Charles Osgood/Chicago Tribune
Michael Wilmington film critic
Mike Wilmington: an auteurist to the core.
Whenever a significant film personality died, I could count on an immediate phone call from Mike Wilmington, Isthmus’ freelance movie critic. Mike — invariably broken up by the news, even when the deceased was a second-banana character actor like Warren Oates — would beg to write a tribute. Could we clear out space in the next issue for, say, 3,000 words?
As arts editor, I had mixed feelings about these calls. On the one hand, no, I didn’t want to rearrange the entire issue at the last minute. On the other hand, I knew Mike would strive to write an essay to end all essays for the pittance we paid freelancers in the 1980s and ’90s. To him, it didn’t matter that he no longer lived in Madison or that he already had plenty to do as a movie critic for the Los Angeles Times and later the Chicago Tribune. He wanted — he needed — to write this piece for Madison readers. For the publication and the town he still loved.
So I’d rearrange the entire issue at the last minute. And we ran the heartfelt tribute to Oates, or to Orson Welles, or to Francois Truffaut, or to Alfred Hitchcock.
Now, Mike Wilmington himself has died, at 75. So here’s a heartfelt tribute of my own.
Mike came out of the 1960s Madison counterculture, hot for changing the world. After a tough childhood in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, he marched against the Vietnam War at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and appeared onstage in 1968’s notorious nude Peter Pan, a campus production that served as an antiestablishment parable. His UW gang included other obsessive cinephiles — like Joseph McBride, his collaborator on a book about director John Ford — who gained renown in film circles as “the Madison Mafia.”
As an erudite young film critic for the UW’s Daily Cardinal in the late 1960s and ’70s, and then for Isthmus starting in the early ’80s, Mike was an auteurist to the core. He worshiped a personal pantheon of filmmakers like Welles, Ford and Hitchcock, who in his estimation could do no wrong. Indeed, it wounded him deeply when others disparaged their work. He made it his life’s mission to exalt them wherever and whenever he could.
That’s why, when he moved to Los Angeles in the 1980s for a movie-writing job at the LA Weekly, he tried to singlehandedly revive the public’s interest in Welles. It’s why he insisted on covering every Hitchcock rerelease for Isthmus, including a virtuosic review of Rope — a film shot in one continuous take — that consisted of a single, labyrinthine 500-word sentence.
When writing of his cinematic heroes, whether classic or contemporary, Mike grasped for ever-greater superlatives, like an operatic tenor reaching for higher and higher notes. I remember one urgent call before press time when he insisted that I change a descriptor in his review from “scintillating” to “coruscating.” Because, on second thought, “scintillating” just didn’t have the proper intensity.
I could write a whole separate essay about Mike’s phone calls from Los Angeles and Chicago, where he kept contributing to Isthmus on a weekly basis on top of his gigs for major metropolitan publications. In the days before email, he dictated reviews over the phone as I typed, struggling to make sense of his low, gravelly monotone. Due to nonexistent recordkeeping, he also called to request faxes of his old Isthmus articles for research purposes — the same articles, over and over. I finally stored them in a file drawer by my desk so I wouldn’t have to dredge them out of the archives each time.
Isthmus had its share of eccentric writers, but Mike ruled them all. For some obscure reason, he asked publisher Vince O’Hern to store a box of his mother’s spare change in the paper’s basement, where it remained for decades. On his occasional trips back to Madison, he stayed in staff members’ houses and caused Mr. Magoo-level mishaps that live on in local legend. At my house, for example, he once obliviously showered without closing the curtain and flooded the room below, later expressing puzzlement about why the shoes he’d kept downstairs were filled with water.
But my favorite Mike Wilmington memory is fittingly set in a Madison movie theater. He’d returned to town to speak at a festival, and I attended a screening with him for the first and only time. I’d often had trouble connecting the dour character I knew from our phone calls with the giddy enthusiast I encountered in his writing. Sitting next to him in the theater, however, I saw up close what movies could do to Mike. His face bathed in light from the silver screen, he seemed — and this is the only way to put it — transfigured by joy.
If there’s a heaven, I imagine that Mike is in some otherworldly movie theater right now. His own version of eternal bliss.
