podcast medium is that listeners never need to be alone, that you can take a curated pair of social experience with you everywhere you go. I don't think that that's a bad thing, and it's not even remotely unusual in 2023. It's just one of the many little packages in the medium of the smartphone and the ubiquity of network connectivity. You're probably listening on a smartphone right now while doing other things, maybe on a dumb MB3 player, but still doing other things. But like, statistically, right? I'm not even making this up. The integrated circuit has drastically changed our lives. Mcluhan eventually talks about a global nervous system, and I think we're pretty much there already. As dark mirror as that is medium cool doesn't look at it with quite that much depth, although they did send. Some film over the bike messenger network and they did have Motorola Pageboys which were very early one way paging devices that could receive targeted voice broadcast. These are commented on directly in the text of the film. Mcluhan seems to have been on to something clearly and Mcluhan aside, Medium cool digs into TV what it means and what it can do and gives us a little story about it. It's a slice of a story. I I guess is that the meat of the movie really happens outside of of it, but it's a story nonetheless. We follow protagonist John Casellis, the cameraman in question, and to a lesser extent, his sound sidekick. Gus Casellis is somewhat of an unfeeling hedonist on the outset. Then there's this plot point where he finds out that his new station is handing over footage to the cops. He then shows up to his network and finds out that he's fired. Just prior to that, there is a definite lecture on on racial bias in the media, which is nice and well presented, as if it was captured by Casellis himself. Gus mostly drops off at this point and Casellis befriends an Appalachian refugee, Eileen and her son Harold. There was 0 context. For me as to what the hell was going on. But it was an ongoing situation in Chicago and Wexler legitimately wanted to address this. Casellas begins a relationship with Eileen and gradually becomes more aware of the world and its political landscape as he begins to freelance and then takes a job with the Democratic National Convention. He also takes a positive role in Harold's life. The riots break out and Harold seems to have gone missing. She ends up walking through all these. Protest zones looking for him and trying to reach Casellis. Finally she is able to and he picks her up. We see that Harold has returned home safely on his own while Casellis and Eileen are driving somewhere. It's unexplained as to what happens, but it sounds like maybe a a catastrophic blowout and we see Casellis's car crashed into a tree and Catching Fire on the side of the road. A car full of rubberneckers rolls through slowly and snaps a photo of the car. We hear from a new broadcast. We hear from a news broadcast that Eileen died in the crash and Casellas is in critical condition. End of movie. That's some ****. But honestly, even with the relative nothing burger that the the plot of this movie ended up becoming, there's a lot to dig into. Each character has something going on that's worth discussing, but I think I'll limit myself to broader strokes. A major component is. How violent these protests got. And here's the here's part of the genius of this movie. Wexler and crew and actors were there at the protests. Filming the film of the protests is pretty much all real. Wexler knew that the protests were going to pop and and he set up and and watched some of the criticism that he leverages toward Kassalis about being this passive observer. Disinterested even. Some of that was him trying to work out his own feelings with this. Wexler took the theme of the movie visually to be as documentary as possible, and he was formerly a documentary filmmaker. But he's not without craft or skill. He's got this long one take when Eileen is looking for Harold in the apartment. That is just ******* swell, but it's made possible with the most Spartan lighting set as possible. He's also using a lot of still photography lenses and a specific Kodak film stock a faster 1 to get the most out of the least, and he succeeded. The movie looks pretty great. There's only one or maybe two really conventionally beautiful sequences, and they're they're flashbacks. Their memories of Eileen and Harold, especially Eileen's baptism in a pond in a field. And it really is beautiful. The rest of the movie isn't gritty per se, but it does feel more real, less dreamlike the unimpressiveness of everyday life. The other two sequences are both fictional, and they they bear mentioning as they stand out somewhat as well. The first one is Cassellis and his initial love interest Ruth running nude through his apartment. And when I mean running, they are running, and when I mean nude, they are nude. This is another long one take and it is frenetic. The set dressing is amazing. Like a like a ******* person lives like that, you know? I don't know, but you could probably still bring a girl home with Riz like young Robert Forrester. In fairness, you get a really, really good look at Forrester. The second one also features Forrester, but it's also featuring Verna Bloom's Eileen. They go to like a club or a concert or something like a performance. Like it's like hippie stuff, right? Like the Mothers of Invention are playing in this kind of pitch black room with the craziest strobe effect. And I read that they actually cut like black frames of film and inserted them where the strobe was off to like quadruple emphasize the effect. And it works, but it