By Philip Weiss.
The New York Times. March 25,
2001.
On a snowy night in Albany last month, 600 people packed a hall at the State
University of New York for a screening of the movie "Before Night Falls"
and cheered wildly when the filmmaker Julian Schnabel came onstage after the
show. Schnabel was wearing a boxy gray jacket; he did not fit the image he had
gained over the years as a painter in a sarong. He seemed ungainly, and the
heavy black glasses he put on only emphasized the bluntness of his features. His
beard stuck out like a shingle. His bright round cheeks made his eyes almost
disappear.
But as comfortable as a man walking onto his veranda to greet old friends,
Schnabel spoke in a stream-of-consciousness way about his film, others' films,
art, whatever crossed his mind. "You know, I watch a movie like 'Cast Away'
and I want to, like, commit hara-kiri," he said. "The dumb lobby, the
money lobby -- there are companies that would rather make one dumb movie for
$200 million rather than 20 $10 million movies that might have some meaning."
Thunderous applause.
Then Schnabel turned to his friend in the front row, the novelist William
Kennedy, and asked for his coat. "Do you believe in ghosts, Bill?" he
said. ("I do," Kennedy replied, handing over the coat. "I've got
them in my new novel.")
Schnabel pulled a book from a pocket of the coat and began reading from the
writings of the man his movie celebrates, Reinaldo Arenas, the Cuban writer who
died in New York 11 years ago.
"Art can transgress death," Schnabel said, and now he was
determined to prove it, reading poetry to a packed house, every now and then
looking up to offer a hipster reflection:
"It's kind of getting late. I think you got Reinaldo's vibe, and if you
want to split, I won't be insulted."
There were questions from the audience. A woman, perplexed, asked if he was
going to keep painting.
"I'm a painter," Schnabel replied. "I've made 1,000
paintings. I've made two movies. I'll probably make another movie. Basically I'm
an artist. Whatever tool it is, whether it's a camera or it's a paintbrush, I'm
kind of, I guess, expressing something and trying to find the right tool- "
The woman's confusion was understandable. Julian Schnabel has been a famous
-- and infamous -- painter for 20 years. Now he has emerged as a gifted film
director, his talent evident in the loving fantasia of revolutionary and gay
Cuba he created in his second film.
"Before Night Falls," which was made for $8 million, will set no
box-office records. (It has grossed little more than $3 million.) But it has
gotten highly favorable reviews since opening in December, and it has made
Schnabel a power in the film community, not least because Schnabel took a
Spanish actor unknown here, Javier Bardem, and made him a star by casting him in
the role of Arenas. Tonight, Bardem and Schnabel will be in Los Angeles for the
Academy Awards: Bardem is a long shot for Best Actor. Back in New York,
Schnabel's desk is loaded with scripts people have sent him, to which, he says,
he is largely indifferent.
"Before Night Falls" succeeded despite its uncompromising subject
matter: the life of a gay Cuban poet who, dying of AIDS, committed suicide. "I
tried to talk him out of it," says his friend, the actor Dennis Hopper. "I
said: 'Julian, you're in a position to make a film that's commercial, that
people can go to, and then later you can make "Before Night Falls."
But right now establish yourself.' He said, 'No, I've got to make this film.' So
he went out and he made it."
This grand gesture of Schnabel's recalled his first one, the plate paintings
of the late 70's. These paintings kicked off the 80's art boom and allowed
Schnabel to buy teal suits and the silk designer pajamas he wore in the streets
of New York, making himself a symbol of an excessive age. Since then, he has
endured scathing criticism that his work is superficial and macho, or worse.
The criticism didn't interest me. Schnabel has made it in two difficult and
ruthless fields in the arts. There really isn't anyone like him.
Three days after the Albany screening, I visited Schnabel where he works and
lives in the West Village. It's a former perfume factory with 20-foot ceilings
now barely able to accommodate Schnabel's vision. A half dozen paintings were
lined up around the walls, each the size of a studio-apartment floor, each with
a pale ground and bearing a few splatlike images and then the message "Hat
Full of Rain."
People milled about, speaking Spanish. Cuban music was on very loud.
