The people's cinematographer.

• Author: Landau, Saul
• Position: Haskell Wexler

I first met Haskell Wexler in 1969. He had recently finished directing Medium Cool, a film that exposed the brutality of Chicago cops during the 1968 Democratic convention. Paramount had refused to release Medium Cool for almost a year after he had finished editing it, even though he had won an Oscar for filming Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The executives asked him to tone down the police-brutality scenes. Haskell wouldn't do it. The Motion Picture Association of America gave the film an X rating -- ostensibly because it had a nude scene. Haskell maintains to this day that the X stood for unacceptable political content.

Haskell's cinematographic successes with commercial films did not adequately prepare him to confront the real power of the motion-picture industry bosses, with their close links to political elites. He had been D.O.P. (director of photography) for the successful In the Heat of the Night. Subsequently, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he filmed American Graffiti, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Coming Home. and Bound for Glory, which won him another Oscar.

In 1996, the film industry recognized his genius and gave Haskell the Motion Picture Academy's Lifetime Achievement Award. He is ranked as one of the world's greatest cinematographers. But the acclaim has not diluted his politics. "We have a responsibility to show the public the kinds of truths that they don't see on the TV news or the Hollywood film," he says.

At the time he received the Lifetime Achievement Award, he was videotaping bus riders in Los Angeles to dramatize the ordeal of getting from the ghetto to downtown L.A. by public transit. It will be his third "bus" documentary. The first was a 1963 film about freedom riders. The second, some twenty years later, was about a bus full of people making a cross-country trip for peace and disarmament. The documentary about the Bus Riders Union of Los Angeles will tell the story of an organizing group that has dramatized how the city government neglects the poor.

Hollywood did not always embrace Haskell. During the McCarthy era, he couldn't find work in the industry. "I filmed football games for TV," he says. "They gave me two ten-minute rolls of film to cover a whole game. `But games last sixty minutes,' I told the producer. `Only film touchdowns and completed passes,' he said."

Wexler had other enemies. The FBI called him "potentially dangerous because of background, emotional instability, or activity in groups engaged in activities inimical to the United States," according to a 1974 memo signed by FBI Director Clarence Kelley.

Haskell Wexler was born in...