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The Oscars made me feel dumb
I must live in a cave…
Watching the “In Memoriam” segment on the Academy Awards last night, Dave Grohl is singing along as the images of the departed go by, and suddenly the name and face on the screen is HASKELL WEXLER!!
I’m like… WHAAAAA??
Sadly, I had no idea Haskell had departed us. Looking it up, it wasn’t that long ago, and he died on the very day that I was dealing with a basement flood… but missing that still made me feel pretty out of touch.
Wexler was a real cinematographic god to me, untouched by just about anyone (even beating out my #2 hero, Roger Deakins, who coincidentally in his trademark “always a bridesmaid” style lost his thirteenth Oscar nomination last night).
I just wish I’d known about it sooner…. rest well, Haskell.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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5 Replies
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Yeah, it’s kinda sucky that more and more of the names in “in memorium” aren’t ALL that much older than I am.
Damn passage of time!
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The bigger crime to me is that after so many years of dodging the Final Cut, they didn’t bother to put Abe Vigoda in the memorial video. He was only in The Godfather, for chrissakes.
We also lost George Kennedy yesterday.
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I too was shocked to hear that Haskell Wexler kicked the bucket.
Along with all the great musicians that kicked the bucket this year.Next year, there will be a new category – “Best feature shot with an iPhone or an iPad”. Creative Cow will have a feature on the DP “yea, I graduated High School, and me and my friends used our iPhones to make this really cool film in 4K. We put it on iTunes, and 60 Million people have downloaded it. It’s pretty cool”. and – “we were going to cut it in FCP-X, but my editor’s mom grounded him, so he had to cut the film on his iPhone too.”
And do you know what that means – that WE ARE OLD.
Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com -
If you are not old enough to remember Nagra tape recorders, you won’t appreciate this AT ALL.
Wexler’s “Medium Cool” was probably not a great movie, but I loved it. It was ostensibly a political film, but I saw it as a love letter to the process of movie-making. There was a shot of 1/4″ tape as it started running through the Nagra, with the tensioning tape roller rocking back and forth. I always thought that was pretty neat, and clearly Wexler did too.
Bob C
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People think of the Nagra as a Swiss product, but it was created by a Polish guy, Stefan Kudelski. Nagra is actually Polish for ” it will record”.
We had one in the shop, a leftover from when we shot 16mm film and dual-system sound with crystal sync. It was a thing of beauty; with the precision of a fine watch. But it became irrelevant after the shop switched to video tape and so it went off to surplus. I hope someone with a sense of it’s value found it and got a deal on it. Maybe someone who saw the 1981 movie, “Diva”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PDM-i7pzeI
There’s a couple of seconds in the current promo for the new all-female Ghostbusters movie reboot, that shows a Nagra portable RTR running as part of their gear.
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