JOEL SCHUMACHER 1939 - 2020

THERE WAS A LOT MORE TO THE DIRECTOR’S HIGH IMPACT CAREER THAN THE LOST BOYS AND BATMAN & ROBIN. TOTAL FILM LOOKS BACK AT ONE OF THE MOST IDIOSYNCRATIC RESUMÉS – AND COLOURFUL CHARACTERS – IN HOLLYWOOD.

- JAMIE GRAHAM

In the late summer of 1997, Joel Schumacher was in Brazil promoting Batman & Robin. The press tour, which he likened to “being in a rock band”, had completed the US, Asia, Australia and Europe, and was now rocketing through South America. “You’re in a different city every day-and-a-half,” he said. “You get off the plane, go to the premiere, talk to the press, open a toy store, kiss babies, get back on the plane.” Sitting on a beach in Rio, he suddenly thought, “Who are you? What are you doing? Why are you here?”

Following Schumacher’s death from cancer, aged 80, on 22 June, we might ask the same questions. His is a career and a life that defies easy categorization.

Born on 29 August 1939, Joel T. Schumacher was raised by his mother, Marion Kantor, a Swedish Jew who worked in a dress shop. His father, Francis Schumacher, a Baptist from Tennessee, died of pneumonia when Joel was four. He lived in a Long Island tenement in the shadow of a cinema (“I grew up behind a movie theatre, before [a] TV”), and studied at Parsons School of Design and Fashion Institute of Technology, both in New York, before landing jobs as a window dresser in Macy’s and Saks.