Wexler, Haskell

Wexler, Haskell (1925–  ) cinematographer, movie director; born in Chicago. After making industrial and educational movies for some ten years, he broke into feature films as cameraman for the semidocumentary The Savage Eye (1959). He went on to film a number of notable movies, culminating in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), for which he won an Academy Award. He also branched out into writing, directing, and producing movies, most of which were documentaries that allowed him to express his own progressive political sympathies; the best known of his own films, Medium Cool (1969), mixed a fictional plot with documentary footage. He won another Academy Award for the cinematography of Bound for Glory (1976).