Michael Schultz

If there is, as we have long established, a Standard TV Actor’s Career, there must conversely be a Standard TV Director’s Career. Both are essential to the smooth running of the television industry, since seldom are directors given the opportunity to just work on the same show week after week. But would it surprise you to learn of someone who started directing episodic TV with a Rockford Files and from there had a Diagnosis Murder, two episodes of Felicity, six of Chicago Hope, eight of The Practice, and so forth? My only surprise is that he doesn’t seem to have touched the Law & Order franchise.

Michael Schultz actually got his start directing for the stage. He directed Waiting for Godot at Princeton, I believe as a grad student, then joined the Negro Ensemble Company. He directed To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, the play assembled from the writings of Lorraine Hansberry after her death, and then the made-for-TV movie version. And okay, so actually he directed an episode of an obscure black-themed sitcom called Roll Out! the year before his Rockford. But even Rockford seemed, at the time, like paying his dues, because his feature career was taking off.

Even if you haven’t seen his movies, you’ve heard of at least a few of them. Cooley High. Car Wash. He worked with Richard Pryor a lot. We’re skipping out of order for a second, but he directed the reshoots for Bustin’ Loose after Pryor’s, you know, incident. This was in part because he had a good relationship with Pryor and they thought he would help the situation. Why he didn’t get credit for his work, I cannot tell you, but it seems clear that he was considered a reliable director.

Which is doubtless why he was given the opportunity to direct Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. And if you’re at all familiar with that movie, you just flinched. You can’t say it destroyed his career in big-screen directing, because after all The Last Dragon and Krush Groove were yet to come. And given what I know of the behind-the-scenes on that movie, I’m loath to put too much blame for its failure on him personally anyway. It took a lot of people on a lot of cocaine to screw things up like that. But you figure Hollywood was eyeing anyone involved with it askance.

He hasn’t directed a theatrical release since 2004’s Woman Thou Art Loosed, but he’s spent the last three decades or so directing TV. And, yes, that includes things like JAG and Ally McBeal, but he’s also directed episodes of such Magpies darlings as Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Switched at Birth and Black-ish. And, um, Arrow. Hey, they need directors, and it’s clear that Schultz is a good director. I don’t know if he’s doing passion projects, but how often do we really get to do that?