Looking back on the life and star-making career of the late Lost Boys auteur.

1939 - 2020 THERE WAS A LOT MORE TO THE DIRECTOR’S HIGHIMPACT CAREER THAN THE LOST BOYS AND BATMAN & ROBIN. TOTAL FILM LOOKS BACK AT ONE OF THE MOST IDIOSYNCRATIC RESUMÉS – AND COLOURFUL CHARACTERS – IN HOLLYWOOD.

In the late summer of 1997, Joel Schumacher was in Brazil promoting Batman & Robin. The press tour, which he likened to “being in a rock band”, had completed the US, Asia, Australia and Europe, and was now rocketing through South America. “You’re in a different city every day-and-a-half,” he said. “You get off the plane, go to the premiere, talk to the press, open a toy store, kiss babies, get back on the plane.” Sitting on a beach in Rio, he suddenly thought, “Who are you? What are you doing? Why are you here?”

Following Schumacher’s death from cancer, aged 80, on 22 June, we might ask the same questions. His is a career and a life that defies easy categorisation.

Born on 29 August 1939, Joel T. Schumacher was raised by his mother, Marion Kantor, a Swedish Jew who worked in a dress shop. His father, Francis Schumacher, a Baptist from

Tennessee, died of pneumonia when Joel was four. He lived in a Long Island tenement in the shadow of a cinema

(“I grew up behind a movie theatre, before [a] TV”), and studied at Parsons School of Design and Fashion Institute of Technology, both in New York, before landing jobs as a window dresser in Macy’s and Saks.

Schumacher, the man who would one day put nipples on the Batsuit, entered Hollywood as a costume designer. In 1973 he registered credits on Paul Mazursky’s Blume In Love, Herbert Ross’ The Last Of Sheila and Woody Allen’s Sleeper, and from there moved into scriptwriting, displaying early evidence of his ability to spy a trend (“I’m a popculture sponge”) by penning African-American comedies Sparkle, Car Wash (both 1976) and The Wiz (1978). He also wrote TV movies Virginia Hill (1974) and Amateur Night At The Dixie Bar And Grill (1979), this time managing to secure

directing duties, too – a stepping stone to making his big-screen directorial debut with The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981), and following it up with action-comedy

D.C. Cab (1983), starring Mr. T.

It was in 1985, with St. Elmo’s Fire, that Schumacher first captured the zeitgeist, zooming in on a group of angsty graduates of Georgetown University. “A deceptively beautiful electrical display that can’t be confused with reality,” sniffed the Los Angeles Times, referring to both the glossy, poppromo visuals and the Brat Pack cast: Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Andrew McCarthy and Emilio Estevez. Two years later, Schumacher did it again with cool, sexy, none-more-’80s vampire movie The Lost Boys, featuring the killer cast of Kiefer Sutherland, Jason Patric, Jami Gertz, Corey Haim and Corey Feldman. “Vampires are hot,” said Schumacher a full 21 years before Edward Cullen sparkled on our screens.

Well, the cast of The Lost Boys was certainly hot, and Schumacher would do it again and again. He cast Julia Roberts (alongside Sutherland, Kevin Bacon and William Baldwin) in supernatural-thriller Flatliners

(1991) and weepie Dying Young

(1991). He made a star of Matthew McConaughey playing a fearless lawyer in John Grisham adaptation A Time To Kill (1996). And he trained Colin Farrell for the Vietnam War, and Hollywood fame, in Tigerland (2000), before trapping him in a call box, in a sniper’s crosshairs, for Phone Booth (2002).

“The question I always get is, ‘How do you know these young people are going to be stars?’” he said. “You don’t. You just know there’s no one like them. If Julia Roberts walked into your office at 20 and you didn’t hire her, you shouldn’t be in the movie business.”

With Schumacher’s modesty went a tell-it-how-it-is honesty. In interviews he talked of starting drinking at nine, smoking at 10 and losing his virginity at 11, and said that he was injecting liquid methadrine six times a day between 1965 and 1970 (his mother died in 1965), and underwent a couple of thousand acid trips during the same interval. Openly gay at a time few in Hollywood were, he estimates that he slept with up to 20,000 men, telling People magazine, “I went to a party when I was 11 and got home when I was 52.”

In the 1990s, he was Warner Bros’ go-to guy, scoring critical and commercial hits with Falling Down (1993), in which Michael Douglas’ white-collar worker goes on a mad-as-hell-and-not-gonna-take-it-anymore rampage, and his first John Grisham adaptation The Client (1994), in which he directed Susan Sarandon to an Oscar nomination. He was therefore an obvious choice to inherit the Batman franchise from Tim Burton, and unsurprisingly traded Burton’s gothic stylings for something more cartoony. Batman Forever was critically snubbed but the biggest box-office hit of 1995; Batman & Robin (1997), with its godawful puns and neon, stroboscopic lighting, was a stinker on all fronts.

“I was in merchandising meetings with Walmart and K-Mart and McDonald’s, and being told to make the film more ‘toyetic’,” said Schumacher, who feels it was the only time he let box office come before story. In 2017, he would apologise for Batman & Robin, though he’d already done so in his work – that soul search on the beach in Rio led him to make smaller, grittier films like 8MM, Flawless (both 1999), Tigerland, Phone Booth and crusading journalist movie Veronica Guerin (2003), with Cate Blanchett. The movies’ quality varied tremendously but they were unified by an ethos and an aesthetic that were to be commended.

Then, in 2004, came The Phantom Of The Opera, a return to camp spectacle with another fresh-faced star in the title role – Gerard Butler. Minnie Driver, as Carlotta, worried she was too over the top. Schumacher replied, “Oh honey, no one ever paid to see under the top.” The film was insipid but received three Oscar nominations.

After, Schumacher’s career fizzled. His last four movies – crime-mystery The Number 23 (2007), horror Blood Creek (2009), crime-actioner Twelve (2010) and crime-drama Trespass (2011) – were forgettable, and he directed two episodes of Netflix drama House Of Cards in 2013.

Schumacher tackled a gamut of genres. He made good films and bad films, flops and hits, and frequently impacted on the popular culture that he so loved to soak up. It’s too easy to think of only The Lost Boys and the Batman movies and to dismiss him as a stylist and a populist with little to say. But

A Time To Kill dealt with issues of race; Flawless saw Philip Seymour Hoffman play a transgender character and Robert De Niro a homophobe; and Falling Down sparked debate as a white, middle-aged male vented his rage, mostly, on people of colour.

Whether viewers and critics loved or loathed his work, one thing is certain: he was a hugely popular figure in Hollywood, beloved by his film crews and actors, many of whom took to Twitter after his death to express heartfelt condolences. This particular writer met him twice, once for 8MM, and then five years later for The Phantom Of The Opera. The first time he took exception to the line of questioning, suggesting it was pressing “all the hot buttons”, and offered a no-holdsbarred dressing down after the interview. The second time was all anecdotes and laughter, and it wasn’t until after the interview that he made it clear, with a huge grin, that he remembered the previous encounter.

Joel Schumacher had vertiginous highs and plummeting lows, but he was appreciative of it all. “I got my dream,” he said. “I got it so much bigger than even I could have dreamed it. You know, I’m just a kid whose parents died very young, who was on his own and wanted to tell stories. And look what happened.”

‘YOU GET OFF THE PLANE, GO TO THE PREMIERE, TALK TO THE PRESS, OPEN A TOY STORE, KISS BABIES…’