I had to use the bathroom and was shown through a set of double doors into
the Schnabel household. I bumped into a dressmaker's bust and a man bent over a
sewing machine. Around a corner was the bathroom, which had antique hardware and
a period sink and felt like a page from The World of Interiors magazine. I was
thoroughly confused about the line between domestic interior and artistic space
and exhibition space. Later I understood that these lines are not very clear in
Schnabel's mind, and that this confusion has worked to his advantage. When I
returned, Schnabel was speaking Spanish to a group of young filmmakers and
kissing them goodbye. He wore the same boxy jacket he'd worn in Albany, his
loose brown pants were mended with haphazard stitching over one thigh and he had
on pink socks visible above his boots. We sat down in two chairs, and I started
to ask him questions about how he had done what he'd done.
Schnabel got to his feet, cutting me off.
"You have a very specific idea of what you want to do, but at the same
time I might derail you a little bit if I start showing you pictures. But. . . .
"
For the next 40 minutes or so we looked at pictures. Two assistants moved
them around, and they teetered scarily. Schnabel was bent on showing me his
artistic method. The heart of this is being present, being open to what hits him
in the moment, whether it's a painting or a movie. "I don't have a system,
I don't want a system. I made the movie so I could make art, so I could make
something that I wanted to look at. I don't even know why I did it, logically."
Schnabel's art dealer, Arne Glimcher, of PaceWildenstein, made much the same
point when we spoke. "His is a kind of intelligence of recognition,"
he said. "Julian sees and Julian knows."
There is a fearlessness in Schnabel's response. One series of paintings was
based on a slogan he read one day that had been written on a $10 bill. ("There
is no place on this planet more horrible than a fox farm during pelting season.")
But the art show I was getting had a larger point. Any suggestion that
Schnabel's success was calculated was wrong. Art was something alive; "it
gets on your shoes."
My mention of the word ambition caused his dark, narrow eyes to disappear in
a painful squint.
"There's a great line in 'Gandhi' when Martin Sheen says to him, 'Mr.
Gandhi, you're a very ambitious guy,' and Gandhi says, 'I hope not."'
Determined to be analytical, I asked, "So you feel misrepresented by
that term?"
Schnabel shrugged with more than mild irritation. "A little bit, yeah,"
he said. "I don't think you're trying to insult me by calling me -- but his
goal was that these people would be free. He wasn't so important; it was the
idea of whatever he was involved with that was important."
Schnabel motioned for me to follow him upstairs. He led me past a tall man
whom he identified as his brother -- Stephen Schnabel works for his younger
brother as an accountant -- and up a staircase to a kind of cement loggia.
Another of Schnabel's magical interiors, this one was dimly lighted and hung
with a red Italian curtain. We then entered a room that felt like a castle
chamber. A stuffed monkey hung from a wooden bar, fabulous rugs were piled one
atop the other, there were curtains everywhere and a Durer print on the wall.
Schnabel said that it was a bedroom. At the back was a bed on a dais.
"It's the monkey room. Javier was here; he stayed there."
He wanted to show me a picture of his at the foot of the bed, "Pisa,"
an orange painting with a kind of wax proboscis in the middle. Schnabel sold the
painting for $700 in 1977 to the art dealer Holly Solomon, then bought it back a
few years later for $50,000, because he needed to be able to look at it.
Schnabel stood staring fondly at the painting, saying it reminded him of his
first movie, 'Basquiat,' which he made in 1996 and watched again just the night
before, and relished.
Schnabel was a famous painter before he was 30, and from the beginning of
his career, he was friendly with actors. Youthful fame was something they could
relate to. And Schnabel admired actors' self-involvement and their instinctual
method. Hollywood always came to New York to buy art, but over the last 20
years, the distance between the coasts has shrunk. Miramax, Spike Lee and the
producer Scott Rudin have made New York an important outpost in the film
business. Studio heads have bought homes in the Hamptons. Sometimes it's hard to
tell dealers and producers apart. The art dealer Larry Gagosian screens new
films at his home on Long Island. His friend David Geffen has a large art
collection, some of it in New York. Schnabel's dealer, Arne Glimcher, has made a
name for himself as a director: "Just Cause," "The Mambo Kings."
