Joel Schumacher, the director of such hits films as Flatliners, St. Elmo's Fire, and The Lost Boys, started out 21 years ago as a costume designer. In his Bel-Air home, he admits that his movies are like his "children," and says he worries whether sometimes he has "failed that child."
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Joel Schumacher grew up in a tenement house in Queens. His father died when he was four. His mother worked two jobs. Little Joel spent all his free time at the neighborhood movie theater. "Ever since I was seven I wanted to be a movie director," he says. In 1979, at the age of 40, Schumacher's dream came true: he was handed the directorial reins on a Lily Tomlin film called The Incredible Shrinking Woman. So what kind of thrill was it for him to sit in a theater and watch his first movie? "It was devastating. I was shocked at how untalented I was," Schumacher says. "It's a delusion to think that just because you want to do something all your life that you have a knack for it. I realized then that I had two choices: I could either leave the business and move to Australia, or I could start going to film classes and get better. The fact is, I was so bad, I could only get better."
So Schumacher stayed and learned and prospered. His resume now includes films like The Lost Boys, St. Elmo's Fire, Cousins, Flatliners, Dying Young and the recent Michael Douglas drama Falling Down. He has become, in the last decade, a bankable director and offers pour in daily. Despite his success, Schumacher remains, according to Michael Douglas, who's known him for two decades, one of the nicest guys in the business. "Joel likes people, he listens, he's compassionate. On the set, he's never threatened by a new idea. He allows impulsive things to happen. And he keeps things in perspective. He's aware of the absurdities in this business, and he knows that moviemaking is not brain surgery. Joel's come a long way, and he's grateful for where he is right now."
And why not? Where he is, these days, is a hilltop hideaway that overlooks the Hotel Bel-Air. On the morning I arrive, a security guard wants to know my business. I tell him, and he barks into his walkie-talkie. The driveway gate shudders and slides open. An agreeable blond chap in a sweat suit strides across the driveway, extends a hand and says, in an impeccable English accent, "Good morning. I'm Andrew, Mr. Schumacher's butler. Can I get you something to drink?" I ask for coffee and walk into the foyer which is swarming with poinsettias, leading me to suspect that Schumacher never saw the play Tru, in which Robert Morse, playing Truman Capote, calls poinsettias "the Bob Goulets of botany." Schumacher is prepping a holiday party, so there are workmen in the hall repairing a broken water heater, and outside, more men are tending to the vegetation and the pool.
Schumacher's assistant, Bettina, bids me to step into the sunken living room, which is crammed with what Schumacher will later call "an eclectic bunch of shit." A fire is blazing. There are Navajo rugs and religious art all over the place. (Schumacher's mother was Jewish, but he apparently never met a cross he didn't like.) There are two carved chairs from Kenya and two scarred leather chairs ("falling apart and decadent, like me"), a coffee table made from the inner ring of a jet engine, a candle chandelier that is lowered and raised by a pulley, and three burlap sofas awash with pillows.
Looking around the room, I am reminded that Schumacher was an art director before he was a director. Catching sight of Schumacher--who sweeps into the room in jeans, navy sweater and a black leather jacket--I am reminded that he was a costume designer as well. His first words to me--"Where shall we sit? Well, let's get rid of some of these fucking pillows"-- make me remember that he was a writer, too. Schumacher is 53 now, and though this last decade has been good to him, you can still see, in the fault lines of his face, traces of the lean years and the party years when he slept little and tried everything.
Other than William Cameron Menzies, Harry Horner and Mitchell Leisen, there haven't been many art directors who've gone on to direct films, and even fewer costume designers who've done so. Until Schumacher, there hasn't been anyone who did either and made so many films that have been so profitable. How has he succeeded where others have come up short? "I had a great luxury that many directors don't have," he says. "I worked for a lot of directors before I became one myself. I got to sit around and watch what worked--and what didn't. I watched them repeat themselves. I watched them close themselves off from the cast and crew when they should have been saying, 'I don't know what the hell I'm doing, does anyone have any ideas?'" What about the personal qualities that have fueled him during the long climb? "Hubris, trust and a certain blindness, an ignorance of the odds against succeeding in the movie business. I had this dream that I was going to be a director. If I had stopped to think about the chances of that actually happening, I never would have been able to hold out."
In order to appreciate how enormous those odds were, you have to understand just how low Schumacher had sunk before he was tossed a lifeline.
In 1962, while in art school, Schumacher began designing store windows at Henri Bendel, an upscale boutique in New York City. After three years of working for someone else, he opened his own place, Paraphernalia, which, as the name suggests, had much to do with drug-culture accessories that became popular in the '60s. Then, later in the decade, Schumacher went to work for Revlon, where he designed clothing and packages. He helped Halston design his first collection, did a stint at Vogue, and along the way became, in his words, a "hopeless, miserable drug addict."