shows Casellas and Eileen really having a good time and being of the people, so to speak. Casellas. Isn't this removed alien anymore? He's kind of into the psychedelic scene and the liberal scene and just having a good time. I can't help but wonder if this mirrors Wexler's experiences in any way. Wexler, from what I understand, came from a wealthy family and served in World War Two and spent 10 days on a lifeboat. He then came back to the States and worked making industrial films for a period of time. Eventually falling in as a camera assistant on documentary films in 1963 he got the nod to serve as cinematographer on Elliott Kazan's America America, a movie of which I know nothing about but a movie which received an Academy nod for Best Director. He self funded the documentary on civil rights activists called The Bus that same year, and then was able to get steady work in Hollywood. Wexler, as I'm sure I've mentioned, was the person who pulled strings to get George Lucas admitted to the USC Film School. But what I learned recently was that they were both gear heads or petrol heads, as one would say in other places, and that's how they knew each other. He received his first Academy Award for the cinematography in black and white, which was a separate category at the time of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Which is 1 based on a stage play and two incredibly depressing. It was a provocative stage play that translated well onto film and it won several awards. He had a a a couple of issues filming on movies where he was removed. I don't necessarily know why. He suspects it might have been because of his outspoken politics, including being removed from Coppola's The Conversation and Milos Foreman's 1 Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which is a good looking movie of what he says. Out of the entire movie, he probably didn't shoot. About two scenes, however, he did end up winning again on this biopic of of a friend of his, folk singer Woody Guthrie, whom he met way back in World War Two. This film, Bound For Glory, featured a Steadicam in its infancy, and it had a long shot that starts out with Wexler on a crane in a big crane move, and then he just walks off and and I've seen it. And and it's fine, I guess. We live in a A post bound for glory world, so it's not impressive to us. But the camera gets lost along with subject in what I can only assume to be a Dust Bowl okie crowd. And it it it, you know, again it probably had people openly weeping in theaters in 1976. It might have been so beautiful to them. But it's fine. It's good, it's clever, it's thematic. It's got weight in the story. But Wexler's approach to medium cool is both unique and noteworthy. He was initially given the green light to make a movie called Concrete Wilderness, based off a book by Jack Kufer. It's a book that hasn't really stuck around in the zeitgeist, but it, you know, seems interesting nonetheless, like a reverse My Side of the mountain, I guess. Either way, he gets to Chicago and he knows that it's a powder keg. He's been in the antiwar movement for a while, so he starts to pick up on events and happenings. He quickly writes and registers a script for Medium Cool, a name that was suggested to him. He was familiar with Mcluhan in so much as he knew that he did not understand what the hell Mcluhan was talking about, but he did know a good title when he heard it. He went with Robert Forrester and Peter Bonners to Washington, DC, to Resurrection City. There was an entire subplot where Eileen learns about the civil rights and antiwar movements, and there was an entire section with Jesse Jackson, who's only reduced to a quick cameo. There was more story to this movie, a lot more that was cut to make time, and this movie's about two hours long, so those were good cuts. But there was a lot of thought and intentionality to the story and a lot of realism. A lot of the. Non actors in the movie were these actual people that were actual activists, educating the character of Eileen on activism and and these issues and things like that. It was real activists in in real situations interacting with the actors, playing characters. You know that the tent city was real, The people walking around the tent city were real. The waiting around that John and Gus were doing was real. And then they they end up going to the the training ground where the National Guard was training for the the Chicago Democratic National Convention. That was also real. They showed up with cameras and were treated like journalists. The unit was split up into bad guys and good guys and it was all real. It was a documentary shoot with two fictional characters rocking, walking around in the real world. The Apalachian ghetto was real. There was a subplot where the Apalachians were linking up with civil rights folks because ultimately. They were in the same boat, looking for the same things, equality and and improvement of quality of life that was cut. The plot conceit of the new station providing information to the police and the FBI was also really happening. Wexler was also rewriting this movie as time went on, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Robert Kennedy was assassinated. He wrote scenes about that in. He, along with sound recordist Chris Newman and two other cameras operated by Michael Margulies, the other operated by Ron Vargas, them and producer Jonathan Hayes, link up with a gentleman by the name of Studs Terkel, who is a Chicago historian. Studs gets him into the conversation with all types of activists in Chicago and vouchers for them. They then know where the organized protests are going to go to