"The art world is a passport," Glimcher says simply.
Schnabel was fearless as a networker because he never felt inferior to
anyone, felt at ease with the likes of Johnny Depp.
"If he's interested in an actor or director, he makes friends,"
Glimcher says, adding that even extraordinary actors don't have Schnabel's level
of self-confidence. His sense of himself beguiled them, and he was generous to
boot. After Schnabel came to visit Glimcher on the Spanish set of "The
Mambo Kings," he befriended Antonio Banderas. He made a painting of
Banderas and gave it to him.
"In the film industry," Glimcher says, "generosity is almost
nonexistent."
Hollywood people also called Schnabel to come to their homes and see their
collections. Michael Ovitz once sent him chocolate-chip cookies when he was at
the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, hoping that Schnabel might come by.
"I think the only time Oliver Stone and Dennis Hopper went to Michael
Ovitz's house is when I brought them there," Schnabel muses.
But it's not as if gold-plated connections meant that Schnabel could direct
a movie. Feature films can be explained; they come out of scripts and are
generally narratives. The language of painting is not verbal. Collectors tend to
look on a painter as if he's a "shaman or a crazy person," Schnabel
says, a medium for spiritual utterance at a time when religion is dead. As far
as the movie business was concerned, Schnabel says, he was less qualified to
direct a film than a graduate of a film school.
Just the same, in the mid-90's, several artists made feature films. Robert
Longo directed a movie called "Johnny Mnemonic," a thriller about a
virtual courier based on a short story by the cyberauthor William Gibson. Cindy
Sherman made a B-movie called "Office Killer," about a murderer who
uses e-mail to disguise her crimes. And David Salle, backed by Martin Scorsese,
made a black comedy called "Search and Destroy," about a climbing New
York producer.
Schnabel watched this happening and wondered whether time hadn't "passed
me by" on a film career. In a rare moment of vulnerability, he told me that
he wondered if he was afraid to try to direct.
Hopper says that Schnabel turned to him for advice.
"He asked me what I thought was the most important thing," Hopper
recalled. "And I said the most important thing is to get around people who
make film, to get on sets and see how it works, because a lot of being on a
movie set is really being a floor manager. As a director, you have a lot of
different departments, a lot of different people you have to talk to and keep
working. He did that very intelligently."
Then a Polish-born director named Lech Majewski came to interview Schnabel
for a movie he was planning on the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died in 1988
of a drug overdose. Schnabel and Basquiat had had a contentious relationship.
Basquiat was self-destructive, Schnabel is anything but. Schnabel tried to
advise Basquiat but in a magisterial way. Basquiat once called Schnabel "the
big J.S." And Schnabel says he declined the younger man's offer to trade
work.
Majewski's project drew Schnabel in, and he put $50,000 into the movie. But
as he worked with Majewski, he lost faith in him and ultimately bought him out.
He would direct the movie himself. "He made more money on this than I did,"
Schnabel says.
Movie friends gave Schnabel little encouragement. "I read the script
over and over and over," Dennis Hopper says. "I kept turning him down.
I told him, 'I'm not going to be in this."' Schnabel wanted him to play a
Swiss art dealer named Bruno Bischofberger. "He kept saying, 'You're going
to play Bischofberger.' I said, 'I'm not going to play Bischofberger.' I finally
played Bischofberger."
Schnabel also approached Harvey Weinstein at Miramax.
"Harvey Weinstein said don't do it, I should save my money,"
Schnabel recalls. "I said, 'Chris Walken loves the script.' He said, 'What
do actors know about scripts?"' ("I was being polite to Julian,"
Weinstein says. "It wasn't the script. I didn't know whether Julian could
pull it off. And he did.")
Ultimately Miramax distributed the film, but Schnabel had to finance the
$3.3 million budget himself, with support from two partners. He shot for a month
and came up with 90,000 feet of film.
