Schickel also wrote about movies for Time magazine for 45 years, making him the magazine’s longest consecutively serving critic. He and his fellow Time film critic Richard Corliss, who died in 2015, were towering figures to a lot of young cinephiles who came up in the middle part of the 20th century. They weren't groundbreaking theorists or crusaders of any sort; they wrote for a mass market publication, often under a tight word count. But they did their jobs with insight and flair, trying to connect movies to historical and cultural forces and arguing for and against certain trends in the industry. Whether I agreed or disagreed with their verdicts, they made me appreciate the skill involved in sketching a concise but thorough portrait of a movie-going experience. And they were especially good at drawing the reader’s attention to films that weren’t big deals yet but were about to be.
The most obvious example is the original 1977 “Star Wars,” which Time put on its cover and declared the year’s best movie. I wouldn’t agree with that hyperbole, and even back then a lot of people had a problem with it—22 years later, Time magazine’s art critic, Robert Hughes, would write a New York Daily News piece about "The Phantom Menace" declaring “Star Wars” a destroyer of both intelligent popular art and skeptical arts journalism. I mention that first Time cover here because it shows how Schickel, who championed the movie behind the scenes at Time, was always thinking about how certain movies fit into the culture and what effect they might have on it, even as he appreciated them at the level of craft.
Time put the next two "Star Wars" films on their cover as well, and Schickel wrote two documentaries about the original trilogy, 1977’s “The Making of Star Wars” and 1983’s “From Star Wars to Jedi,” that were mostly about the productions themselves, with lots of details about then-new special effects processes. I watched both of these documentaries on TV as a kid and was blown away by how simply and clearly they explained the technical magic behind the images. Schickel had a knack for that kind of thing and applied it to a lot of different projects.
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