Obituary: Film critic Richard Schickel fell in love with movies growing up in Wauwatosa

Richard Schickel, a Wauwatosa native who built a long career as a film critic and filmmaker, died Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 84.

The Los Angeles Times first reported Schickel's death Sunday night. His family told the Times that Schickel died from a complication of a series of strokes.

One of the deans of American film criticism, Schickel began reviewing movies for Time magazine in the 1960s and continued to review and write about movies for the weekly newsmagazine until 2010. He wrote, by the Los Angeles Times' count, 37 books, ranging from collections of criticism to biographies to memoirs. Among the latter was 2003's "Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip," a nostalgic look at his childhood and the role movies played in it.

Schickel writes of going to movies at the Times and Tosa (now Rosebud) theaters, and of the moment when, while watching the 1942 James Cagney musical "Yankee Doodle Dandy" with his parents, he realized movies could be "something more than one among several ways of agreeably passing the time, when they reached out and enfolded me in some kind of magic."

Schickel went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a journalism scholarship, and was editor of the Daily Cardinal and did some freelance work for The Milwaukee Journal. (In "Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip," he says he lost his job as editor of the Cardinal because of his "anti-McCarthyism."). Schickel left Wisconsin in 1956 for Los Angeles, where he worked as a freelance writer and reviewer.

Emerging at a time when film criticism was in its ascendancy, Schickel was part of a generation of critics who helped foster America's movie culture.

"Richard was a giant of American film criticism, one of the last survivors of a golden age," Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan told the Times for its story on Schickel's death. "No one could touch him for the high quality of his writing sustained over so many formats and so many years."

Schickel became almost as well-known for the work he did behind the camera. In 1973, he directed a well-received documentary series based on "The Men Who Made the Movies," his book of interviews with classic Hollywood directors. Over the following 40 years, he made more than a score of documentaries, most of them about filmmakers and film history. In 2003, his documentary "Chaplin" was the closing-night movie at the inaugural Milwaukee International Film Festival.

In addition to writing books and making movies about movies, Schickel supplied commentaries for dozens of DVD releases, from "On the Waterfront" to "Titanic."

In 2003, Schickel was installed on Wauwatosa East High School's Wall of Inspiration. "I was a total failure," he told students at the school, according to a story in the Journal Sentinel by Mike Drew, "and I'm here to prove that goof-offs can succeed." In 2012, he was added to the Milwaukee Public Library's Wisconsin Wall of Fame.