Director of 2 Batman films, Brat Pack’s ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’
JOEL SCHUMACHER | Aug. 29, 1939 - June 22, 2020
NEW YORK — Joel Schumacher, the eclectic and brazen filmmaker who dressed New York department store windows before shepherding the Brat Pack to the big screen in “St. Elmo’s Fire” and steering the Batman franchise into its most baroque territory in “Batman Forever” and “Batman & Robin,” has died. He was 80.
A representative for Schumacher said the filmmaker died Monday in New York after a yearlong battle with cancer.
A native New Yorker, Schumacher was first a sensation in the fashion world after attending Parsons School of Design and decorating Henri Bendel’s windows. His entry to film came first as a costume designer. Schumacher dressed a pair of Woody Allen movies in the 1970s: “Interiors” and “Sleeper.” He also penned the screenplays to a pair of musicals: “The Wiz” and “Sparkle.”
As a director, he established himself as a filmmaker of great flare, if not often good reviews, in a string of mainstream films in the 1980s and ’90s. To the frequent frustration of critics but the delight of audiences, Schumacher favored entertainment over tastefulness — including those infamous, sensual Batman and Robin suits with visible nipples — and he did so proudly.
“A movie that’s in a movie theater that runs at 2,4,6, 8 and 10 and there’s no one in the audience when that movie runs — what’s the point?” Schumacher once told Charlie Rose.
The success of his first hit, “St. Elmo’s Fire,” with Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez and Ally Sheedy, not only helped make a name for the Brat Pack but made Schumacher in-demand in Hollywood. He followed it up with 1987’s “The Lost Boys,” with Jason Patric, Corey Haim, Kiefer Sutherland and Corey Feldman. A vampire horror comedy, it gave a darker, contemporary view of the perpetual adolescence of “Peter Pan.”
Schumacher was sometimes regretful that he played a role in hoisting fame on his young stars and “the two Coreys.” Before dying in 2010, Haim struggled with drug addiction and said he was sexually assaulted in the film industry. Feldman on Monday recounted on Twitter trying cocaine during “The Lost Boys” as a 16-year-old. When Schumacher found out, Feldman said, Schumacher temporarily fired him.
“He tried to prevent my descent,” said Feldman, who continued to struggle with drugs.
Schumacher then made “Flatliners,” about morbidly obsessed medical students, and a pair of John Grisham adaptations: “The Client” and “A Time to Kill.”
“Falling Down,” with Michael Douglas as a Los Angeles man whose anger from minute every-day interactions steadily builds in violence, was maybe his most critically acclaimed film, though its depictions of minorities — particularly a Korean grocer — were from the start hotly debated.
The slickness of those productions helped Schumacher inherit the DC universe from Tim Burton. In Schumacher’s hands, Batman received a garish overhaul that resulted in two of the superhero’s most cartoonish movies: 1995’s “Batman Forever” and 1997’s “Batman & Robin.” The first was a box-office smash, but the second fizzled and remains most often remembered for its infamous suits.
“It was like I had murdered a baby,” Schumacher told Vice of the response to “Batman & Robin.” Yet it, too, has developed a small cult following for those who prefer the antithesis of Christopher Nolan’s more grim Batman movies.
Schumacher, born on Aug. 29, 1939, to Francis and Marian Schumacher, was raised in the Queens borough of New York by his mother; his father died when he was 4.
Schumacher would often say he was fortunate to have survived the ‘60s. He made habits of liquid Methadrine, acid and sex. Out long before many in Hollywood, Schumacher claimed his list of lovers reached “the double-digit thousands.” He was a warm and gossipy raconteur, though Schumacher said he “never kissed and told about anybody who gives me the favor of sharing a bed with me.”
“I don’t not like talking about it, I just don’t believe it matters,” Schumacher said of his sexuality in a 2000 interview with the Guardian. “I’ve lived my life very openly . ... So I’m not hiding anything. But I am totally and completely against labels.”
After “Batman & Robin,” Schumacher turned to lower-budget thrillers: “8mm,” with Nicolas Cage; “Flawless,” with Robert De Niro; and “Phone Booth,” with Colin Farrell. Schumacher, behind the beginnings of so many careers, gave Farrell his first led role in 2000’s “Tigerland.” In 2004, he took on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera,” a late, gaudy flourish that combined Schumacher with perhaps his Broadway equivalent in the spectacle-making Webber. Most recently, he directed two episodes of Netflix’s “House of Cards” in 2013.