Joel Schumacher, the legendary director behind classic films including “The Lost Boys,” “St. Elmo’s Fire” and “Batman Forever,” has died at age 80, according to several reports.
Schumacher died Monday after a year of living with cancer, according to Variety. The New York native began his career as a costume designer. He cultivated that eye for on-screen looks into vision for entire film productions, with most of his prominent years of filmmaking taking place in the 1980s and 1990s, including films such as “Cousins,” “Dying Young” and “A Time to Kill.”
It would be his taking the helm of two Batman films, “Batman Forever,” starring Val Kilmer, and “Batman and Robin,” with George Clooney leading the cast, that would result in Schumacher’s greatest financial success in filmmaking. The films grossed more than $600 million worldwide combined.
With the franchise, Schumacher, who was openly gay, sparked controversy by adding homoerotic elements to the crime-fighting duo Batman and Robin, according to Variety. In 2006, Clooney told Barbara Walters in an interview that he played Batman as a gay man.
His career surpassed the controversy surrounding the “Batman” films, with Schumacher directing thrillers and crime films like “Flawless,” starring Robert DeNiro and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, and 2002’s “Phone Booth,” with Colin Farrell and Kiefer Sutherland.
His extensive career started with costume designing credits on “Sparkle” and “Blume in Love” in the 1970s. He studied fashion at New York’s Parsons the New School for Design and the Fashion of Institute of Technology and later earned an MFA from UCLA.
In a 2017 interview with Vice, Schumacher talked about his regrets in some of his decisions in making the critically panned "Batman" movies and what made him want to make films.
"I remember starting as a 200 dollar-a-week costume designer before wanting to be a director. I was there thinking, why did I want to do this? It was because I grew up behind a movie theater when I was a kid, before television. I loved movies and wanted to tell those stories."
Fans and colleagues paid tribute to Schumacher Monday.
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