Making a movie was similar to making art, Schnabel found. A movie was like a
series of paintings. He tried to create those images in the moment, without much
rehearsal. And he exercised a gruff authority. When veteran cameramen and
assistant directors he hired explained how a scene should be shot, the usual
way, Schnabel was angrily dismissive. "When I came on the set it was like
he had been directing movies for 40 years," says Hopper.
Like other highly successful people who plow ahead, doing one thing after
another, Schnabel simply does not hear criticism. "Whatever enzyme in the
socialization process that everyone else gets, he didn't get it -- lucky him!"
says his friend the artist Ross Bleckner.
Another way of saying this is that Schnabel believes his powers are godlike,
which is the sort of thing that Hollywood understands. At one point in our own
conversations, Schnabel likened articles about him to various painters'
renditions of Christ on the cross.
"In that world they're all megalomaniacs; they recognize a kindred
spirit," says the novelist Frederic Tuten. "And talent is an
aphrodisiac in their community."
Schnabel takes his self-belief to the next level, by staking his money on
the project. He told me he had been financially responsible for "the whole
nut" on both his movies, without going into detail, though it is said that
he sold one of his early plate paintings to help finance "Before Night
Falls."
"He risked personal money, and to me that means a lot," says the
independent producer John Pierson. "Fundamentally, the first rule of the
film business is never put your own money on it, because it's the highest risk
this side of theater, and because it's tainted -- the word goes out that you
couldn't convince anyone else. But when you wind up with something terrific,
it's the boldest move you can do. You're someone with a vision willing to go to
the nth degree. In 'Apocalypse Now,' the original money from United Artists was
gone after the first typhoon. Coppola mortgaged everything to finish."
Dennis Hopper makes a similar comparison: "A lot of people have
problems with Julian, because they feel that he's a braggart or this or that. To
me he's just big opera. He's like Francis Ford Coppola. They're big opera, they
wear capes and they're big and they're generous."
I'd caught the big-opera Julian in action. After the screening in Albany, I
went out with him and a dozen others to an Albany restaurant, Paradiso. The New
York State Writers Institute had the governor's table after hours, and for most
of the evening, before he was trundled into the icy night to William Kennedy's
Jaguar, Schnabel held forth. It was a stunning performance. Schnabel talked
about matters great and small, from how John Huston persuaded Jack Nicholson to
star in "Prizzi's Honor" to why he had grown a beard (to deflect envy:
he had looked too young to be so famous). Some stories went on too long -- like
the one about vomiting on the set of "Before Night Falls." Still,
Schnabel's salty Borscht Belt charisma kept the night alive.
His performance was all the more stunning because there were so many other
interesting people at the table, but not a peep from anyone else. When Joe
Gagen, a film producer, followed something Schnabel said with a comment on union
politics, Schnabel simply cut off that line of discussion. "Well," he
said, "I don't know anything about that."
Pushing 1 a.m., both fruit plates were in front of Schnabel, and he had sent
his fillet back to be rewarmed. He had been talking so much he hadn't had time
to eat.
Still, you could not say that anyone was unhappy to let this giant presence
hold the table. Schnabel uttered not one insincere word the entire evening. He
did not try to charm or manipulate. He held the table rapt by talking in a
serious and genuine way about high art and his struggles to present it. At one
point, he launched into a slightly pugnacious discussion of why "Before
Night Falls" was the best movie of the year. We all nodded. It was
reminiscent of Hemingway saying that he could go 10 rounds with Tolstoy.
Later, when I told Ross Bleckner about the evening, he gave a droll sigh and
reflected on a long friendship with Schnabel.
"Try that same dinner for 10 years, three times a week," he said. "Need
I say more?"
Bleckner played a key part in Schnabel's first Herculean test. Twenty-three
years ago, the two went to Spain together, and while Bleckner was on the beach
in Ibiza, Schnabel retreated to Barcelona in a down mood. There he was drawn to
the mosaics in Gaudi's Park Guell. Returning to New York, he went to the
Salvation Army on Eighth Avenue at 20th Street and bought all the dishes they
had.
A worker there tried to box the dishes carefully, and Schnabel took them out
of his hands.
"I dropped them in the box, smashing them," Schnabel later wrote. "He
looked shocked. I said: 'It's O.K. I was going to break them anyway."'
