By Iain Blair

Had dinner the other night at the beautiful Montecito home of legendary DP Haskell Wexler and his wife Rita. It was a very small group of friends, including director Chris Monger  (The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain starring Hugh Grant)  and producer Karen Montgomery and we all sat outside and had a very amusing evening and ate amazing food that Rita had bought that day at the local farmer’s market.  Although he’s now in his mid-80s, Haskell is amazingly youthful and the perfect host – he draped his own jacket over my friend, painter Jacqui Winter ( her husband Dario owns Ca’Dario, one of the top restaurants in town) , to make sure she wasn’t getting cold, and later he made tea for everyone. Haskell, who won Oscars for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Bound for Glory, has shot so many seminal films – including One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Coming Home and In the Heat of the Night, and he’s still busy working on several documentary projects. And it was like a tour of the golden era of ‘60s and ‘70s Hollywood to walk around the house and look at photos of pals like Jack Nicholson and George Lucas, whom he encouraged to go to film school when Lucas was still a film-mad teenager.

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