Wrestler Mark Schultz has changed his tune on ‘Foxcatcher’

Posted by on Jan 20, 2015 15:20

Apparently, five Academy Award nominations can change a guy’s mind. Or at the very least, that might settle a hothead down.

Just over two weeks ago, former Olympic wrestler Mark Schultz exploded on Twitter over how he was portrayed in the movie Foxcatcher, pointing most of his outrage toward director Bennett Miller. What particularly angered Schultz was a scene in the film that some critics have interpreted as implying a homosexual relationship between Schultz and billionaire John du Pont, who had recruited Schultz to train for the 1996 Olympics at the facility he built on his family’s Pennsylvania estate.

Here’s what I wrote about the story at the time for Awful Announcing:

During the scene in question, du Pont (played by Steve Carell) wakes Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) up for a late-night training session. Earlier in the film, du Pont is shown participating in amateur tournaments for older wrestlers with his opponents being paid by aides to take a fall. This is something du Pont seemingly has no idea about, so he believes he’s an accomplished wrestler. In the training scene, du Pont pins Schultz face-down in an arm lock, and the camera then films a close-up on Schultz’s face in pain as his face is pressed into the mat.

As mentioned, some took that scene to say that something more than wrestling may have been going on between Schultz and du Pont. And when Schultz found out about those rumblings, he went on a Twitter tirade. The tweets have since been deleted, but thankfully, some film bloggers screencapped the posts.

schultz_tweets

Considering that Foxcatcher was a couple of weeks away from a wide national theatrical release, that’s not the sort of publicity Sony Pictures Classics was hoping for from the real-life subject of its film. For Schultz, it was also quite a turn from endorsing the portrayal of his wrestling career and retelling of the events leading up to his brother’s murder, along with palling around with Miller, Tatum, Carell and Mark Ruffalo when the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

Maybe Schultz settled down after taking a couple of weeks to reconsider his outburst. Perhaps friends told him that he completely overreacted and sounded like a crazy man in those tweets. It’s certainly possible that the film’s producers and the publisher of his memoir, which tells the events of Foxcatcher from his point of view, convinced Schultz that it wasn’t in anyone’s best interests to publicly trash the movie. Or maybe he saw the movie again after it was released in more theaters and decided the supposedly offending scene wasn’t so suspicious.

Regardless of the actual reason, Schultz did a 180-degree turn during the weekend Foxcatcher went into wide release, apologizing to Miller and praising Tatum for his role in the film. Furthermore, he said Tatum was robbed by not getting a Best Actor or Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination (I agree!) and attempted to explain why he became so angry.

So all’s well that ends well, it appears. An endorsement from Schultz might sway some moviegoers who need to be convinced that a movie based on a true story sticks closely to what actually happened.

Additionally, Schultz can probably count on an invitation to the Oscars on Feb. 22. (That’s not to say this is the reason he changed his tune.) Maybe he’ll even sit next to Miller in the audience. That would be a nice real-life epilogue to what’s a pretty damn good movie.

About Ian Casselberry

Ian is a writer, editor, and podcaster. You can find his work at Awful Announcing and The Comeback. He's written for Sports Illustrated, Yahoo Sports, MLive, Bleacher Report, and SB Nation.

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