From Rags to Riches

Next came Cousins, which is one of Schumacher's best-reviewed and least-seen films. Ted Danson and Isabella Rossellini starred as philanderers in this remake of the frothy French film, Cousin, Cousine. I ask, "Did it perhaps disappoint because Ted Danson is not a movie star?"

"Some have suggested that," Schumacher replies with a smile.

Schumacher's next film was so successful that it obliterated any memory that Cousins was not a hit (though it should have been one). Flatliners reunited Schumacher with his pal from the early '70s, Michael Douglas. Schumacher first met Douglas when Douglas was playing second banana to Karl Maiden on the TV series "The Streets of San Francisco." Schumacher recalls, "I was working as a $200-a-week costume designer in the film business. Michael was living with Brenda Vaccaro, who was hot off Midnight Cowboy, so she'd get invited to all the movie parties and Michael would tag along." Douglas recalls that at one party, because of their lowly status, "there were no place settings for Joel and me, so they had to wheel out an extra table for us."

A few years later, things changed. Douglas picked up an Oscar for co-producing the Best Picture-winner One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Schumacher says that he was not surprised. "Michael is smart, he's focused and he gets the job done. He was a star producer long before he became a movie star." The Douglas-produced, Schumacher-directed Flatliners was a box-office smash. Despite the brand-name cast--Julia Roberts, Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, William Baldwin--and a flashy story about near-death experiences, the film is primarily a triumph of art direction saving an improbable script. Douglas admits he was taken aback when he saw the sets for the film's central setting, a medical school. Who wasn't? Though Douglas had thought the scenes of stars reviving other stars would take place in white-walled operating rooms, instead the sets looked like a Transylvanian railway station. When I ask Schumacher about this, he says, "The scenes with four actors standing around another actor who is pretending to be dead are noncinematic. I felt I had to make the scenes scary and exciting and there was no way I could make [a scene in a white room with fluorescent lamps] exciting. I needed all that stuff [the spooky sets] to make it... visceral."

Well, maybe. Schumacher does not agree that he let the visuals save the day. "Having done costumes and sets, I have to be very cautious not to just concentrate on the visual elements, because that's what's comfortable for me."

Nevertheless, Schumacher's flair for how his movies look, and how carefully his stars are photographed (Jason Patric, in The Lost Boys, seems lit from within), led to the director getting an opportunity, after Flatliners, to make a film for which he seems ideally suited: the movie version of The Phantom of the Opera. Before Flatliners was made, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber asked Schumacher to fly to England--not that he ever actually thought he'd get the job. "I was thrilled just to have the interview," he says. "We met at Webber's country...house is not the right word ... estate, and we talked for about six hours. When I was leaving, Andrew said, 'Well, shall we do it, then?' And I thought, 'He'll think better of it in the morning.' It had to be just the exuberance of the moment, right? But the next morning, Andrew called me, and he hadn't changed his mind. So I went home and made Flatliners, and the day it ended, I flew to the south of France where Andrew has another magnificent mansion, and we started in on the script."

Schumacher conveys the thrill he felt at this point: He'd been, until then, a freelance director from, as he says, the "lucky-I'm-working school"--and all of a sudden he was about to direct one of the best-known properties in the world! "We worked on the script; sets and costumes were designed, locations were secured in Munich and Prague, and Michael Crawford and [Webber's wife] Sarah Brightman were set to play the roles each had originated."

If it all sounded too good to be true, it was. "On the way to start preproduction, I stopped in Miami to visit a boyhood friend who was dying of AIDS. While I was there Andrew called and said that he and his wife Sarah had decided to divorce. Andrew felt the rights to the show would become involved in the divorce settlement and so nothing could move forward. And he had no idea when this situation would be resolved." Even now, four years later, you can still hear the pain in Schumacher's voice. "A dream had ended," he says, "and I needed to move on. Emotionally, I couldn't afford to be attached to it any longer, because I didn't want to get disappointed again."

That's when the phone rang, and Julia Roberts was on the other end, asking him to direct her in Dying Young. "This was the first time a star had ever asked me to direct," Schumacher says, "and I don't think I would have made that particular movie if Julia hadn't asked me. I said yes because I needed something to fill the hole left by Phantom. Also, I agreed to direct Dying Young because I was madly, insanely in love with Julia. I mean that in the purest terms. Here I was, 50 years old when we met, and she was 20, and it was like I'd found a whole new inspiration in my life. I'd never met anyone like her. She was so full of life, so passionate, so funny, so vulgar, and ladylike and crazy and interesting and mature way beyond her years. She was like the daughter I'd never had. And I was blinded by my obsession, my passion to be around her, and I wasn't thinking clearly." Schumacher takes a deep breath and furls his brow. "This is still a disturbing subject for me."

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