At times, someone viewing the film “Medium Cool” might think it’s a documentary about the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
It captured real events in the streets outside the convention — the protests and police riots — and highlighted other parts of the city, but its characters and plot were scripted.
The movie, directed by Chicago native Haskell Wexler, was released in 1969. It is a documentary-style fictional film that bends reality.
It stars Robert Forster as a TV news reporter in a swarm of actual TV news crews. His character, John Cassellis, falls in love with a war widow from Uptown who has a young son.
As Chicago prepares to host the Democratic National Convention again in August, programmers at the Chicago Film Society decided it was “almost too obvious” to make a new print of the movie — captured on 35mm film — and screen it once more.
The Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave., will screen “Medium Cool” at 7 p.m. Monday. Tickets are available for $11 at musicboxtheatre.com.
“Obviously … you show a Christmas movie on Christmas, and you show a movie about the DNC when the DNC comes back to Chicago,” said Julian Antos, executive director of the Chicago Film Society.
“But it’s also part of our whole programming structure — looking at historical films in context and sort of thinking about the audiences that saw them then and how that relates to audiences seeing them now, and just looking at the history of the film exhibition,” Antos said.
The movie was scripted. In fact, Wexler, in a 1969 interview with film critic Roger Ebert, said even the riots were in the script.
“We anticipated them. We knew something would happen somewhere, and we knew that our TV reporter would naturally be involved in them,” Wexler said in the interview.
Wexler’s “TV reporter” was on scene for actual, unscripted Democratic National Convention events and protests at the International Amphitheater, Grant Park and Lincoln Park. Other scenes were shot in Uptown, areas of the South Side, the Loop and a roller derby rink.
“DNC aside, there’s a lot of amazing footage of the city that’s really sort of unlike anything else that I can think of in terms of Chicago movies,” Antos said. “Wexler just had such an eye for the city that it really comes through in the film.”
The film, turning the real political turmoil and tense clashes between police and protesters into a fictional story, was “definitely a bold move” at the time, Antos said.
Its release was also controversial. Paramount Pictures reversed course at the last minute and pulled out of premiering the movie in Chicago, fearing political repercussions, and instead showed it in New York.
It eventually appeared in Chicago and across the country, drawing rave reviews as a cutting-edge film that broke the conventional movie plot.
Wexler blended reality with fiction and challenged the acceptance that what’s reported on TV news is what really happened.
“See, nothing is ‘real,’” Wexler said in the interview with Ebert. “When you take a camera down to Michigan Ave. and point it at what's happening, you're still not showing ‘reality.’ You're showing that highly seductive area that's in front of your camera.”
Ebert called it “the only feature film to really capture the life of Chicago’s neighborhoods.”
The movie ends with the camera filming a car accident, then panning over to another camera that pans to the viewer. Chants of “The whole world is watching,” a recurring phrase of anti-Vietnam War demonstrators during the 1968 convention, echoed during the film’s final seconds.
“But watching what?” Wexler asked in the interview. “Perhaps it's cameras watching other cameras. Perhaps TV was not showing what happened but showing what happened on TV.”