The smashing crockery was soon heard everywhere. Schnabel, along with a
group that included David Salle, Eric Fischl and Robert Longo, ended the era of
minimalism and conceptual art. Fischl and Salle's works were voyeuristic,
film-influenced. Schnabel's was architectural and theatrical. He mixed an object
with flat representation, confusing the viewer, holding the viewer.
Before long he was the most famous of the suddenly famous group, as noted
for his big life as for his emotional, impulsive neo-expressionist work. Tuten
says: "They came out of nowhere, they seemed retrograde because they were
figurative and they became celebrities overnight. To some, they seemed to
represent everything that was horrible about 80's bratty guys who got all these
goodies out of nowhere, when everyone else had had to pay their dues."
With Tuten's help, Schnabel wrote a remarkably honest book about his
artistic education that also had a vainglorious air. Like so much of Schnabel's
expression, "C.V.J. -- Nicknames of Maitre d's & Other Excerpts From
Life" was completely self-possessed. It described a clumsy fistfight with
the painter Brice Marden when Marden patronized Schnabel by calling him a
student. It described an angry confrontation with the critic Clement Greenberg
in the Los Angeles airport, in which Greenberg told Schnabel that early success
doesn't last. It started a lasting battle with Robert Hughes. Schnabel distances
himself from the book now, saying he wrote it as a "teenager" or "a
kid." He lapses momentarily into reflection.
"If you compare me to Barnett Newman or Mark Rothko or those guys, they
were broke longer," he says. "It took 10 years before I was able to
really make some money with my paintings, although once I sold the paintings for
$6,000, even if I was getting $3,000 of it" -- an art dealer typically gets
half the sale price -- it was enough to quit my job as a cook." That moment
of reflection soon ends. Schnabel's essential mode is effulgent, uncritical.
"There were things I liked about Julian and other things that I liked
and still like," says Bleckner, who is still friendly with Schnabel. "They
are his unbridled optimism and his sense of himself, that he was the beginning
and the end. His sense of truth and of reality starts and ends with who he is.
The problem is, it can be unrelenting at times."
Bleckner went on to marvel at "Before Night Falls": "I didn't
think he had much empathy outside of mainstream, conventional relationships.
Julian never struck me as particularly empathetic. He certainly never seemed
political in the sense of having a kind of breadth of awareness of political
events in the outside world. Ultimately the movie gave Julian the ability to be
what he really isn't, because he's an haute bourgeois family man in his life and
a renegade fag in the movie."
"Before Night Falls" came out of one of Schnabel's sharp moments
of recognition -- Julian sees, Julian knows. He had finished shooting "Basquiat"
and was in Miami, hanging out with one of his countless friends, a real-estate
agent named Esther Percal. ("I adore him," she says. "In his own
huge way he's so tender.") Percal said there was a documentary she wanted
him to see, Jana Bokova's "Havana." They went to a Cuban
record-and-video shop and bought a copy.
The documentary contained an interview with Reinaldo Arenas, then ill and in
New York. Mordant and brilliant, he spoke about his invisibility as an artist in
his adopted country. He opened his refrigerator to show the baby food he ate.
Papaya, he said puckishly. Percal explained to Schnabel that papaya was Spanish
slang for a certain part of the body.
Schnabel felt an instant connection to this big, self-lacerating talent and
decided to make a movie to rescue Arenas for the world. That heroic impulse
continues to flow. Schnabel publicizes Arenas's books. He gave the movie the
name of the reissued Arenas novel, "Before Night Falls," and has
pushed the book through several printings.
The day I first visited him in the West Village, he led me into a large
central room. He switched the light on, and a bulky man who was napping on what
seemed a fin-de-siècle couch got to his feet.
"Excuse me," Schnabel said in Spanish. Then as the man left the
room, he added sweetly, "He must have got up early."
The stagelike room played more havoc with my sense of domestic space.
Elegant couch and chairs were placed on a fabulous gold rug. A pink matador's
jacket hung from a stand. Three giant Schnabel paintings and a rich, dark red
velvet curtain were hanging from an iron rod. But at the opposite end of the
room were beds. Who slept there? Schnabel's three children by his first
marriage. (He also has two children with his current wife, Olatz.)
