Joel Schumacher Was A Tireless Worker, As Well As A Tireless Pursuer of Pleasure

Joel Schumacher died today at age 80, of cancer. In the motion picture biz, he was lots of things: a writer, a costume designer, and a director. His movies as director — which ranged from 1990s entries in the Batman franchise to tearjerkers like Dying Young to alarmist thrillers like 8mm to more or less alarmist thrillers like Falling Down to lavish musicals like The Phantom of the Opera — were always watchable, even if a lot of the time they were watchable in an “I can’t believe I’m watching this” kind of way.

Many of the movies, then, were kind of fun to drag on. But there are worse movies. On social media a little while back, in one of my huffs, I spoke of a certain filmmaker who, as I put it, considered himself an heir to Rainer Werner Fassbinder but who did not, in fact, reach the level of Joel Schumacher. This excited some discussion, and I heard from a lot of Schumacher fans who, frankly, made excellent points.

The news of his death is genuinely saddening. In part because whatever your opinion of Schumacher’s movies, he earned a lot of credit for being a gay man in Hollywood who, from his early-’70s beginnings there did nothing to disguise his sexuality. That took guts, and those guts also figure in the frankness he displayed in his never-boring interviews.

The movies he was involved in before he started directing constitute a formidable filmography in and of themselves. His first gig as a costume designer was coming up with chic wear-for-despair in Frank Perry’s astringent 1972 adaptation of Joan Didion’s astringent novel Play It As It Lays, starring Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld as walking signboards for L.A. anomie. He concocted futuristic garb on the cheap for Woody Allen’s 1973 sci-fi burlesque Sleeper. The still-underrated The Last of Sheila, one of the best Tinsel Town whodunits ever, co-scripted by Mr. Perkins and Stephen Sondheim, was also clothed by Schumacher. As was Allen’s first foray into super-serious drama, Interiors.

The names that recur in the credits of the above films alone suggest a very gifted and gilded Hollywood network, and as the years went on, Schumacher’s reputation as The Man Who Knew Everyone only ever got bigger. Like the production designer Richard Sylbert, he was one of those fellows who would seem to know where the bodies are buried. In a 2017 interview with Andrew Goldman for Vulture, he kind of shrugged off the idea that he had unusual social skills: “It was a very small community when I went out.” But it was more than that. Dishy, voluble, a great enthusiast, Schumacher also seemed to have a real gift for friendship, taking care to protect Julia Roberts during the early ‘90s period during which he worked with her on Flatliners and Dying Young, when the actor was in a particularly vulnerable place.

But to go back to the work: I don’t think anyone can deny that as a screenwriter, Schumacher broke genuine ground. 1975’s Sparkle, about a Harlem-based girl group coming up in the 1950s, was a sensitive and thoughtful story that yielded what was in a sense an anti-blaxploitation movie — and also provided, I think, more than a suggestion for the subsequent smash stage musical Dreamgirls. (It was co-written with Howard Rosenman, who went on to become a prominent film publicist.) The raucous comedy Car Wash also bristled with indignation over racial injustice.

His first movie as a director was Virginia Hill, a true-life story starring Dyan Cannon and Harvey Keitel. The title character, if you have a long memory, was a mob moll and longtime girlfriend to Bugsy Seigel, one who bragged to the Kefauver Commission on organized crime that she was the best cocksucker in Vegas. Although the legend is that this volunteered info was broadcast on live television, Schumacher himself was inhibited from using it since he was making a TV movie. Keitel would go on to play an associate of Siegel in Warren Beatty and Barry Levinson’s Bugsy. (Schumacher ahead of the curve again here).

Still  — once you get into the ’80s, it’s confusing. The Incredible Shrinking Woman seemed like a can’t-miss idea with a can’t-miss comedic lead in Lily Tomlin. But it missed. St. Elmo’s Fire had an irresistible pitch: The Brat Pack Grows Up, Or At Least Tries To. But the results were so ham-handed and trite that the least of John Hughes’ works looked like Eric Rohmer pictures by comparison. With D.C. Cab and The Lost Boys one could certainly enjoy the unabashed cheese, particularly if nudged along by cannabis derivatives. It was, I think, in Camp-Friendly genre pics like Boys or a shrug-it-off sex comedy like Cousins (a 1989 remake of a French hit starring Ted Danson and Isabella Rossellini) where Schumacher hit a reasonable directorial stride.

The bigger stumbles occurred when he aimed for profundity, as in the what-does-it-all-mean,-this-thing-called life thriller Flatliners, or right-wing-slide-rule-guy-goes-bonkers potboiler Falling Down. But even these were enlivened by casts that were either spectacularly charismatic (Flatliners had Roberts, Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon) or loaded with Serious Actors (Falling Down gave you Michael Douglas, Robert Duvall, Barbara Hershey, Tuesday Weld and Fredric Forrest in the top line, and stalwarts like Lois Smith and Raymond J. Barry in support). And I’ll go to my grave swearing that 1994’s The Client is a better John Grisham riff than Sydney Pollack and Tom Cruise’s The Firm. Although Schumacher’s subsequent Grisham, A Time To Kill, takes one prize and one prize only, as The Sweatiest Movie Ever.

And what about those Batman movies? Cheesy and leaden and filled with terrible dialogue — and 1997’s Batman and Robin gets a bonus demerit for making Alicia Silverstone feel bad about herself and about acting — they do, if you’re in the right mood, provide a nice dose of eye candy. And given the pomposity and grandiosity both filmmakers and fans display about Batman in these twisted times, the nippled Batsuits Schumacher pioneered strike me as the best kind of sacrilege.

In subsequent films he would concoct a dig-in-his-heels treatment of an idea that belonged in a slush pile — that would be the “blowing the lid off porn” lead balloon 8MM in 1999, and then not-quite-deliver on an idea that should have torn the roof off — that would be 2003’s flat tire Veronica Guerin. Through it all, though, he was a tireless worker, a tireless pursuer of pleasure — in the above-quote interview in Vulture, he made the now-famous claim of having had sex partners in the tens of thousands — and a vast repository of hard-won wisdom. He will absolutely be missed.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.