--- name: "Michael Wadleigh" canonical: "https://film.one/person/michael-wadleigh" roles: ["Director","Editor","Screenwriter"] born: "24 September 1939" reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 updated: "2026-09-17T04:47:05.362138+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Michael Wadleigh Director and editor. Born 24 September 1939 in Akron, Ohio, USA. ## Details - **Work:** Director, Editor, Screenwriter - **Born:** 24 September 1939, Akron, Ohio, USA ## Fi1m on Michael Wadleigh > Wadleigh made one concert film that every concert film has had to answer to, and one horror film the studio took away from him, and then he stopped. The split screen is his; so is the habit of pointing the camera at the crowd. Richie Havens is soaked through and running out of songs, and Michael Wadleigh gives us his boot on one side of the screen and his face on the other. That is the whole method in a frame. *Woodstock* (1970) runs 224 minutes, and for long stretches nobody is playing anything: people queue for the telephones, sleep in cars, wash in a pond. Wadleigh took a crew to a dairy farm near Bethel, New York, in August 1969, and came back more interested in the hill than in the stage. He had been a cinematographer before he was a director, shooting *David Holzman's Diary* (1967) and *Who's That Knocking at My Door* (1967). *Woodstock* was cut from more than 120 miles of footage and released in March 1970, and the cutting is the famous part: one wide frame split into two or three, the stage in one panel and the field in the other. The editors were Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Warnow, Yeu-Bun Yee and Jere Huggins. Malcolm Hart and Michael Margetts shot it on 16mm with the flare and the jostling left in, so it still looks like reporting. What got to us was not a song. Between sets Wadleigh cuts to the farmers, the shopkeepers in town who cannot decide whether they have been charmed or invaded, the men keeping the place fed, and they talk to the camera plainly, without trying to be liked. We were moved by them more than by anyone on stage, because they are the only people who are not performing. The flaw is the same instinct with nobody arguing against it. The film is never once off the festival's side; it admits for about ten minutes that 400,000 people in a field with no shelter is dangerous, and then goes back to the music. Then came *Wolfen* (1981), his only narrative feature. It is a horror film built to carry an ecological argument; Wadleigh said, "I rewrote it as Moby Dick, the horror story a sugarcoating around serious ecological issues." It has been admired for its point-of-view sequences and its dreamlike look at a decaying city, and judged too offbeat for a mainstream audience. He was removed from the final cut after a dispute with the studio over editing and length. We have not reviewed it, but the pattern is plain: a man who filmed a festival and kept looking at the crowd then made a monster film about the parts of a city nobody was watching. After that, only archive work in the 1990s on Woodstock-related releases. Two features is a short list: one that concert films still have to answer to, and one that was taken away from him. If you have four hours, give them to the first; the pond and the telephone queue are worth more than most of the bands. ## Biography Michael Wadleigh is an American film director and cinematographer. He was born on 24 September 1939 in Akron, Ohio. Wadleigh began working in film in the late 1960s as a cinematographer on low-budget independent features including *David Holzman's Diary* (1967) and *Who's That Knocking at My Door* (1967, credited as Michael Wadley). He directed, co-wrote and co-edited the documentary *Woodstock* (1970), which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. His other directorial credit is the 1981 horror film *Wolfen*, which he also wrote. *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *Woodstock* (1970), Fi1m 80, Director, Editor, Screenplay — [page](https://film.one/film/woodstock.md) ## Also known for - *Wolfen* (1981), Director, Screenplay, Screenstory --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/michael-wadleigh