In this election year, Ann Hornaday remembers Medium Cool, the great cinematographer ""Haskell Wexler's weird and riveting 1969 directorial debut", which he filmed during the summer of 1968, with the climax shot against scenes of actual political protest and street violence at that year's Democratic Chicago Convention. The movie stars Robert Forster (thirty years away from Max Cherry, the bail bondsman he played in Quentin Tarantinio's Jackie Brown) as a TV news cameraman, and Verna Bloom as a single mother from the South who's struggling to keep her nose above water. The movie's "story" is little more than a peg for the set pieces that Wexler and his cast improvised in documentary locations, and the characters have only as much life as the actors could breathe into them on the fly, but the film retains considerable interest for the history it captured and for its then-radical mixture of staged drama and nonfiction backdrop. Its most famous line was delivered, impromptu, by a member of the crew to the director as the tear gas was released and the cops unholstered their billy clubs: "Look out, Haskell, it's real!"
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