Michael Wadleigh
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Michael Wadleigh (born September 24, 1941) is an American movie director and cinematographer renowned for his groundbreaking documentary of the 1969 Woodstock Festival, Woodstock.
A native of Akron, Ohio, Wadleigh entered films in his early 20s as a cinematographer on independently-produced low-budget films David Holtzman's Diary and I Call First (both 1967) and My Girlfriend's Wedding (1969). Billed as Michael Wadley, he gained notice for his work from critics who followed independent and underground films, but the films, primarily aimed at a specialized and counterculture audience, brought him no financial security.
In April-May 1969, Wadleigh undertook the monumental task of documenting the rock music festival scheduled in the vicinity of Woodstock, New York on August 15-18. He arrived on the site in Bethel with over a thousand reels of film and a crew of several camera operators. The finished product was said to have consisted of about 120 miles of footage which, over the next months, was edited down to 184 minutes. Warner Brothers, the film's primary financial backer, released it on March 26, 1970.
The film, which reportedly cost $600,000, earned over $50 million in the U.S. and more millions from foreign rentals, but due to a complicated arrangement with Warner Brothers, Wadleigh received only a small percentage of the profits. Woodstock stands as a milestone in the documentary film field, receiving an Academy Award for Documentary Feature at the 1971 ceremony.
Janis, a 1974 documentary about Janis Joplin, gave Wadleigh credit as cinematographer for his archive footage, but it would be 11 years after the release of Woodstock before he received his next and, last to date, directorial credit. Wolfen, a unique 1981 horror phantasmagoria based on the novel by Whitley Strieber, was praised for its dreamlike nature and striking visual quality, but despite a top-notch star turn from Albert Finney, turned out to have been too offbeat for the general public to achieve financial success. Wadleigh also wrote the Wolfen screenplay and has a bit part as "Terrorist Informer."
In August 1994, 24 years after its original showing, a 228-minute "director's cut" of Woodstock was released, and in 1999, another Woodstock-based documentary, Jimi Hendrix: Live at Woodstock gave Wadleigh another archive footage credit for cinematography.
Little has been heard from Michael Wadleigh in the quarter-century since Wolfen in film circles. Rumors have it he has been variously reported as having returned to his hometown of Akron, working as a bus driver for local transit.
With the continuing residuals from Woodstock, Wadleigh has been able to pursue various projects. He has been involved with projects documenting music through databases, producing documentaries and working in radio. With his partner and girlfriend Cleo Huggins, they have lived in Seattle, London and settled down in New Hampshire.
In 2000 and living in Dover, New Hampshire, Wadleigh and Cleo Huggins opened a community-based radio radio station WXGR 101.5 FM. They continuing to work with The Gritty Organization, a New Hampshire nonprofit involved in global media production and education as well as nDimension, which focuses on creation of standards and databases of public and private information online.
After a fire damaged the station in 2003, Wadleigh moved on to managing an educational media company in New Hampshire and, later, Maine.
In his work with The Gritty Organization, Wadleigh went to Darfur with the Physicians for Human Rights organization and helped produce their book "Darfur: A Book of Photographs from Physicians for Human Rights" released November 2005. There, he also produced a documentary on the Turkana people, a group of 300,000 people living in the corner where Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya meet.
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[edit] Further Reading
- Dave Saunders, Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties, London, Wallflower Press 2007
