Uncovering Wolfen

In the decade since Michael Wadleigh's defining rock documentary Woodstock became a cultural phenomenon, Wadleigh spent many years in Hollywood developing scripts that were never produced. Having seen Woodstock before it hit the screens, Orion Pictures executive Mike Medavoy took an interest in Wadleigh's project, the war epic The Revolution, and asked him to consider doing a commercial feature first. The Wolfen was the book that Wadleigh chose, a best-seller by Whitley Strieber about a pack of superhuman wolves stalking parts of New York City that producers Alan King and Rupert Hitzig had read and optioned in galleys. Wadleigh abandoned the straight detective story of the novel in favour of turning it into an allegory about the decimation of society as we knew it. Thoughtful, tragic, lyrical and eerily prophetic, Wolfen is a film awaiting rediscovery.