Haskell Wexler, ASC Will Receive the International
Documentary Association’s 2006 Career Achievement Award

LOS ANGELES, September 21, 2006 – Haskell Wexler, ASC will receive the 2006 International Documentary Association (IDA) Career Achievement Award. The award is presented annually to an individual who has an extraordinary record of achievements in the nonfiction film genre. The presentation will be made here on December 8, 2006, at the IDA Distinguished Documentary Achievement Awards at the Directors Guild of America.

“We could rightly present two career achievement awards to Haskell Wexler,” says IDA President diane estelle Vicari. “He deserves this recognition for his incredibly powerful, diverse body of work as well as for his unwavering courage. He has inspired a generation of documentary filmmakers to be uncompromising in their pursuit of the truth regarding the crucial issues of our times.”

Wexler has compiled some 30-plus documentary credits, including The Bus, Interviews With My Lai Veterans, Brazil: A Report on Torture, Interview with President Allende, Introduction to the Enemy, CIA Case Officer, The Swine Flu Caper, Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, The Sixth Sun: Mayan Uprising in Chiapas, Target Nicaragua – Inside a Secret War, At the Max, an IMAX™ depiction of a Rolling Stones tour, and Bus Riders Union, an in-depth probe of the neglect of public transportation relied on by the Los Angeles working class.

Between pictures he never stopped shooting documentaries. Introduction to the Enemy in Vietnam and many pictures in Central America where proxy wars and state sponsored terrorism made shooting dangerous on stories often unreported.

“My excitement in making a documentary comes from making discoveries, seeking a truth, to communicate images that may not conform to the original intention,” Wexler says. “When there is an assignment to fill in the colors of a pre-painted picture it may difficult to trust your gut, to do what’s in your heart. Difficult but not impossible, it’s all part of the game we must learn as artist citizens.

When the Pope visited Cuba in 1998, Wexler documented that historic journey for posterity. “I wanted to document that visit on 35 mm film because I thought it would be important for history,” he says. “News crews from every country in the world were there. We were at the airport waiting for the Pope’s plane to land, when we saw Dan Rather, Tom Brokow and Peter Jennings heading back to network jets. A Swedish news guy asked Rather why they were leaving before the Pope’s plane landed. He answered that something important was happening back home. The Monica Lewinsky scandal was breaking that weekend. The foreign journalists were incredulous. I shot thousands of feet of film, including the Pope talking with Fidel Castro about ideological and social issues.”

Wexler’s Who Needs Sleep? documentary tells the story of film and television crews routinely working sweat shop hours, clocking 15- to 18-hour days at the expense of their families, their health, their well being and even their lives.

It was eight years from the first shot until the Who Needs Sleep? reception at Sundance. “I’m not suggesting that documentaries should take 7-and-a-half years to make, but something magical does happen when I stick with a subject. Real life is not like a theatrical film where fiction doesn’t have to want for the ’scene.’ For documentarians a full picture often emerges in the editing where we find the dramatic structure to create a reality based ’fiction’ hopefully with a story which will interest an audience.”

Wexler is a celebrated narrative film cinematographer who has earned Oscars® for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Bound for Glory, and additional nominations for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Blaze and Matewan. A short list of his other credits include such classics as The Thomas Crown Affair, In the Heat of the Night and Coming Home.

Wexler has received lifetime achievement awards from the American Society of Cinematographers (1993) and the Camerimage International Festival of the Art of Cinematography (1996). In 1996, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The presentation was made by his niece Daryl Hannah and actor Mike Farrell.

Haskell was born in Chicago. The December 1942 headline in the Tribune read “Boy Mariner Tells Jinx Day Torpedoing.” On Friday, November 13, a German sub sunk his ship, the SS Excello. With surviving crewmates, he lived with the Pondos in South Africa until being jeeped to “civilization” in apartheid Durban. He reveals how this youthful experience fueled his social radicalism which can be seen in all of his documentaries as well as feature films.

Being superstitious he didn’t have a Virginia Woolf acceptance speech before the Academy Award. Striding up steps he thought of thanking Mike Nichols to whom he says he owes so much. Wexler felt it would be the only time in his life to say anything to tens of millions of television viewers. Oscar in hand he said, “I hope we can use our art for love and peace.” In 1967, those were radical words like “Make Love Not War.

Medium Cool followed. Written and directed by Wexler, this Paramount 1968 release is a melding of the documentary and theatrical. Film schools around the world study the innovative techniques. Wexler says he stole it all from Jean-Luc Godard

Previous recipients of the IDA Career Achievement Award include such legendary filmmakers as Pare Lorentz, Richard Leacock, Jacques Yves Cousteau, Frederick Wiseman, Robert Drew, Albert Maysles, Marcel Ophuls, Henry Hampton, Michael Apted, Charles Guggenheim, Jean Roach, Ken Burns, Sir Richard Attenborough, William Greaves, D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus. IDA has also presented the award to former CBS Television news president Fred Friendly, journalists Walter Cronkite and Bill Moyers, media mogul Ted Turner, and HBO’s Sheila Nevins

IDA traces its roots to an informal meeting of about a dozen filmmakers in Los Angeles in 1982. They defined a need for a nonprofit organization that served as a forum where nonfiction filmmakers could share ideas and discuss and advocate issues of common interest. The organization has some 2,500 members in 50 countries today. Eastman Kodak Company has sponsored the annual IDA Distinguished Documentary Achievement Awards since their inception in 1984. For more information about the IDA, visit www.documentary.org.