The Multitalented Mr. Schnabel

Julian Schnabel is an American painter, a highly controversial one, at least in the sense that critics have both slammed him and praised him. A few years ago, he switched gears and decided to become a film director, a move that gained him almost universal praise, particularly for his most recent movie, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly."

Since he first came on the art scene in the 1980s, Schnabel has shown a great talent for attracting attention to himself - a poster boy for the "me generation," who likes to go out publicly in pajamas or a sarong.

As correspondent Morley Safer reports, you can't help but notice this man, even admire his belief in his own genius. Love him or hate him, you must admit he has an ego the size of Manhattan.

Buy it or dismiss it, people have been arguing about Schnabel's art for 30 years. And it has paid for some spectacular real estate: one home in Montauk on Long Island, and a palazzo in New York's Greenwich Village.

The Greenwich Village palazzo - known as the pink palace - is his base of operations. Outside, there are 360 degrees of killer views. Inside, touring the place with him, you feel like Gulliver in the land of the giants, surrounded by huge sculptures, 20-foot high ceilings, and Schnabel paintings that are both larger than life and larger than some New York apartments.

The living room is dominated by one of his favorite works, a painting of a girl's head. It's one of a dozen similar big girls Schnabel has painted in recent years, all of them inspired by a small amateur painting he found in a junk shop years ago.

"My father said to me, 'How come you painted her eyes out?' And I said, 'So you look at her chin,'" Schnabel remembers.

What's it all about? As Schnabel well knows, explaining art can be an elusive and treacherous pursuit.

He's constantly on the prowl for new surfaces, painting on old tarpaulins, rugs, and velvet. His current passion is for a stash of old navigation charts that seem to say to him "color me purple."

"I probably paint like a jazz musician. I know where to begin, but I don't really have necessarily an idea of how the thing's going to turn out. And I'm sort of leaning toward a divine light. And I think maybe it'll hit me, maybe it won't. But in making a movie, it's the same thing," he told Safer.

Divine light or earthly savvy, there's no questioning his success as a filmmaker: his movies were nominated for five Oscars, and he himself won top prizes at the Golden Globes and the Cannes Film Festival.

"I thought I was too old to be a movie director. But once I was doing that, Dennis Hopper was on the set. He said, 'Looks like you've been doin' this for 40 years,'" Schnabel remembers.

There was "Basquiat," the tragic biography of the young artist who died of a toxic mix of drugs at age 28, a victim of the overheated New York art world of the 1980's, a culture Schnabel knew firsthand.

"Before Night Falls" was an uncompromising portrait of the persecuted Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas, who died of AIDS, believing that writing was the best revenge.

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is a true and compelling story about a French man-about-town suddenly imprisoned by a rare and almost total paralysis.

Making the films, Schnabel quickly developed his own method for working with actors: short on rehearsal, long on improvisation. "My technique is, you throw everybody in a hole and if they can climb out, you go home at the end of the day - and that includes me," he explains.

What if they don't "climb" out?

"If they don't, then the movie dies," Schnabel tells Safer.

Schnabel, 57, was born in Brooklyn. He remembers as a kid drawing underneath the kitchen table. "My brother and sister were a lot older. So I was alone a lot when I was a kid. And it always seemed that I was able to draw. So I was an artist since I was a child. I mean, I never really was gonna be anything else," he says.

When he was 10 or so, his mother took him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he saw the first painting that knocked him out, and it was not some Avant-garde abstraction. "The painting by Rembrandt of Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer," he remembers. "It was a big deal to me. There was like, a glow coming out of that picture."

And the movies thrilled him too, one film in particular directed by Cecil B. DeMille, the king of pop spectacle. "Well, I liked when the Red Sea split open in 'The Ten Commandments.' That was a spectacular moment," Schnabel says.

DeMille's over-the-top biblical epic taught the kid in the cheap seats the paramount rule of show business, and maybe life: first you get their attention. "I mean, if there's no conflict in a movie, you don't have a movie," Schnabel says.

When Julian was 15, his father moved the family about as far away as you could get from New York, at least in cultural terms: Brownsville, Texas.

"When you think, 'What exactly made me?' Do you think more of Brooklyn or Brownsville?" Safer asks.

"Definitely Brownsville," Schnabel admits.

At 15, the kid from Brooklyn got a crash course in life as it is lived on the banks of the Rio Grande. He learned to surf - something he still does - off the reefs of the Gulf of Mexico. And he engaged in some reefer madness as well.

