Joel Schumacher: The Designer Who Ran Gotham
In 1965, the year his mother died, Joel Schumacher was fifty thousand dollars in debt, missing teeth, and weighed 130 pounds. He had been drinking since he was nine and was working his way through LSD and methamphetamine. Thirty years later he was directing Batman. In between he became one of the most commercially reliable and critically unloved directors in Hollywood — a man whose eye for a face made half a dozen careers and whose taste made him a punchline.
Long Island City
Joel T. Schumacher was born in New York City on 29 August 1939. His father, Francis, a Baptist from Knoxville, Tennessee, died of pneumonia when Joel was four. His mother Marian, a Swedish Jew, raised him alone in Long Island City. The addiction started early and ran deep, and it took until 1970 for him to get sober — a recovery he credited to a job. Working at Henri Bendel, he said, gave him back his self-respect.
He had studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology and graduated from Parsons School of Design in 1965, designing for Revlon from 1966 before moving to Bendel. This matters more than it looks: Schumacher came to cinema not through film school or theatre but through clothes and shop floors, and he never stopped being a designer. The surface of a Schumacher film — the neon, the leather, the beautiful ruined faces — is the work of someone trained to make people look at a window and want what is inside it.
Costumes, Then Scripts
His way into the industry was through wardrobe. He designed costumes for *Play It as It Lays* and *The Last of Sheila* in 1972, Woody Allen's *Sleeper* in 1973, Paul Mazursky's *Blume in Love*, and Allen's *Interiors*; he was production designer on *Killer Bees* in 1974. Then he started writing, and wrote his way up: *Sparkle* in 1976 with Howard Rosenman, *Car Wash*, and *The Wiz*. He directed television first — *Virginia Hill* in 1974, *Amateur Night at the Dixie Bar and Grill* in 1979 — and took an MFA at UCLA along the way.
His feature debut, *The Incredible Shrinking Woman* (1981), was a critical and commercial failure whose budget escalated past twenty million dollars. It nearly ended him.
The Star Machine
What rescued him was an instinct for casting that turned out to be his real talent. *St. Elmo's Fire* (1985) took a group of young unknowns and semi-knowns and welded them into the Brat Pack; *The Lost Boys* (1987) did the same trick with vampires and became a permanent cult object. *Flatliners* (1990) took $61 million domestically. Through the 1990s he was among the most bankable directors in the business: *Dying Young* (1991), *Falling Down* (1993), the John Grisham adaptations *The Client* (1994) and *A Time to Kill* (1996), the crime thriller *8mm* (1999).
*Falling Down* is generally reckoned his best film, and the *New York Times* description of it — "glitzy, casually cruel, hip and grim" — is as good a summary of the Schumacher register as anyone has managed. *A Time to Kill* put a then-unknown Matthew McConaughey in the lead of a major studio picture, a bet that made a career; McConaughey said as much when Schumacher died.
Gotham
In 1995 Warner Bros. handed him the Batman franchise after Tim Burton, and *Batman Forever* — Val Kilmer, Jim Carrey, a great deal of purple light — took more than $336 million, out-grossing *Batman Returns*. Two years later *Batman & Robin* took $238 million and acquired a reputation as one of the worst films ever released by a major studio.
The autopsy focused, then and since, on the costumes: the rubber nipples, the codpieces, the lingering close-ups of the leads' bodies. Critics accused Schumacher, an openly gay man, of smuggling homoerotic content into a children's franchise; he replied that the suits were modelled on anatomically correct Greek statuary and medical illustration. George Clooney has said Schumacher told him Batman was gay. Whatever the intent, Warner Bros. rejected Schumacher's follow-up pitches, which were drawn from Frank Miller's *Year One* and *The Dark Knight Returns* and would have taken the series somewhere much darker. In 2017 he apologised outright for the film's quality.
After the Fall
He kept working for another fifteen years and did some of his most interesting work in the wreckage: *Flawless* (1999) with Robert De Niro and Philip Seymour Hoffman, *Tigerland* (2000), which introduced Colin Farrell, *Phone Booth* (2002), which used Farrell again and made money on a single location, *Veronica Guerin* (2003), *The Phantom of the Opera* (2004), which drew three Oscar nominations on tepid reviews, and *The Number 23* (2007). *Trespass* (2011) was his last feature. In 2013 he directed two episodes of Netflix's *House of Cards*. His films took over a billion dollars across four decades.
Why Joel Is Called a Genius
The claim for Schumacher is not that he was a great artist, and the sources record no serious critic calling him one. It is a claim about a specific, unglamorous, rare faculty: he could look at an unknown twenty-three-year-old and see the star. Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Matthew McConaughey and Colin Farrell all had career-making roles handed to them by Schumacher, and McConaughey credited him publicly with launching him. That is not luck four times over. It is perception — reading a face for what a camera will do with it — and it descends directly from the man who designed for Revlon and Bendel. He thought in surfaces and was better at them than almost anyone: the light, the wardrobe, the casting, the atmosphere that makes *The Lost Boys* still work when its script does not.
The counter-case is loud and largely correct. Schumacher had no consistent authorial signature, no thematic project, no interest in the kind of formal control that produces reputations. His filmography swings between *Falling Down* and *Batman & Robin* with no obvious internal logic, and he made enough bad films that "a Joel Schumacher picture" became a term of abuse. He apologised for the worst of them, which is more honesty than most directors manage and also a concession. The fair verdict is that he was a superb producer of surfaces and an inconsistent teller of stories — a talent scout of near-infallible instinct in a job that also required things he did not have.
Legacy
Schumacher was openly gay in an era when studio directors mostly were not, and startlingly candid about it; he told an interviewer in 2019 that he had been sexually active from eleven and estimated his partners in the tens of thousands. He watched friends die in the first years of AIDS, was certain he was next — "I was sure I had it, I was planning my death" — and never contracted HIV. He received a special award from Camerimage in 2010 and the Costume Designers Guild's Distinguished Collaborator Award in 2011, the second of which is the honour that fits him best. He died of cancer in New York on 22 June 2020, aged eighty. The tributes came loudest from the actors he had discovered.
