Electric Shadow

Me and Richard Schickel

I read Richard Schickel's work at Time a little bit here and there over the years. When the opportunity arose to interview him in relation to the release of the Clint Eastwood 35 Years 35 Films box set, I said yes without thinking twice. Little did I know this giant time commitment was about to drop into my lap.


I feel terrible for only just getting this transcribed and up when the set came out weeks ago. In something of a blessing, the recent inside-baseball controversy around Schickel's comments about having never really loved movies at a screening of Gerald Peary's For Love of the Movies happened after I'd originally intended to post this, so now there's some additional context for what follows. On top of that, Kevin Smith went on a Twitter tear about critics himself, so the critic-talent relationship has once again gotten hot as a topic.

Schickel is involved with the box set inasmuch as a 20-minute clip of his forthcoming The Eastwood Factor documentary is included as "#35". The box set is the largest authorized and official set compiling one artist's work. I've inserted a few thoughts and impressions throughout our conversation as transcribed below.

I started by asking, "What surprised you the most when putting together The Eastwood Factor? Did you discover anything new about your friend Clint?"

Richard's breathing was heavy, and he had a bit of a 30's gangster snarl in his voice, which was unintentionally charming to me. He was ready and willing to go full on crank with this nobody kid he's never heard of, but generally gave me the benefit of the doubt and stayed away from completely programmed answers.

Schickel: "Not really. What's nice about the long version that'll go out on TV in the fall is that he's in such good humor for a lot of it. It's not a typical TV interview, where everyone is a stranger. He's loose and relaxed. Nobody has filmed him like that."

Me: "Do you the first film you saw Clint in?"

Schickel: "I really can't remember the first one I saw him in, but the first one that really impressed me was The Beguiled. It questioned all the conventional presentations of masculinity in the movies. It's this young actor and these previously unquestioned values in conflict before anyone was really doing that. Dirty Harry is another great example. There's this wistfulness and sadness, a lonely guy detached from the mainstream. People initially saw it as just this guy running around with a big gun."

Me: "Do you get an impression there are aspects of character personalities he specifically likes to return to consciously? Are there titles you think he wishes had been more broadly-seen?"

Schickel: "There is this theme you see running through a lot of his work: a family under pressure, a family being torn apart. Honky Tonk Man and A Perfect World weren't well-received and have some distance yet to travel. He always had more ambition than most ad would do more than just the bare minimum so that the movies would just speak for themselves. Letters From Iwo Jima is a great example where he went much further than he had to in terms of effort."

Me: "Is there any ground you feel he wants to cover that he hasn't been able to?"

Schickel: "There's not a lot of self-consciousness. He reads something he likes, he does it. He leaves himself open to do something interesting that wasn't on his radar the day before."

Me: "Do you think there's some really under-appreciated Clint work out there that needs more exposure or championing?"

This is where things get kind of weird. His answer sounds like I asked a completely different question.

Schickel: "You've gotta recognize his first success was on Rawhide. Not many people come out of TV and have movie careers. Steve McQueen is probably another guy like that. Pauline Kael and others were convinced he was just this dumb hunk. Getting past that takes a lot of persistence and ambition."

Maybe he thought I asked "how has Clint been under-appreciated"? The next bit almost exactly quotes V.O. narration he does in The Eastwood Factor.

Schickel (con't): "The studio was a little dim on Million Dollar Baby. 'We see a boxing movie.' He said, 'well, I see a father-daughter love story.' Same thing on Mystic River. Clint, for all of his casual nature, is a very shrewd judge of material. If he wants to do something, then he's gonna do it, and not many stars are like that."

He seemed to really hammer "Clint does his own thing" firmly into ever answer he gave me.

Me: "Anything in particular he was offered and outright passed on?"

Schickel: "Not really something he talks about. Once or twice in the course of our relationship, he's sent a couple of scripts over to me, and I say this not as some sort of boast, but...that's what our rapport is like. I'd give some general notes, or say 'you might think twice on this', and I wasn't the only person he ran things by, you know. The funny thing was, any notes I had for him he'd already thought of. It was as if he'd already basically decided to pass and wanted a second opinion before putting it away."

Me: "So you've got a retrospective book coming?"

Schickel: "Yeah, it should be out in late March, I think. There's a 20-page excerpt in the box set. It includes one essay on each film. The doc will go on Turner Classic Movies in late May, from what I'm told."

Me: "Just one last thing: is you were to grab one movie out of the 34 in the box set out of all the others, which would you go for?"

Schickel: "You know, I...hm. Unforgiven is such a great film, an interesting Western. It's still a really impressive Western. I was on that location for several weeks, so I have this natural prejudice in favor of it. Clint optioned the script by Peebles 10 years before actually doing it, because he needed to be 10 years older. It was a talisman for him. It was like having this nice little gold watch sitting in his pocket. He waited for the right moment, felt like it was the right time, and made it happen. The movie is wonderful and the story behind it happening is just as good."

After a ton of time to reflect, I don't think it's that Schickel hates movies, he's just not remotely of the ravenous movie-lover breed that so many younger people are now. More interesting, though, is the fact that people perceived Schickel as a critic's critic in the first place. He's a journalist and filmmaker, but he has more in common with online writers who have no qualms fraternizing with the talent involved. I'm not going to make a judgment definitively on those relationships, because they are widely varied. Schickel was never going to defend the Kael's of the world because he never ran with that crowd of monks. I will say that he tells some good stories, a couple of which I took off the record. That snarly, jaded gangster voice never really subsided, however.

The box set is currently $127.49 at Amazon, which averages out to $3.75 per movie plus the 20-page booklet, some letters, and photos. All the movies are now available on various digital download services as well, but the per-film cost is a lot lower in the box.

Titles included in the box:

Where Eagles Dare, 1968
Kelly's Heroes, 1970
Dirty Harry, 1971
Magnum Force, 1973
The Enforcer, 1975
The Outlaw Josey Wales, 1976
The Gauntlet, 1977
Every Which Way but Loose, 1978
Bronco Billy, 1980
Any Which Way You Can, 1980
Honkytonk Man, 1982
Firefox, 1982
Sudden Impact, 1983
City Heat, 1984
Tightrope, 1984
Pale Rider, 1985
Heartbreak Ridge, 1986
Bird, 1988
The Dead Pool, 1988
Pink Cadillac, 1989
White Hunter, Black Heart, 1990
The Rookie, 1990
Unforgiven, 1992
A Perfect World, 1993
The Bridges of Madison County, 1995
Absolute Power, 1997
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, 1997
True Crime, 1999
Space Cowboys, 2000
Blood Work, 2002
Mystic River, 2003
Million Dollar Baby, 2004
Letters from Iwo Jima, 2006
Gran Torino, 2008
The Eastwood Factor, Short Film, 2009