Richard Schickel is a film historian, filmmaker, and film critic.  He is the author of 37 books and the director-writer-producer of dozens of film and television documentaries largely about film makers and about movie history.

Among his best known books are:  The Disney Version; D.W. Griffith:  An American Life; Intimate Strangers:  The Culture of Celebrity;  Clint Eastwood:  A Biography; and, Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip (a memoir).  His most recent title is Conversations with Scorsese.

Central to his work as a documentary filmmaker are a series of 20 profiles of great American directors—among them Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Elia Kazan, and Steven Spielberg—which taken together constitute an unparalleled history of the director’s craft and of the American movie-making tradition.

Mr. Schickel began his career as a film critic at Life in 1965 and served in a similar capacity at  Time until 2009.  He now reviews for the blog, Truthdig.com.  Over the years his articles and reviews have appeared in close to a hundred magazines and anthologies, and he has provided audio commentaries for numberless DVD releases.

He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, was awarded an honorary degree from the American Film Insitute and the British Film Institute Book Prize, as well as the William K. Everson Award from the National Board of Review and the Telluride Film Festival’s Silver Medal, both for his service to film history.  His reconstruction of Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One, which added back close to fifty minutes cut from the original release of the film, received many awards from critics groups in 2004-05

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"Mr. Schickel knows how to use his prodigious knowledge of cinematic history to create portraits of film artists that illuminate their individual talents while at the same time situating them within a social and aesthetic context."

A.O. Scott
New York Times Reviewer		   More »