I began to ask Schnabel about career-making, but he deflected my questions
by reading aloud from catalogs of his paintings. Long imagist riffs on his work
by Francesco Clemente, William Gaddis and Charles Bukowski. Broken pots in Rome,
car-wreck dummies. . . . My mind blurred.
Happily, the doorbell rang, and an artist friend came in and sat down on the
couch. Greg Bogin is a thin man with short hair and glowing watchful eyes. Like
so many friends of Schnabel's, he's utterly devoted to him.
"He almost treated me like I was his son, at a certain point,"
Bogin told me of the relationship. "I'm not particularly close to my
father, and Julian was a major developmental force in my life."
Stories of Schnabel's generosity are legion. An artist given a painting to
pay for dental treatment. A Latin-American writer saved from a loan shark who
was into him for $90 a week.
Schnabel's generosity has a way of coming back to him. We were sitting under
stark testimony of this: "Edge of Victory," a large painting of his
done with a few broad white lines on a stunning surface, a former boxing gym
canvas, darkened with sweat and blood and creased with worn silver gaffer's
tape. The artist James Nares had grabbed the mat from the abandoned Gramercy
Gym, on 14th Street, and knowing the gym's history, that everyone from Mike
Tyson to Floyd Patterson had trained there, felt Schnabel had to have it.
"The first things I ever sold were to Julian," Nares says. "He
was always bringing people to my studio. The paternal thing comes naturally to
him."
The artist Jeff Koons says the same thing.
"The art movement of the 80's, and the support of that art, well, a
whole lot of it rests on Julian's shoulders," he says. "He came in
with this bravissimo of strength and really tried to share his success."
Koons's work could not have been more different from Schnabel's -- he was
putting classic Hoover vacuum cleaners in Plexiglas boxes -- but Schnabel
promoted it to J. Patrick Lannan, the ITT executive who was a major 80's patron,
and Lannan bought Koons's first Hoover piece, for $900. And Schnabel sent David
Salle to visit Koons's studio as well.
"I had a Mercedes car, and one night I took Julian home from the Mudd
Club," Koons says. "His life was expanding and I needed money, and I
sold him that car."
I told Schnabel about other artists I meant to interview: men of his
generation, Fischl, Longo, and Salle.
Suddenly the paternal mood ended.
"See, those guys, I would say that first of all, I don't like their
work," Schnabel said. "Second of all, I think it would be very
interesting to talk to them, because who knows what they would think. I think
they're all extremely boring. Robert Longo's probably a nice guy, David's a
total creep and God knows what's going on in Eric's mind. David Salle is
somebody who -- people become professional artists and they betray themselves
and their friends, because there's nothing there. He's a very lonely person."
The wash of contempt was surprising. Bogin tried sweetly to temporize his
friend's statements. But Schnabel went on, leaning out of his chair.
"When I was younger, I sold a lot of David's paintings for him. I sold
Eric Fischl's paintings for him."
"What does it mean you sold him?" I said.
"What does it mean?" Schnabel said to Bogin.
"It means Julian put the heat on for the sales pitch," Bogin
explained.
I vexed Schnabel even more when I brought up the name of Fidel Castro. I was
taking a trip to Cuba, and I wanted to interview Castro about Schnabel's movie.
What should I ask the president?
Schnabel sighed and got to his feet. He cast me a sidelong glance. He had
intuited something unseemly: I was using his movie to try and meet Castro (it
didn't happen, but I tried). Schnabel suddenly mistrusted me. He spoke with
blunt power.
"I guess that's what you do as a journalist," he said. "I was
10 feet away from him, and I wouldn't shake hands with him. I was invited to the
film festival, and there was a long line of people who were invited to this big
smorgasbord, and he was there where that chair is, and Tom Hayden was shaking
hands with him and all these other different people and directors, but I just
couldn't bring myself to do it. I think there's too much blood on his hands. I'm
trying to be true to Reinaldo's voice here; I'm not that civilized where I want
to go and shake hands and hang around with Fidel Castro. Jack Nicholson has done
that, or Gérard Depardieu is friends with him or whatever. I can't be
that casual." Schnabel's description of himself as "not that civilized"
was honest and resonant. He might have said "unsophisticated," but
only a sophisticated person would use that word. At dinner in Albany Schnabel
spoke of people as being either "bums" or "mensches." Bums
were betrayers. Mensches were loyal to art and family. It was simple, but it
worked.
