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Although it has been completed for five months, Cool has been held from release by a variety of intra-and extramural crises. Trade rumor has it that Mayor Daley's office is displeased with the film. It is known that one member of the board of Gulf and Western, the conglomerate that owns Paramount, threatened to resign if the film were ever released. Jack Valenti and his Motion Picture Association shock troops registered considerable displeasure over some of the obscenities in the dialogue. "I wrote them and said I'd be glad to fix it up," Wexler reports. "Only I said every time someone said a 'dirty' word I would substitute the word kill. That way we'd have things like 'Kill you!' and 'Put me down, you killer!' I haven't heard any complaints from them since."
Wexler insists that he will continue to work against the usual commercial grain, using a small crew to give him greater flexibility of movement and lower budgets. "On most Hollywood movies," he complains, "there are guys on a set to shove chairs under you. But that's how I'll keep my independence —I'll never sit down!" Keeping him on his feet (which are rather improbably shod in red and white Swiss-made track shoes) will be a new project about a couple of young college film makers who get an idea to make "the ultimate film about dying; really dying." The title is A Really Great Movie—and it might be just that.