A former lawyer, Wiseman has captured American institutional life more fully than any other documentarian. Of all the filmmakers who emerged in the heyday of direct cinema in the 1960s, Wiseman remains the most consistently active.Since 1968 Wiseman has produced over 20 films, each of which (with the exception of his first documentary, "Titicut Follies") has been broadcast nationally on PBS. From 1971 to 1981, Wiseman had two successive five-year contracts to make one film a year, with no constraints as to subject or running time, and to premiere them on New York's PBS station, WNET. Since the
