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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 1/11/2025

Joel Schumacher

I walked into the filmography of Joel Schumacher without much of the way in expectations. What did I actually know about him beforehand? Mostly, it was his Batman movies, but I somehow expected that the rest of his filmography wasn't like it much. It raised questions about who this man was as an artist. There are three major throughlines in his work: fantasy/unreality, ensemble-based storytelling, and the guardrails of studio filmmaking.

However, while that's the kind of thinking that I usually have while discovering the work of a filmmaker, it's not what I was focusing on as I went through Schumacher's. The dominant thought was how I got this distinct impression that Schumacher made every movie he worked on...worse. That his guiding hand from scripting to pre-production to production to post were beset by bad decisions that made every single project worse. That's not to say that I disliked everything, but even his best films, movies like Falling Down or the John Grisham adaptations of The Client and A Time to Kill, there are choices stemming from production that feel to deviate from basic ideas of the script, approaching situations wrong from a filmmaking perspective.

These sorts of negative reactions from me are always beset by objections from fans of the filmmaker, specific films, or just the idea that concentrated criticism against a creative is naturally unfair. I just need to make it clear that just because I don't like a lot of Schumacher's films (the big one that probably creates arguments is 8MM which bored me) that isn't an attack on you. I just...don't like many of his movies.

Anyway...

The Director as Writer

The reality of a film production means that almost every director on almost every movie could justify an effort to get a writing credit on any film they work on. From taking a script and putting it into pre-production shape, where they have to decide on new ways to deliver information in scenes to match projected budget requirements to working with the editor to re-arrange scenes in the edit to make unexpected holes in the narrative work (or to find ways to cut down on running time), directors are, most of the time, the driving force for those decisions. They may not put pen to paper, but telling the writer, "You need to write a scene that does x, y, and z," is like having a story credit, at a minimum.

This is why a great filmmaker can have consistently good output and bad filmmakers can have consistently bad output. It's the source of the idea of auteur theory, stemming back to the article in Cahiers du Cinema that blamed, actually, a pair of writers (Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost) for consistent bad work on adaptations and blaming the weak directors (that Truffaut, in the article, called mere scenarists) for not fixing. When Aurenche and Bost worked for filmmakers like Cocteau, the problems didn't appear, but when they worked with less strong filmmakers, they did. Cocteau, a strong filmmaker, made films his own.

I think Schumacher saw himself as a strong director. He started as a writer/director, writing every film he directed from 1974 to 1985 (except for The Incredible Shrinking Woman in 1981), including his early financial successes like St. Elmo's Fire. He got swallowed up in the studio machine for more than a decade, having no writing credits until 1999 and his personal project Flawless. I think he saw himself as a writer-director through his entire career, even when he wasn't getting writing credits, and he exerted his stamp as far as he could on what projects he could. If he was working for John Grisham (who produced all of his own literary adaptations to film), Schumacher's choices feel really limited. If he's working with Andrew Kevin Walker (who also wrote David Fincher's Se7en), Schumacher tends to take over (Walker later complained that Schumacher heavily rewrote the script, even though Schumacher doesn't have a writing credit).

It's actually really rare when a writer has real power on a film set. Frank Miller tried to make it in Hollywood as a writer in the 80s, and he watched as Irvin Kirschner tore out pages of the script on the set of Robocop 2 laughing that they were never going to film them. The director, being part of the production from scripting through editing, on the project almost every single day, has power that only a producer can match, and if the director wants to exert that power, there's very little that's going to stop him. So, when I hear stories about how Schumacher rewrote 8MM from the writer's mouth, combined with evidence of his own struggles with writing on the films he actually is credited as having written (D.C. Cab is...not good), and I think Schumacher exerted that power whenever he could. And since I don't like most of the films and still have issues with the films I do like, well...*points to Schumacher*.

Ensembles


The earliest efforts on Schumacher's part are actually quite distinctive in a way I would have never predicted. The combination of Amateur Night at the Dixie Bar and Grill (a small TV movie that's darn near impossible to find, but which I did find), D.C. Cab, and St. Elmo's Fire show a very strong and undeniable Robert Altman influence. It's Nashville, in particular, (with a healthy dose of Short Cuts) that seems to drive his writing efforts early. But, it's important to understand how Altman accomplishes his expansive looks at Americana in Los Angeles and Nashville, Tennessee: he used a very long editing process to cut down the large amount of improvisation to come to a conclusion. Schumacher tried to write it out.

And he generally just wasn't that good at it. His characters tended to be very thin, like sketches for actors to figure out on their own during shooting but never given the time to discover any depths. The situations are often ridiculous and unbelievable. The characters are often extremely unlikeable. Combine it all, and I just get frustrated with most of his early output because it never feels well-written. The best of them, ironically in my opinion, is the impossible to find Amateur Night at the Dixie Bar and Grill. It still doesn't quite work, leaving subplots hanging that were probably cut short purely due to time.

I was actually kind of surprised that this direction of Schumacher's career, including his own writing, came to an abrupt halt with St. Elmo's Fire. Sure, it was received badly at the time, especially critically, but it made good money and helped cement the idea of the Brat Pack in the 80s. And yet, after, that, he essentially just became a studio director, starting with The Lost Boys, one of his most enduring films, and decidedly not an ensemble effort trying to recreate Robert Altman for Gen-X.

Studio Man


What voice Schumacher had in the beginning of his career was largely lost for the next decade-plus of his output. This is when it's obvious that producers were putting up guardrails around his work to keep him from doing too much. They could only do so much because of the limits of producer power on a live film set they're not on, but it's obvious that he could only rewrite scripts so much and only mess with so much in editing, leaving his curious decisions to how he filmed things. The big example I lean on is the way he films the ending of Falling Down which has an action-y feel when it should feel more thriller-esque and filled with tension.

