Frederick Wiseman Always Made His Point

Before he became a filmmaker, Frederick Wiseman was a professor who was in over his head. Wiseman had gone to Yale Law School partly to avoid the Korean War draft (though he ended up drafted anyway), but also, by his own admission, because he lacked a better idea of how to spend his time. At Boston University, he taught classes on topics that he claimed he didn’t know much about, so he would take his students on educational field trips to sites where their defendants might end up if they received insufficient legal representation.