Medium Cool (1969) on Netflix
John Cassellis films car wrecks and racial tensions for a Chicago television news station, never stepping in to help. He finds out the station hands his footage to the FBI.
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- Netflix4.2/5
- IMDb7.2/105,257 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
John Cassellis works as a cameraman for a Chicago television news station in the summer of 1968, filming car accidents and violence in poor neighborhoods. He is more concerned with stories that draw an audience than with the people in them. He finds out that the station has been handing the footage and information its crews gather to the FBI and is enraged; the station finds an excuse to fire him. He soon finds freelance work at the Democratic National Convention. Eileen, a single mother who moved to Chicago from West Virginia with her son Harold, tells him Harold's father is dead, while the boy says his father is in Vietnam. Cassellis grows fond of both of them.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Medium Cool (1969)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool was given an 'X' rating by the Motion Picture Association of America; the censors objected to the language and the nudity, but Wexler said the real reason was that it was a political 'X'. It was re-rated 'R' in 1970.
- Marianna Hill's full nude scene in Medium Cool was not planned. She said she went along with it only because she trusted director Haskell Wexler, and she would never have done that for anybody else.
- Filmmaker Paul Cronin tracked down Harold Blankenship, the boy who played the young Harold, years later and put him in Cronin's film Sooner or Later. Blankenship named his first son after director Haskell Wexler.
