JOEL SCHUMACHER

(29 August 1939 - 22 June 2020)

The American film writer, producer and director Joel Schumacher, who has died at the age of 80 from cancer, was a gay filmmaker who managed to gauge popular taste with surprising success, while his sexual orientation informed some of his screenplays. Highlights of his career include St Elmo’s Fire, The Client, Flatliners, Falling Down and Phone Booth, in which he often used potential stars before they became public properties. Born in New York City, young Joel was brought up by his Jewish mother after his father died when the boy was four. At first he studied fashion and worked as a window dresser. When his mother died, he went through a period of heavy drug abuse but on moving to LA he began designing costumes for films including Blume in Love, The Last of Sheila, The Prisoner of Second Avenue and Woody Allen’s Sleeper and Interiors. He wrote his first screenplay for director Sam O’Steen’s Sparkle with Irene Cara, before she went on to do Fame. He also wrote Michael Schultz’s Car Wash and Sidney Lumet’s The Wiz before directing his first film, The Incredible Shrinking Woman with Lily Tomlin.

St Elmo’s Fire, about a group of university graduates, was his first directorial hit, with the so-called Brat Pack actors, Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy and Mare Winningham. He cast Jason Patric, Corey Haim, Dianne Wiest, Kiefer Sutherland and Corey Feldman for his horror comic film The Lost Boys. Flatliners starred Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon and William Baldwin and he used Roberts again for the rather maudlin Dying Young. Falling Down was a great improvement with Michael Douglas playing against type as an ordinary man whose life begins to slowly unwind. Schumacher made great movie successes out of two John Grisham novels, The Client and A Time to Kill, and ventured into comic book superheroes with Batman Forever and Batman & Robin. 8MM was a thriller with Nicolas Cage, while Flawless saw Robert De Niro’s security guard joining forces with drag queen Philip Seymour Hoffman. From 2000 there was Tigerland and Phone Booth both starring Colin Farrell, who also appeared with Cate Blanchett in Veronica Guerin. The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical of The Phantom of the Opera saw Gerard Butler in the title role. Schumacher made a few more feature films up to 2011 and his last work was on two episodes of the Netflix version of House of Cards in 2013. Joel Schumacher’s films were often nominated for Academy and other movie awards and he won several prizes on the international festival circuit.

MICHAEL DARVELL