40 August 29 • 2019 jn R ough-and-tumble journalist Mike Wallace is remembered for not holding back on any questions he thought his television viewers wanted asked — whether of political leaders, business notables or entertainment luminaries. Wallace demanded answers and didn’ t mind repeating his questions in different ways to elicit what he thought should be known. When it came to questions asked of him, however, Wallace, a contro- versial presence, usually knew how to rebuff them. When asked how many wives he had, an answer was avoided. Another question Wallace wanted to steer away from had to do with whether he had tried to commit suicide during a battle with depression. Making a denial to Barbara Walters and others, he revealed that time of desperation to personal friend and 60 Minutes colleague Morley Safer. Wallace, so otherwise strong and compelling on air, had decided to relent during a television moment. The personal side of the legend- ary broadcast journalist is included but holds only a small part of the film Mike Wallace is Here, being shown Friday-Sunday, Sept. 6-8, at the Detroit Film Theatre. The film focuses on his career and how it gained journalism momentum after beginning with commercial narra- tion and acting. Israeli-trained filmmaker Avi Belkin directed the documentary. “I think there’ s something about the pace of the film and the way it moves that is reflective of Mike, which is what I was trying to get, ” says Belkin, 41, who began working on this production at the end of 2017 and finished at the start of 2019. “My angle was broadcast jour- nalism, so I wanted to show more about his career and less about his personal life. ” Belkin watched some 1,400 hours of footage before whittling that down to one-and-a-half hours of film dominated by excerpts from interviews with people who range from the Ayatollah Khomeini to Barbra Streisand, from an in-busi- ness Donald Trump to an in-gov- ernment Vladimir Putin. “When I started working on the film, I was living in Tel Aviv, and journalism was very much in debate back then, ” recalls Belkin, a prizewinning filmmaker in his home country and now living in California. “It was before Trump was elected, but it already felt that journalism was at a tipping point, and I was looking for a story I could do about broadcast journalism that would be engaging for audiences. “I like to choose a smaller story to create a bigger story, and Mike Wallace was in all the right moments in time. I had the idea of doing a portrait of Mike and, through him, tell about broadcast journalism because of his unpar- alleled career, which was over 60 years. ” Doing a smaller story to convey a larger story was at the center of Belkin’ s first film, Winding. It fol- lowed a river and its landscape to tell the story of Israel and won best picture at a Haifa International Film Festival. In communicating the Mike Wallace presence, Belkin took note of the strength of Wallace’ s voice even in his 80s. “We worked with footage from all periods of time, ” the filmmaker says. “Sometimes I’ d have a scene with Mike at 40 next to a scene with Mike at 80, and you couldn’ t tell the difference in age because his voice was consistent, and that goes to show how professional he was. ” Belkin’ s professional life began as a photographer. On extensive trav- els after fulfilling his military obli- gation, he decided he had an eye for finding interesting sights and aimed his camera. “When I was 25, I started film school in Israel, ” Belkin recalls. “When I finished after five years, I started directing. I felt I then had the ability to tell a story with the right images and the right sound. “When I was going to film school, I started scripting a film, but SUZANNE CHESSLER CONTRIBUTING WRITER PHOTOS COURTESY OF MAGNOLIA PICTURES Follow-Up Question arts&life Mike Wallace in Mike Wallace Is Here, a new documentary Avi Belkin, director of Mike Wallace Is Here, a Magnolia Pictures release. fi lm King of the Film Mike Wallace is Here examines the broadcast legend.