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The Cask of AmontilladoWrite-up on director Bernard Wilets by Geoff Alexander
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on 19 March 1928, Bernard Wilets moved to Long Beach, California at an early age, eventually attending Long Beach State and obtaining a Master’s Degree in English. He began writing plays and composing music (“leaning toward atonality”). In 1964, he made his first of over eighty films, Buses That Serve The Community, for Film Associates. Wilets, a prolific filmmaker whose subject matter included the Bill of Rights, drama, music, and history, saw perhaps his greatest artistic success in his ‘Man and the State’ series, originally distributed by Bailey (BFA) in the early 1970s. Wilets’ actors, recruited through southern California theatrical contacts, were superb, and some of the finest to appear in educational films of any kind. Wilets was an exceptional writer and craftsman, whose best work remains as fresh today as it was when originally released. Because Bernard was one of the few academic filmmakers who owned the copyright to his material, he utilized multiple distributors selling the same titles, and liked to compare how each distributor was doing against the others... |