Speaking by phone from Florida, Jack Schnabel said that Julian, the baby
among his three children, was his favorite and his wife's too. When Julian was a
boy in Brooklyn, the Schnabels gave him oil paints when other children were
using crayons, because Julian wanted them.
Jack Schnabel's accent took me aback. It is a Brooklyn accent of the sort
that used to be parodied right after the war. Oil for Earl. He seemed a
throwback. It turned out he had emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1926, at 15,
stowed away on a boat.
"I didn't need no job; I'm too smart for that," he said. "I
never worked for anybody. I handled my own business. Julian took that from me.
He was his own man, at all times. I always told him, Make sure you're a straight
guy, and make sure you're honest. Don't fool nobody, don't tell no lies."
Jack Schnabel worked in the meat business in Brooklyn. Then he bought
supermarkets and a coffee shop in the borough before moving to Brownsville,
Tex., on the spur of the moment when Julian was 15.
"I changed my line," Jack Schnabel said flatly. "I had an
uncle in the clothes business."
Julian Schnabel has always been thankful to his parents for moving to Texas.
In a rare moment of self-analysis, he said to me, "Growing up in New York,
being a member of the, you know, what do I say, the Jewish cultural community of
Brooklyn, and then in Texas it was like I became a witness and a participant of,
you know, a catalog of small-town tragedies."
Schnabel's mother, Esther, became the head of a local Brooklyn chapter of
Hadassah, the Jewish women's volunteer organization. She was the one who took
her son to museums. In Texas, Jack Schnabel drove around in a new Chrysler
looking for real-estate deals and left his teenage son working for him in a
dusty warehouse, breaking up bales of used clothes and selling lots to Mexican
clothes dealers who came across the border.
Julian had no ambition to work as a garmento. He wanted to be at the beach. "I
didn't want my father to leave me in that warehouse anymore," he recalls.
So he took a bold career risk. One day he sold $10,000 worth of clothes to a
woman for $2,000. He told his father that the woman promised the rest of the
money; of course she never showed up again. And Julian was relieved of his
duties.
"Anyway, I gave it back to him later," he said, with a boyish
smile.
Young Julian was liberated from the Freudian mental fretwork of the affluent
Jewish artist. Self-doubt, cultural anxiety, murderous Oedipal feeling --
Schnabel either doesn't have these feelings, or he just has never cared to open
the can.
"He's pretty driven psychologically," says his old friend Ingrid
Sischy, an art critic and the editor of Interview magazine. "I think he
wanted to do something that would make his mother and father so proud. He wanted
to find the space in the world that was so beautiful that he could bring them
with him into that space."
I said, "You make him sound like a basketball player who bought a big
house for his parents."
"Not in quite that way, but yes, you've got it. I think he watched his
parents in a real tough time as he grew up. He wanted to have enough authority
in the world that they would always be safe and cared for."
Sischy says that her friend always felt that he was going to "burst the
ceiling off" in the American suburban and urban landscape. When he went to
Spain and Italy, he was drawn by the grand scale of their buildings. The
personal narrative of postwar America didn't tempt him either -- drugs, sex,
prolonged adolescence.
"The chasing after women, I always thought there was something petty
about that," Sischy says. "Well, there's nothing petty about Julian."
Tuten, the novelist who helped Schnabel write his book, describes Schnabel
as an old-fashioned paterfamilias.
"He was so sweet and tender with his children, then you'd see the
appropriate discipline when they would rampage through his studio," he
says. "It was amazing. He takes people under his wing, as long as you're
loyal. You had to call Hemingway 'Papa.' He's very simple that way."
