By Sandy Cohen, Entertainment Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) --Frederick Wiseman is not a Hollywood guy. The filmmaker has been quietly making documentaries from his home base in Cambridge, Massachusetts, since 1967, exploring such subjects as meat production, welfare, a ski town and a hospital for the criminally insane.
Though none of his films received Academy Awards bids, Wiseman will accept an honorary Oscar Saturday at the film academy's eighth annual Governors Awards. He's being recognized alongside action star Jackie Chan, film editor Anne V. Coates and casting director Lynn Stalmaster for career achievements and contributions to film.
"I'm very pleased. It was a big surprise," Wiseman said during a recent interview from Paris, where he is finishing his latest film. "The kind of thing I do is really not done in Hollywood. And I'm quite content to pursue my career from my home in Cambridge."
Though a documentarian, Wiseman considers his work "more related to fiction writing."
"I'm not suggesting the films are fiction, although they have a fictional aspect," he said. "But in the construction of the film, I'm trying to construct a dramatic narrative out of sequences, out of (footage) completely formless… In editing, I'm involved in the same kinds of issues that a novelist would be involved in. issues of character, abstraction, metaphor, passage of time, etcetera."
Wiseman has always loved to read. He studied law but didn't like it, daydreaming his way through school reading novels. After graduating, he ended up with a job teaching law.
"I reached the witching age of 30 and figured I better do something I liked," said Wiseman, 84. "It was just a few years after the technological developments that made it possible to shoot synchronous sound… so that opened up the world for filmmaking. And there were so many good subjects that hadn't been filmed, as there still are."
He has made almost a film a year since then, describing his career as a "continuous course in adult education, where I'm the alleged adult and every year I've got something new to study."
He collects all the footage in one three-month blitz, then spends the rest of the year editing the material into a narrative he discovers along the way. Wiseman said all the novels he read as a young man helped him develop his most valuable skill: reading and recognizing the story in the raw footage.
"It has to do with knowing what it is, trying to understand what it is you're seeing and hearing," he said. "The fact that I took a lot of English courses in college and I learned how to read – or at least I hope I learned how to read – carefully is the thing that's been most useful to me."
His next film (his 44th) is about the New York Public Library.
"I don't have time to read much anymore, which I regret," he said. "But I like – Working when you're old or older is a way of keeping yourself going. Because I've seen so many people who, when they stop working and don't have anything to do, they get sick and they die. And I'm not ready to meet the grim reaper yet."
Review: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More