Analysis gave him a road back, and he still agrees with what he told Liz Smith back in 1977: "I think the world is divided between people who have had analysis and people who haven't. I don't think my life really began until I had analysis." Schumacher got off drugs and, in 1970, went back to the only job he could get, working again at Bendel. This meant that, at the age of 30, he was doing the same thing he had been doing at 22. He knew he had to make a change, and--through a mutual friend who worked at an ad agency--Schumacher wangled an introduction to writer/producer Dominick Dunne. "I bugged him like crazy for the next six months to get a job on his next film, Play It As It Lays. I said I'd carry lights, get coffee, whatever. I was relentless. Finally Dunne broke down and said that since my background was in fashion, he'd give me a two-week trial as a costume designer on the movie."
So, come Christmas, 1971, Schumacher "came out to Hollywood and got a $60-a-month apartment above Sunset Boulevard. I was a recovering drug addict, so I had to avoid all the parties. I had no phone, no radio, and I didn't know how to drive." Schumacher passed Dunne's two-week trial and began to get work regularly. Aside from a run-in with Raquel Welch on The Last of Sheila--she thought Schumacher was trying to ruin her career by putting her in a costume that did not call attention to itself, and she treated him cruelly--things proceeded smoothly. He moved up the ranks from costume designer to art director and the high point--both topographically and professionally--was Sleeper, which featured the hilarious scene of Woody Allen skimming across a lake in the Rocky Mountains, decked out in a hydrovac suit that made him look like an airborne doughboy.
By 1974, Schumacher realized that, typically, art directors were not offered directing jobs, but writers often were given the chance to direct their own scripts. So Schumacher read some scripts, studied the format ("it wasn't hard") and began turning out TV movies. He did get to direct one of his own scripts, The Virginia Hill Story, with Dyan Cannon and Harvey Keitel in the roles later played by Annette Bening and Warren Beatty in Bugsy.
"They shouldn't have let me have that job," says Schumacher. "I didn't know what I was doing." This is, perhaps, not false modesty: he didn't get to direct again for five years. However, he kept busy as a screenwriter and in 1976, two of his scripts, Sparkle and Car Wash, were made for the big screen.
Director Sidney Lumet saw both and since they had a number of blacks in the cast, he figured that Schumacher was black and asked him to write the screenplay for the 1978 film version of the Broadway musical The Wiz. When he discovered that Schumacher was Caucasian, Lumet was no less persistent. "I didn't really want the assignment," Schumacher recalls. "I wasn't thrilled about tampering with a classic, and I also felt that Dorothy should be played by a child." But Lumet would not take no for an answer, and despite Schumacher's wariness, thirtyish Diana Ross played the part anyway. Though the film was not a success, it was a big-budget extravaganza that brought Schumacher more industry exposure. He designed costumes for one final film--Woody Allen's Interiors, in 1978-- then directed another of his scripts, Amateur Night at the Dixie Bar and Grill, for TV. When it received critical acclaim, Schumacher got an opportunity to direct a feature film, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, at Universal, where The Wiz, had been made.
Lily Tomlin and her frequent collaborator, Jane Wagner, had most recently worked together on a disaster called Moment by Moment, which starred Tomlin and John Travolta as the most unlikely of all ill-starred lovers. Were it not for that excess d'estime, Wagner would have directed Shrinking Woman, but for the moment she had lost her cachet. Schumacher still had to be approved by the women and he says, "I'll always be grateful to Lily and Jane for saying yes." His gratitude ends there, however; the three didn't get on so well during the shooting. "Lily and Jane had always been at the center of their own projects," Schumacher recalls, "and they were used to running the show. As the director, I thought I was running the show. We had conflicts, and we ended up making a movie by compromise--which I now know is the worst way to make a movie."
Still, the picture made money and gave Schumacher an opportunity to show off his visual skills, as the film's sets needed a skewed perspective and very imaginative colors.
Next he was executive producer of a TV film he'd written, Now We're Cookin'; then he got the opportunity to direct another of his screenplays, D.C. Cab. Does Schumacher apologize for subjecting us to this rather unpoetic material? No way. "It was the only job I could get," he says with a laugh. "It wasn't like I was sitting around saying, 'Should I do Out of Africa with Meryl and Bob or D.C. Cab with Mr. T?' I needed the job desperately, and I was thrilled to have it."
Schumacher's next movie, which he coauthored and directed, was the 1985 film St. Elmo's Fire, which showcased the "Brat Pack"--Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Demi Moore, Rob Lowe, Ally Sheedy and Andrew McCarthy--at the height of their popularity, winning acclaim from the already converted. Schumacher recalls that, after an industry screening of the film, a studio head pulled Schumacher aside and confided, "You've written a script about seven characters who no one gives a damn about."
Even now, recalling this remark makes Schumacher testy. "Does a character have to give something to poor people in order to be sympathetic?" he asks. "What about two people trapped in a bad marriage? What about an alcoholic? What about kids who've been spit out of college and are trying to find their places in the real world? These are real people with real problems. Do you have to be Mother Teresa in order to be sympathetic?"
I switch subjects and ask Schumacher how he gets together the starry ensemble casts that are the hallmark of his films St. Elmo's Fire, Flatliners and The Lost Boys.
"I get on the phone and make a call and, if an agent turns me down, I call the actor I want directly."
