Joel Schumacher, ‘Batman’ director, dies at 80
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com/ Reuters) – Joel Schumacher, costume designer-turned-director of films including St. Elmo’s Fire, The Lost Boys and Falling Down, as well as two Batman films, died in New York City on Monday morning after a yearlong battle with cancer. He was 80.
Schumacher brought his fashion background to directing a run of stylish films throughout the 1980s and 1990s that were not always critically acclaimed, but continue to be well-loved by audiences for capturing the feel of the era.
The Jewish Schumacher was handed the reins of the Batman franchise when Tim Burton exited Warner Bros.’ Caped Crusader series after two enormously successful films. The first movie by Schumacher, Batman Forever, starring Val Kilmer, Tommy Lee Jones, Jim Carrey and Nicole Kidman, grossed more than $300 million worldwide.
Schumacher’s second and last film in the franchise was 1997’s
Batman and Robin, with George Clooney as Batman and Arnold Schwarzenegger as villain Mr. Freeze. For Batman Forever, the openly gay Schumacher introduced nipples to the costumes worn by Batman and Robin, leaning into the longstanding latent homoeroticism between the two characters. (In 2006, Clooney told Barbara Walters that he had played Batman as gay.)
Several years after the Batman debacle, Schumacher directed the feature adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical The Phantom of the Opera. Despite tepid reviews, it received three Oscar noms.
In 1985 Schumacher struck gold with his third feature film,
St. Elmo’s Fire, which he directed and co-wrote. Brat Packers including Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez and Ally Sheedy as well as a young Demi Moore starred in the story of a bunch of Georgetown grads making their way through life and love. Even the theme song was a hit and is still played to evoke the era. The film offered a pretty smart take on the complexities of post-college life.
His next film was a big hit as well: horror comedy The Lost Boys, about a group of young vampires who dominate a small California town, starred Jason Patric, Kiefer Sutherland, Corey Feldman and Corey Haim. It became a cult favorite, and a TV series adaptation has long been in the works.
SCHUMACHER HAD a high-concept screenplay by Peter Filardi and an A-list cast – Julia Roberts, Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, William Baldwin – for the 1990 horror thriller Flatliners, about arrogant medical students experimenting with life and death, and the director hit it fairly big again, with a domestic take of $61 million.
While those hits captured the era well, others during that period were misfires, such as the 1989 remake of the French hit Cousin/Cousine called Cousins
and starring Ted Danson and Isabella Rossellini and the sentimental Dying Young, starring Roberts and Campbell Scott.
Schumacher was the son of a Swedish Jewish mother and a Baptist American father.
He started out in showbiz as a costume designer, earning credits on 1972’s Play It as It Lays,
Herbert Ross’s The Last of Sheila
(1973), Paul Mazursky’s Blume in Love (1973), Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973) and Interiors (1978) and 1975 Neil Simon adaptation The Prisoner of Second Avenue. He was also credited as the production designer on the 1974 TV horror film Killer Bees.
He also started to write screenplays, including 1976’s Sparkle, 1978 hit Car Wash and the adaptation for 1978 musical The Wiz.
Schumacher’s first directing assignments came in television: the 1974 telepic Virginia Hill, which he also co-wrote and starred Dyan Cannon, and the 1979 telepic Amateur Night at the Dixie Bar and Grill, which he also penned. He stepped into the feature arena with the 1981 sci-fi comedy The Incredible Shrinking Woman, starring Lily Tomlin, followed in 1983 by D.C. Cab, an action-comedy vehicle for Mr. T that Schumacher also wrote.
Born in New York City, he studied at Parsons the New School for Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. He worked in the fashion industry, but decided to instead pursue a career in filmmaking. After moving to Los Angeles, he applied his fashion background to working first as a costume designer and worked in TV while earning an MFA from UCLA.
Schumacher directed a couple of episodes of House of Cards in 2013, and in 2015 he exec produced the series Do Not Disturb: Hotel Horrors.
Camerimage, the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography, awarded Schumacher a special award in 2010. He also received the Distinguished Collaborator Award at the Costume Designers Guild Awards in 2011.
Jerusalem Post staff contributed to this report.