Jerry Schatzberg

It is never late if happiness is good. Jerry Schatzberg was 43 years old when he released his first film as a director. He considered it an advantage, because, he said, “I think that in all this time I have acquired some knowledge and experience of life.” This filmmaker of Jewish origin, born in the Bronx in 1927, earned considerable prestige as a professional photographer. He collaborated with publications such as Vogue, and his is the cover of Bob Dylan’s album “Blonde on blonde” from 1966. Although he liked movies as a child, he watched movies as a simple spectator in search of entertainment. Only when he became a photographer, did he change the perspective of the movies, he began to take account of the work behind him.

Then the first idea for a film began to haunt him, which was based precisely on his professional experience. Confessions of a Model (1970) described the relationship of a photographer with the model of many of his snapshots, and in the booklet he collected many of the anecdotes and experiences that he had collected throughout his career. In addition, he achieved the complicity of one of the actresses he had photographed for a report on Bonnie & Clyde : Faye Dunaway. Both had a great friendship and a sentimental relationship –Schatzberg divorced Corinne, his first wife, with whom he had two children, in 1968–, and she offered to play the protagonist of the film. She was a character who ranged in age from 13 to 40 years, which is why Schatzberg had initially thought of having two actresses. Since she was in her 20s, he was able to play the character throughout the footage. It took the debutant three years to get the project off the ground, but it was well received, and marked the beginning of his career as a director.

It can be said that he put Al Pacino on the film map , who shines in Panic in Needle Park (1971), a film that delves into the harsh world of addictions. Although Schatzberg’s consecration came two years later with Scarecrow , again about marginal characters, Pacino repeated and also featured one of the actors who stood out at the time, Gene Hackman . Yes, the 1970s were sweet for the director, who went on to make the lesser-known Sweet Revenge (1976), starring Stockard Channing , and The Rise of Power (1979), with veteran Alan Alda and a young Meryl Streep ., which talks about the struggles in the United States to place judges on the Supreme Court.

He would vary somewhat in register in 1980 with Honeysuckle Rose , in which Willie Nelson gives life to a country singer, in addition to composing the music, nominated for an Oscar. In 1983 he undertook a second marriage with the French actress Maureen Kerwin , but they would break up in 1998.

He reunited with Gene Hackman in Elliot, My Best Friend (1984), where he was a widower who focuses on work, neglecting his son, Henry Thomas , who two years earlier had done Steven Spielberg ‘s ET the Extra-Terrestrial .

With Click, Click , from the same year, he recovered a photographic theme, as in his debut, but the film was not very well received. He had better luck with The 42nd Street Reporter (1987), starring Christopher Reeve as “Superman” , and for which a Morgan Freeman who was beginning to attract attention received an Oscar nomination .

Schatzberg’s works as a director are spaced out, although he still has titles of interest such as The Friend’s Reunion (1989), whose script Harold Pinter took care of , and which describes the paths of friendship between a young Jew and another Aryan from a good family when Hitler came to power in 1933. His last film, El cielo del Bronx , from 2000, is a minor film, where perhaps he was attracted, after eleven years without directing, to shoot in digital format, something interesting for a photographer who came from the world of film and celluloid.