The day after I talked to his father, Julian Schnabel called from Paris,
ebulliently, to say that "Before Night Falls" had been nominated for
an Oscar, for Best Actor. In the background I could hear the Schnabel suite at
the Ritz going nuts. His daughter Stella was crowing with pleasure, and Daddy
was hushing her affectionately. I imagined fancy pillows being torn in
excitement, kids jumping up and down on the bed.
Like other parts of AOL/Time Warner, Fine Line Features was in some turmoil
this winter, but its president, Mark Ordesky, said it was mounting a
no-holds-barred campaign to score an upset at the Academy for Javier Bardem.
That meant getting people to see the movie. At Schnabel's request, Jack
Nicholson held a screening in Los Angeles and said a few words. Dennis Hopper
talked up Bardem, saying there wasn't a better performance this year by any
actor in film. Harvey Weinstein feels much the same way: "The performance
he got from Bardem was incredible, just incredible. There's something about
Julian that's so primal and actorlike that actors love the guy. It's the way he
creates his playground. It's an art form."
Javier Bardem came to New York to do press. The big snowstorm delayed him,
and when he finally got into New York and to his hotel room the night of March
6, Schnabel, whom I was visiting, phoned him and grew ecstatic on the telephone.
"Javi, Javi, you're here in one piece! What name are you checked in
under? Encinas, O.K., good. Javi, I love you."
Then Schnabel and I went back to the central room upstairs to talk. He was
wearing paint-spattered pajamas and red Venetian slippers. We verbally fenced
with each other. I kept asking him what movie he planned to do next. Harvey
Weinstein had told me he thought Schnabel could be a "major, major
director," though he doubted that a studio would give Schnabel much more
than $20 million for a movie. Bigger budgets, he said, require a director who
can "homogenize" his or her vision. Schnabel kept saying that he
hadn't given any thought to a next film because he didn't think about the
future.
"I'm 49 years old," he said. "I don't know how long I'm going
to live, tomorrow or 90, but the point is that it's really all about being in
the present. The fact that somebody knows you or respects you or likes you after
the fact because of it, that's just gravy and insecurity that needs to be fed,
or some kind of human need. It's very, very different from the clarity of what
happens when you're actually making your art. The reward is in having the life,
being able to make the work.
"I'm looking at that painting, I'm noticing all sorts of moments in
that and topographical choices that you make."
He got up to stare at his painting "Boni Lux" and to point out the
movement of the blackish red over the Naples yellow.
"Andy Warhol would never explain a painting to you," he said,
shaking his head.
"What about when a studio calls you and says, 'We want to give you a
lot of money to make a movie about the life of Pancho Villa?"' I said.
Schnabel gave me a look.
"I definitely am not in the mood to jump on the conveyor belt and get a
ring in my nose. I don't need it."
Nothing Schnabel said could convince me that there was not some shrewdness
underlying his talk, that he wasn't thinking of his next big act. It's what has
distracted his critics, a feeling that he's not just talented but also an
operator. Schnabel had acknowledged his shrewdness in telling me the story about
selling the used clothes from his father's warehouse. Now, when he insisted to
me that the $8 million he spent in Mexico shooting "Before Night Falls"
was equivalent to $21 million spent in the States, I sensed the calculation. He
was letting studio heads know that he wasn't just an indie guy; he could handle
a big budget.
But part of Schnabel's allure is that he is absolutely blind to his cunning.
Arne Glimcher had explained the sources of Schnabel's success to me along these
lines: "One is talent. And the second is naïvete, innocence. That
combination is just unbeatable."
Schnabel's wife called him from downstairs, and Schnabel got to his feet. He
was round-shouldered. It had been a long day; he was weary.
"I'm done with this movie now," he said. "I'm trying to kind
of wash it off my back."
I asked him what sort of art he was going to make next, and he said he'd
been messing around in the basement that day and found some materials that
interested him. And there was a fossilized tree he saw in Rome the week before
that inspired him. He would soon be painting and sculpting in Montauk.
"I'm sick of talking to distributors," he said, turning off the
light. "I'm sick of talking to -- "
He didn't finish the thought. That was kind of him.
Philip Weiss is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
Before Night Falls
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