This is, ironically, the era that defines him. From The Lost Boys to Flatliners to Falling Down to the Grisham adaptations to his two entries in the Batman franchise (Forever and Batman & Robin), these are the movies he's known best for (for good or ill). And this is where he's largely the most competent. He's put in the tightest boxes by producers and strong scripts, and he only has so much freedom. He's relegates to director on set, it seemed, as much as the system allowed. Not that I love everything here, but this is where I find his work to be the most even and basically competently built. He's only rewriting, not writing, and he's working with, generally, better writers than himself.

And despite any potential opinions about any of these movies, Schumacher went from modest box office success to modest box office success until he was given command of the Batman franchise. Are these films purely him? It's hard to argue that his influence isn't all over them, but it's also obvious that he was following directives from the studio to make the films lighter in tone, brighter in color, and more easily sold as toys (Schumacher outright admitted that last one in a retrospective on Batman & Robin), the surprisingly harsh negative reaction to his second Batman movie (it actually made a halfway decent amount of money and was probably in the black when including home video sales, the late 90s being the pinnacle of that revenue stream) obviously hit him back, and he tried a different tact.

Oscar Bait


Yes, Joel Schumacher went through an Oscar bait period. It's four movies out of six from 1999 to 2004 (it could be five if you think Phone Booth was designed to get Colin Farrel and Oscar nomination, which it didn't). Those four are his personal project Flawless, the Vietnam era Tigerland, the real life story about the murdered journalist Veronica Guerin, and the big budget musical spectacle The Phantom of the Opera (trying to ride the wave created by Moulin Rouge! and Chicago).

None of these films are good. When looked at from the perspective of Schumacher's career, I actually find them embarrassing. They're so obviously desperate attempts at respect from his peers in the industry, and none of them work (the best of them is Veronica Guerin which, again, I think would have been better made by someone else). They're filled with either his own problems in storytelling (the thin narrative and characters of Flawless) or inherited (The Phantom of the Opera's basic issues with being spectacle rather than story). They're all so nakedly trying to chase particular trends in Oscar filmmaking like Vietnam movies (Tigerland) or movies with strong central performances about a real person (Veronica Guerin). It's hard to tell what Schumacher wanted out of his career from an artistic point of view, but in this era it's really difficult. He seems to have been choosing his projects with some freedom, and they're majorly just these desperate attempts at being taken seriously by his peers. It's like a cry out that he's more than the guy who put nipples on the Batsuit, he's an artist.

And his peers didn't care. A couple of the films got some Oscar nominations (Blanchett got nominated for her starring role in Guerin and there were a handful of technical noms for Opera), but Schumacher was left behind every time. Was it because they didn't like him or just his movies? I dunno, but ultimately this period feels wasted, an effort to achieve artistic recognition but ultimately feeling derivative and desperate.

The Fading Away


Schumacher ended his attempt at Oscars with The Phantom of the Opera, well reviewed and making decent money, and returned to the kind of film he was more generally known for: visually distinctive thrillers in The Number 23. However, Schumacher's lack of learning about screenwriting dogged him more and more in these final years, creating films that were decreasingly able to find audiences despite decent budgets. Critically, his best days were behind him, and he put out a series of films (Blood Creek, Twelve, and Trespass) with decreasing results until he could no longer fund a film again.

His final directed work was on the Netflix show House of Cards, directing a couple of episodes (I still haven't watched the show ever) before his death in 2020.

And all we're left with are his movies. An incredible mixed bag of solid filmmaking on the one hand and car crashes of terrible decisions on the other. I've been through mixed bags of filmographies in the past, and the one this reminded me most of was Wes Craven's. Craven also felt like he never had a great idea of why one movie worked or another didn't (the dual examples of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Shocker are the cornerstone of my argument regarding Craven there), but he still managed a strong career that spanned decades. Craven developed a stronger personal following (working in horror tends to do that), but he's also got highs that aren't that high and lows that are very, very low while being recognizable in name to the casual film fan.

Ultimately, I was just frustrated with Schumacher. I wanted him to stop rewriting good scripts. I wanted him to recognize and focus on his actual skill set. I wanted him to...make better movies. The good ones are good, but I wanted them to be great.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera

The Last Showgirl

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Phone Booth (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's small, it's tight, it's entertaining. It's his best movie in nearly a decade." [Library]

Veronica Guerin (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "But, it's fine. Blanchett is the focus, and she does it well. It's fine." [Library]

The Phantom of the Opera (Rating 2/4) Full Review "Everything's too thin, but the thing looks great, sounds pretty good, and never quite bored me. That's something, I guess." [Library]

The Number 23 (Rating 1.5/4) Full Review "But, I was mostly kind of just bored instead of miserable." [Library]

Le Corbeau (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "Anyway, the film is a tense treat of suspense and mystery. It works really well. It's something of a treat worthy of discovery." [Personal Collection]

Manon (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's not the top of the stack of his filmography. It's kind of an unusual entry. But it's a solid piece of melodrama." [Library]

The Wages of Fear (Rating 4/4) Full Review "It's a great entertainment that pushes the audience almost as far as it pushes its characters." [Personal Collection]

Les Diaboliques (Rating 4/4) Full Review "It's claustrophobic, character driven, twisty-turny, and fun. It's a delightful bout of suspense, and it keeps working decades after its release." [Personal Collection]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 2/1, and it will be about the directed works of Henri-Georges Clouzot.