"We were living in the marijuana hub of the United States," Schnabel remembers.

Asked if he was a "doper" himself, Schnabel says, "A doper? You mean did I smoke marijuana or take LSD? Yes, I did. Was I in the drug trade? No."

After a lackluster college career in Texas, he worked his way back to New York, doing - in the late 70s and early 80s - what all struggling young artists did: he says he drove a cab and was a cook.

"I think you sold sunglasses or something like that," Safer remarks.

"Yeah," Schnabel says. "I think I stopped working as a cook when I got $6,000 for a painting."

The art scene, ever in the hunt for something new, and Julian, ever happy to oblige, was a marriage made, if not in heaven, then in downtown New York. In 1983, at 31 years old, he was the talk of the town. His plate paintings took the art world by storm.

"They hadn't seen anything that looked like that before. And there was a feeding frenzy around that," he explains.

Plate painting is exactly what it sounds like: heaps of broken crockery glued to giant canvasses. For his materials he sought salvation at The Salvation Army thrift shop.

"They hired people that have disabilities sometimes. So there was a midget there. And he had the plates. And he couldn't, the box was so big, he couldn't get his arms into it. So I said, 'Just drop them. I'm gonna break them anyway.' So he did," Schnabel remembers.

And in a certain sense, Schnabel has been noisily smashing crockery ever since, fighting to get attention for his art and his films and himself. The reviews for his movies have been almost universally positive. As for art critics, while he does have a coterie of fans, his detractors have been brutal. He does not take criticism lightly, as we discovered when Safer mentioned the name of one art critic and historian.

"Speaking of critics, your old nemesis Robert Hughes once said that you are to painting what Stallone is to acting," Safer remarks.

"Is this really what you want to do?" Schnabel asks. "I mean Robert Hughes is, he's sort of like a guy, a bully in a bar that's sitting around waiting for somebody to trip on a banana peel."

Robert Hughes is the highly respected, sometimes venomous, art critic formerly at Time Magazine, who took great delight in dismissing Schnabel as a schlockmeister.

"I mean, he's a bum," Schnabel says.

But he says he doesn't have a real "thing" about him. "I just don't like him. So if you wanna talk about him, you can talk about him all you like."

"We're trying to cover all aspects of…," Safer remarks.

"Hey, do whatever you want. I mean, you know, I expect you to be exactly the way you wanna be, but I will be the way that I'm gonna be. And I feel like conforming to talk about this guy that had, you know, he really was basically a very negative person," Schnabel said.

Safer tried to shift gears, and talk instead about Schnabel's transition from painting to moviemaking.

"Was that something that had always been at the back of your mind, even as a painter?" Safer asks.

"I'm still pissed off about talking about Robert Hughes. I'm sorry, I just think that it's lazy. I think it's very lazy," Schnabel replies.

Schnabel clearly feels the negative criticism is aimed at the artist, not the art, but since he seems to regard himself as his greatest work of art, the confusion can be understandable.

He's been married twice, the father of five children. Down through the years he's painted portraits of them all.

"At the beginning I definitely didn't think about him as a husband, no," says Spanish actress Olatz Lopez Garmendia, Schnabel's wife and the subject of a number of adoring paintings.

Asked what she first of Schnabel when she first met him, she tells Safer, "Charming. And scary."

Asked how he was scary, she says, "Maybe because he's a very intense person."

She has appeared in two of Schnabel's films. It was five years from the time they met to the time they married. "We kept bumping into each other. He was like courtshipping," she says.

And she says he was persistent.

He began a series of huge paintings bearing her name, and sent one to her house in Paris. "They needed to bring it up through the outside of the building. And I guess I took it as a love letter," she remembers.

But love is a tricky thing. Since that interview, the Schnabels' marriage seems to be on the rocks. And while the fickle New York art world may not have fallen out of love with Julian Schnabel, it has embraced newer, younger shooting stars. But he does remain a darling overseas.

He admits he has a good sized ego. "I guess I made the paintings. I guess I made the movies," Schnabel says. "I never made a compromise. For a guy to be able to say that, does that mean he's got a big ego?"

"But there's nothing wrong with having a big ego…," Safer remarks.

"No, but I think it's, its, you know, would you ask Marlon Brando if he had a big ego?" Schnabel asks.

"Probably," Safer replies.

"I mean, you know, do you have a big ego?" Schnabel asks.

"No, not me," Safer says.

Schnabel's response? "Okay, I'm sure you do."

Produced by David Browning