be, and and they go there. The TV cameras were leaving. The people shouting for them to stay. That's real. The people getting hit in the head and bleeding. That's real. The tear gas in Chicago, That's real. Verna Bloom, who plays Eileen, was wearing this bright, bright yellow dress and picking her way through abject violence in Lincoln Park. She was a fictional character in a real place. It couldn't have been done better if there was planning and wardrobe and hair and makeup. But Bloom just went to the store and bought a nice dress, which he refers to as a dress up dress. That, somebody from Kentucky was would think, was nice looking, and it was, but it was just absolutely striking against the relative monochrome of those violent streets. The convention floor footage that was real. They tried to get crash and that didn't work out, but they ran into Warren Beatty, who had credentials. They got in, and Robert Forrester legitimately shot footage of the convention floor while being shot by Mike Margulies. Wexler takes the truth, seeking one step further. And the last shot of the movie is a camera panning away from the crash car of cameraman Jim Cassalis and panning over. And we're looking at Haskell Wexler with this giant camera, and he pans over to us. He pans over to the audience. He turns the camera to us. We're real. He's real. Harold, the boy in the movie. Played by Harold's, Blankenship was a real boy from the Apalachee and ghetto. The scene where he sees a shower for the first time is the first time he saw a shower. He couldn't read, but he was nice and he was intelligent. They took him out of the ghetto for six weeks and they dropped him right back in. And no one has seen or heard from Harold Blankenship since he was real, playing a fictional character that was basically himself. Wexler continued to make movies to some acclaim and to make documentaries as well, including 2000 Six's Who Needs Sleep? About the working conditions in the film industry. He passed in 2015, but he broke a lot of ground, Really great techniques like that Steadicam shot, as well as several of the shots in Medium Cool, some of which didn't make it past the final cut. He also worked on the famous Sidney Poitier movie In the Heat of the Night, where he actually lit and photographed for a black person with intention, which was. Kind of a first. It sucks to say it, but in 1967, people didn't really want to take measures to expose for someone with dark skin, you know, if we want to make some connection, I did a whole thing on baseball movies in the episode of this podcast for the The Sandlot, and he worked on 1990 Two's The Babe. So again, there's a lot in there. Casellis's first relationship, Harold and Casellis is growing closer. Harold's relationship with his dad. Casellis and Eileen's relationship. Eileen being unable to teach in Chicago even though she was a teacher back in Kentucky. The National Guard practice of rounding up hippies and just beating the **** out of civilians. The presence of media everywhere. The ability for media to other people. The ability for people to be othered by authority and concert. With the media, at any rate, the people at the dinner party, in the beginning that is an echo of the riots of the protest that is conflict. But it is so tame in comparison. The woman in the gun store in the gun store owner played by Peter Boyle. You know that dinner party scene and that that gun store scene are are mostly nothing, but they're so compelling. And that beginning scene has Eileen in it with that yellow dress. And casellas handing out drinks. It looks like it might even be in his apartment but it's not fully explained where it is in the timeline or anything like that. It's just there. Maybe it happened on the same day. You know we don't know. Gus is is in the sequence as well and he equates himself to the in the dinner party when somebody asked him about you know what choice he has in in recording and and somebody said, well you're not a typewriter he he equates himself to. Or or you're not like a machine. He equates himself to a typewriter, right, Who is uncaring as to what is being produced through it. He depersonalizes himself. And then he says he is an elongation of a tape recorder, which is certainly a take. But either way, one of the daggers in that scene is where a man says all good people deplore problems at a distance. Like Thomas Jefferson, he loved the common man at a distance. And that makes me think of tools single Vicarious off 10,000 days and it's it's it's kind of basically this is that's a some pretty ******* rad song but like this is the newer take, the tool take. I think this movie's take is the the power of television and media not the fascination of it, which maybe people didn't have back then TV was was lower media. But the idealism that something good can come of television of this power. There's some cynicism. In there. But it's it's realistic. It's born of real world experience. It's as this movie is, just just as much tethered in the real world and the events of the 1968 Democratic National Convention as Tools Vicarious is 2006 or whatever ******* year came out, I remember. But also I'm going to, I'm going to be going on a Tool video binge. So if I have a totally different 5 next episode, well, you know, I guess I came back changed. But the difference between Wexler and I is that I have the benefit of hindsight. TV is powerful and easily manipulated. Every medium is medium cool. I guess you know we we're finally connected with that digital nervous system and it betrays us routinely and in so many ways. But back on task. I can safely say that this was a hugely influential