Michael Childers was a 22-year-old Los Angeles student when a friend set him up on a date with John Schlesinger, a visiting British director nearly two decades his senior. The esteemed film-maker was licking his wounds: his most recent picture, Far from the Madding Crowd, which imbued its 19th-century rural characters with an anachronistic King’s Road style and panache, had flopped stateside. Childers approached the date with mixed feelings. He adored Schlesinger’s previous movie, the jazzy Darling, starring Julie Christie as a model on the make, and had seen it three times.But he had heard the director described as “mercurial”....