Medium Cool marked the directorial debut of American cinematographer Haskell Wexler (whose numerous cinematography credits include The Conversation, One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, for which he won an Academy Award). In Medium Cool, Wexler rather audaciously sets a romance against the tumultuous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago--which he did not recreate, but filmed documentary style as it progressed. The title takes off from McLuhan's “Cool Medium,” and the film builds to a devastating comment on the impact of television on American lives. The narrative deals with a television news reporter (Robert Forster) who becomes involved with an Appalachian woman (Verna Bloom) who has moved to Chicago with her child. The story follows Forster's progression from the “medium cool” detachment he maintains from his stories to his brutal encounter with certain realities of American life. Here, the two levels of the film--fictional narrative and documentary--meet, and “TV newsman” and film director/photographer merge. At a 1969 San Francisco Film Festival tribute Wexler was called “a veritable disciple of Dziga Vertov... Mr. Wexler did everything on location, carrying his camera, aware of the dizzyingly hazardous confrontations between demonstrators and police.” Newsweek critic Joseph Morgenstern called Medium Cool “so intensely American in its images and its ambition, it is an exciting piece of work that must be seen by anyone who cares about the development of modern movies.”