The Multitalented Mr. Schnabel

Morley Safer Profiles Julian Schnabel, A Titan Of The Film And Art World

(CBS)  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.