movie in its time. It likely still is. It probably gave rise to the mockumentary, and it certainly gave rise to American Graffiti as well as the complete homage. More American Graffiti ripples in the pond of human consciousness and artistic pursuits. Nightcrawler, the very good 2014 movie written by Dan Gilroy and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, probably also came of this. The premise of the amoral, bordering to psychotic cameraman and his interaction with the news station seems like an updated opposite take, with a cynical focus on the audience more than the focus on the current events, counterculture and the interplay of media and all of these things. But it's there, right? These are extremely easy leaps to make. I don't regret my time with this movie, like all movies or. Like most, as I have gone way too hard on a couple in the past episodes, there is a lot to experience that I'm choosing to not communicate. There are the in between sequences. So much of this movie happens in between the plot, if that makes sense. The a I written summary would be something like Eileen walks around the park during the protest. But the reality is that we're on that walk with her. She's having reactions to what's going on the real people in the scene. Are reacting to her and to what's going on, but we see her emotions and those of the people around her, and those are her genuine emotions. This then has impact on our emotions. To try to plot this in a summary or synopsis or a book report would be futile. It's just it's just a very personal viewing experience. The documentary sequences following Harold and his friend around are are genuinely beautiful and assembly with their extremely naturalistic performances. The movie cut a good amount of the more contrived parts of the story to ensure that these in between parts had their time and that was the right choice. There is there's a feeling to this movie a vibe. It's genuine, it's earnest as George Lucas would say. It rhymes. And I'm very confident that he ******* loves this movie. So this might very well be where he got the rhyming from. I'll ask him if I see him at the Formula One race in Miami. Pod racing is Formula One, by the way. I'm never going to do an episode on Star Wars, so that's my big reveal. Pod racing is just Formula One, and my dude likes cars and racing always has and always will, and I don't blame him in the slightest. But yeah, the interplay of real and fictional in this film is it's really excellent. On top of the actual overt themes in the text and and and and whatnot, I recently listened to an episode of a podcast that airs both real and fictional episodes, and this one episode that I went to look for was a mix of both. The podcast is called Imaginary Worlds, and the episode was called When Cthulu Calls. Really good stuff. But unfortunately they need to be extremely explicit about what an episode is. Fictional because people like, get mad. Yeah, I don't know. But medium cool in 1968 also has a conspiracy theorist who I think may have been an actor maybe make a brief cameo. So I think that people haven't changed half as much as they have been empowered by media. I don't think there's been so much change as it's been change of reach or change of ability to communicate. Right. We've been given the power to project to to 1,000,000 if not billions of people, But have we gained the power to understand, right? The more I think about this movie, the more I end up liking it. It does share something with with Tulane Blacktop and American Graffiti that I think I've come to enjoy a lot, which is that like ultra naturalistic casting where they're basically finding the characters a person and then hoping they're an actor. But we also have on top of that a layer, an aspect of cinema verite which also Wexler somewhat disowns. But we're seeing the cameraman filming the actors in the action in plenty of instances that makes it feel more real and that there is a consistent world with rules out there between the actor and the camera we are seeing through. It's like the prover of the Magicians act, but this prover just happened to happen in an actual full scale riot in 1968. But yeah, I asked this of you singular listener, this is your homework. If you choose to accept it, find something or someone and take a beat and try to understand a little more about it or or them. I do this podcast because I'm very much on my own. Little sandbox, but it came of a desire to understand movies and broadcasting better. I don't think that I'm the greatest content producer, and I'm certainly middling when it comes to movies, but I do think that I'm a pretty good recorder as an engineer when I put the work in. But you know, if I would just have admired from a distance, I wouldn't have known that this would be a satisfying creative outlet. For me, I wouldn't have known or have been able to put myself in the shoes of just the the, the people that I look up to for their content and their their product and their commitments and their performance in trying to understand people better. You know, I think that's valid, but it's also personal. So pick a person, Pick somebody in your life or something in your life. Try to understand it a little bit better Today or tomorrow, or maybe next week, maybe next month, whenever you want. But give it a try. See everybody. All good people deplore problems at a distance by Thomas Jefferson. He loved the common man. But at a distance, you see it gets pretty complicated. People rarely say the real reasons for things big corporations never do. Just politics. Plain bureaucratic politics. This is a season up here watching.