Richard Warren Schickel

He wrote thirty-seven books, directed more than thirty documentaries, and never stopped sounding like someone who had fallen hard for cinema before he was ten.

He was born in Milwaukee on February 10, 1933, to Edward John Schickel, who worked in advertising, and Helen (née Hendricks), and grew up at 1721 North 68th Street from the late 1930s through the mid-1950s. About age nine, watching James Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy with his parents at the Tosa or the Times, he stopped treating movies as afternoon filler and started noticing directors’ names, then walking to the library for books on how films were made. He graduated from Wauwatosa High (now East), wrote for the Daily Cardinal at the University of Wisconsin—he said anti-McCarthyism cost him the editorship—and later told Tosa East students, when the school put him on its Wall of Inspiration in 2003, that he had been a total failure, proof that goof-offs can succeed.

He was Life’s film critic from 1965 to 1972, then Time’s until 2010. The Disney Version (1968) refused to genuflect, reading Walt as a Midwest product of clean moral stories and gag humor without self-satire. Documentaries included The Men Who Made the Movies (1973) and the Emmy-nominated Life Goes to the Movies (1977); DVD commentaries ran from On the Waterfront to Titanic. He died in Los Angeles on February 18, 2017, after a series of strokes. His memoir title, Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip, is a Wauwatosa childhood talking. Birth was Milwaukee; the formative stretch was Tosa.