That's how he got lason Patric to star in The Lost Boys, his next film after St. Elmo's Fire: it took "six weeks of three-hour conversations" to land the actor, but Schumacher says, "that's how Jason is on every picture, which is why he rarely works." When I mention to Schumacher that he's widely credited with "discovering" Patric, he says, "I just smelled something that anyone else would have smelled five seconds later."
When I ask whether it's true that Schumacher and the studio had arguments over the direction The Lost Boys should take, he tells me, "At the meetings, the executives kept talking some existential crap about what it was really 'about' until finally, I said, 'This is like a family sitting around, and we've got a sister coming down to breakfast every day and her stomach keeps getting bigger. Someone says, "She's got gas," and someone else says, "She's got her period," and I say, "Folks, she's KNOCKED UP!'" I told the studio people, 'We are just making a teenage vampire movie--period! Now, can we make it the best teenage vampire movie ever made? Well, we're going to die trying.'" Did he succeed? Well, recent teen vampire flicks like Buffy the Vampire Slayer make The Lost Boys look good.
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."
To lighten the mood, I offer up my own theory that Dying Young failed because the film was sold as a Julia Roberts movie when, in the truest sense, it wasn't "her" story. It was, rather, the story of the dying man she cares for and who then comes to love life again. Such as it is, the script follows "his" changes, the arc of his character--not hers.
"You may have hit upon the problem," Schumacher says, "and that's something that none of the executives or story editors or agents saw. But as the director, it was my job to know that, and the painful truth is, I would have known it if Julia had not been involved. If it had been just a piece of material, I would have said, 'This is about Victor. His arc is more interesting.'
"Movies are like my children," says Schumacher with a sigh. "And often older parents will agonize over whether one of the children didn't get enough attention. They worry that they failed that child. I will go to my grave feeling that way about Dying Young."
Schumacher didn't have much better luck with his next project, a TV series called "2000 Malibu Road," which followed the problems of ex-hooker Lisa Hartman and her gorgeous roommates Drew Barrymore and Jennifer Beals. How did it come about? "[CBS executive] Jeff Sagansky asked me to create a series," says Schumacher, "so I did it--on a lark." Schumacher says he can't abide film people who look down their noses at television. "People in features should be in awe of people who do TV, where you have little time, little money and no luxuries. It's no-frills filmmaking."
I know that the series--of which Schumacher directed all six episodes--might have made the grade, had CBS not found the stars' salaries too high to underwrite future episodes, and I'm joking when I tell Schumacher that perhaps the show would have lasted if it had had "better" family values--but he's not kidding when he replies, "Who is to say what family values are? If George Bush and Bill Clinton are the arbiters of family values in America, then I'll take the hookers on 'Malibu Road.' At least they're honest about what they do."
Schumacher's most recent movie, Falling Down, again reunited the director with Michael Douglas, who this time was part of the cast. "I was thrilled when he said he'd do Falling Down," Schumacher says. "He not only came in with character ideas--for instance, he wanted to carry a gift, crosstown, to his daughter--but as a producer, he has a good overview, and he made suggestions on things like coverage and setups."
I ask if there's any truth to the story that Michael Douglas was given his choice of the two major roles in the film. "You know that was written in Premiere magazine, and I called the writer and said, 'Where did you get that information?' and she said, 'From an agent at ICM.' I said, 'Why didn't you call me and check it, because it's not true.' Michael was always going to play the man who walks across the city and disintegrates."
At the time of our meeting, Falling Down has not yet been released, and when I ask Schumacher--whose next film will be The Client, from John Grisham's novel--whether he ever knows if a movie is destined to be a hit, he shrugs: who knows?
"I do feel that, in many cases, I've failed miserably," Schumacher says. "I admire great movies and feel I fall very short of that, but I try. Maybe that's a strength in a way, the desire to do better, to make a better film each time out. And if I want to do that, I just have to take a project and do better. I can't sit around and analyze my life all the time.
"I was in EST in 1974, and what I took from that program was the fact that I'm responsible for my life," Schumacher says. "And if I'm not enjoying this [he motions to the room, but is referring, no doubt, to the career that made the luxurious lifestyle possible] then I'm a tragic person. I'm surrounded by tragedy all day long. There are so many people who have everything and are discontent. They see themselves as victims. I see people go thought violent reactions to articles written about them. It's all part of the insecurity and megalomania that seem to waltz together in this narcissistic tango. Isn't it enough that we work in a glamorous business and make lots of money and get all the perks? Do we have to be written about as though we were Jonas Salk or Albert Schweitzer? You always know when you're talking to a victim. It doesn't mean you can't love them, but you can't help them. They spend their days worrying if they're with the right person or if they're watching the right self-help tapes. This is why we're so fucking neurotic.
"In the past, just to survive and have a job and enjoy the children was enough. It was a life! Survival is still a goal for 90 percent of the people on the planet. And here I am, this American who makes movies. I would do this for nothing. My agent will kill me for saying that, but it's true. I'm doing what I've always wanted to do. I'm one of the luckiest people I've ever met. I've survived the fashion business, the movie business and sex, drugs and rock'n'roll."
Jeffrey Lantos interviewed Lara Flynn Boyle for the January/February Movieline.