Workin' at the Car Wash: Schultz Returns to Milwaukee

Big, big news in Brew City. Milwaukee native and legendary film director Michael Schultz is returning home this weekend, and you can catch him at the Oriental Theater on Saturday. 

Milwaukee Film is paying tribute to the 86-year-old with screenings of Car Wash (3 p.m.), Cooley High (7:30 p.m.) and Last Dragon (8 p.m.) Schultz will appear for Q&A sessions after Car Wash and before Cooley High, which will also include an awards presentation.

I was very lucky and honored to interview Michael Schultz in 2022 for Wisconsin Public Radio, and I’m thrilled he is coming to town. All three movies are well worth seeing. Cooley High is the best, and certainly the most acclaimed, but there’s something about Car Wash that draws you in every time, and it’s not just Norman Whitfield’s funky ass theme song performed by Rose Royce.

I asked Schutlz about the joy the movie brought to audiences, including me, when I interviewed him, and I wanted to share some of his comments about his experience making the 1976 movie starring Richard Pryor, Bill Duke, Ivan Duke, George Carlin, Antonio Fargas and others. I talked to Schultz for more than an hour, and, of course, I didn’t get to use everything from the interview in my radio segment and web story. So, here’s a little more about Car Wash, a music-filled movie that wildly tells the story of a Los Angeles car wash over the course of a single day.

Coming off 1975’s Cooley High, a film that had combined comedy and drama to devastating effect, Schultz was unsure initially he wanted to follow up with Car Wash after reading Joel Schumacher’s script.

“I almost turned down the movie because it was just all sorts of humor, slapstick, kind of what I call bubblegum comedy,” he said. “And I was talking to a friend of mine, Suzanne de Passe, who was like Barry Gordy’s right-hand person. She had discovered the Jackson 5 and all that. And I said, ‘Suzanne, they offered me this movie, and I’m going to turn it down.’ She said, ‘Are you crazy? It’s like, if it’s not what you want, take the job and make it what you want,’ which is some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten.”

Schultz went forward and set out to put a “spine of seriousness” in Car Wash to balance the comedy. But at the time, he said, “dramedies” were not the rage they have become, and Universal Pictures did not understand why he wanted to make changes.

“They said, ‘you can’t do that,” Schultz said. “You can’t mix comedy and drama, or comedy and melodrama, or whatever you want to. I said, ‘Why not?’ Because I came out of theater, and I knew from the experience of Cooley High, which was all comedic in the beginning that led to some serious drama at the end, and how effective that was on the public in terms of storytelling.

“So, all through the making of that movie, I’m fighting with the studio to have the film end the way I wanted it to end,” he said. “So, I built this throughline between the old school ex-convict, Lonnie (Ivan Dixon), and the young revolutionary, Abdullah (Bill Duke). Because again, like in Cooley High, the bond and love between young black men. But this time, I wanted the father figure to save the young revolutionary and learn from his experience, and the studio just hated that idea. So, I convinced them to let me shoot the film in chronological order, which is almost never done in Hollywood.”

Shooting chronologically can be less efficient and can result in a loss of time and money, he explained, but Schultz thought he could convince them to accept the ending he had planned if he did that way. But he told executives he was shooting chronologically because he had been influenced by Robert Altman’s approach in Nashville.

“I said, ‘Look, I've modeled this movie after Nashville, and like Robert Altman was doing multiple stories in audio, I’m doing multiple stories in the visuals that we might be seeing something happen, you know, through the glass of the of the car window, that’s as much a part of the story as the people who are talking, you know, and there’s no way to keep track of that if you don’t shoot in order. But the real reason was, I wanted to keep trying to convince them that the way I wanted to tell the story was the best way to do it.

“And the hardest part of convincing them was the scene at the end of the movie where Abdul was coming in to rob the place and Lonnie stops him. They embrace, the revolutionary cries, breaks down and all that.”

According to the 1978 book Creative Differences: Profiles of Hollywood Dissidents by David Talbot and Barbara Zheu, Schultz was given only 28 days to shoot Car Wash, and he exceeded that time limit by about 10.

“It’s so finally I’m going to one day over schedule, two days over schedule, three days over,” he said. “The head of the studio calls me and says, ‘Schultz, you finish the damn film.’ I said, ‘Yeah, if you let me shoot it the way I want to shoot it, OK?’ Go ahead, because they figured they could change it in the editing, right?

“So, that’s kind of how it kind of came to be. So, yes, it was joyful. It was a lot of fun. I got Richard Pryor to do a dick part, you know, yeah, and the Pointer Sisters, and that led to a whole experience of working with Richard on other movies.”

Schultz told the authors of Creative Differences in 1978 that he was about 75% happy with Car Wash and the movie “has its values.”

Roger Ebert praised the movie for its “tremendous sense of life.” “It’s one thing to have an idea like this — a zany, sometimes serious day in the life of a car wash — and another thing to make it work,” Ebert wrote. “But the screenplay and the direction juggle the characters so adroitly, this is almost a wash-and-wax M*A*S*H.”

Pauline Kael, meanwhile, ripped Car Wash, writing, “it has no more class than a Hostess Twinkie, though it, too, might make you gag a little.” However, Kael also knocked Norman Whitfield’s music in her review, so she was obviously out of her mind when she watched the movie.

People have certainly wanted to return to the vibrant 1976 world of Car Wash, as it has enjoyed cult success and attempts to revive it over the years. A pilot for a TV version of the movie, starring Danny Aiello, was made in 1978, and a roundly dismissed remake came out in 2001 with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dog.

The movie’s energy, the perfectly selected cast, most especially Dixon and Fargas, and Schultz’s passion and determination make Car Wash feel so right-on even if "you might never get rich.”