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 …
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.
