Yahoo Finance Halston's Joel Schumacher – what really happened
Halston spoilers follow.
You'd be forgiven for feeling somewhat confused during the second episode of Halston. The Netflix series, which charts the tumultuous life and career of the eponymous US fashion designer, was a man down.
Joel Schumacher is Halston's "junior partner" in the drama and is presented as the brain behind his seminal tie-dye collection.
Schumacher disappeared after just one episode. The last words Halston said to him were, "Now get your f**king shit together" after he had once again caught Joel using drugs in the toilet following a previous rebuke. And then *pfff* he's gone and we never see him again.
The real-life Joel Schumacher's substance abuse has been well-documented.
"I started drinking at 9," he told The Guardian. "I started doing drugs in my early teens. I started smoking at 10 and I started sex at 11."
Liquid methedrine was his substance of choice between 1965 and 1970: "I would sometimes do nine [acid] trips in a weekend."
But by the early 1970s, Schumacher had stopped using.
Chatting to The Hollywood Reporter in 2019, Schumacher said that he met Halston when the designer was working his magic on hats at uber-luxe department store Bergdorf Goodman:
"I was on scholarship at Parsons in interior design [which he graduated from with honours. Before that he studied briefly at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Schumacher also worked as a window dresser for Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor, Macy's and Henri Bendel].
"And I ran into a friend on the beach and he asked me if I wanted to come over to meet his boyfriend who was sharing a house with Halston. I knew who he was – everybody knew who he was. And we were friends from then on."
At the beginning of Halston's fashion journey, there were just four people involved, according to Schumacher: a woman called Frances Stein, who had worked at Glamour, another woman called Joanne Creveling, who handled "the accounting, the business, the PR, the advertising", and then there were Schumacher and Halston himself.
He added: "But I really don't think that Halston needed us at all. It was his vision and of course it was an overnight success."
Schumacher eventually changed tack – he told The Guardian that he "hated" fashion – and set his sights on the glitz and glamour of Hollywood. He arrived in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, but remained in touch with the Halston, who assisted him with his own creative endeavours.
"We always stayed connected," he added. "I was doing costumes for $200 a week and dreaming of being a director. Halston was enormously helpful. My first movie was Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays. There were affluent people in it who needed expensive clothes. Halston sent me samples and did that for three of the movies I did costumes on... he was a very generous person to his friends and very loyal... He was one of the most loving, kindest friends I've ever had."
Schumacher also served as a costume designer on thriller The Last of Sheila and Woody Allen's Sleeper.
After writing the screenplays for Car Wash and The Wiz, he moved on to directing. His CV includes St Elmo's Fire, The Lost Boys, Falling Down, Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, The Phantom of the Opera (2004), and The Number 23, among others. He also directed a couple of episodes of Netflix's House of Cards.
Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas, was nominated for the Palme d'Or at Canne, and 8mm (Nicolas Cage, Joaquin Phoenix and James Gandolfini, among others) was nominated for the top prize at the Berlinale.
Schumacher also won the award for Distinguished Collaborator at the Costume Designers Guild Awards in 2011.
In a curious twist of fate, he also directed an action-drama called Twelve in which Rory Culkin, who played him in Halston, starred alongside Chace Crawford.
In his interview with Vulture, Schumacher was asked about the fact that most of his work didn't soar critically but still attracted the masses, to which he said: "My success annoyed a lot of people always. Maybe they thought I didn't deserve it.
"If you want to make movies just for the critics, they will f**k you anyway."
Batman & Robin, in particular, ignited heated discussion and emotion among fans and critics (its Tomatometer reading sits at 12%).
"Look, I apologise," Schumacher told Vice. "I want to apologise to every fan that was disappointed because I think I owe them that."
He explained why he had never really been sold on making the film in the first place: "I just knew not to do a sequel. If you get lucky, walk away. But everybody at Warner Brothers just expected me to do one. Maybe it was some hubris on my part.
"I never planned on being, that dreadful quote, 'a blockbuster king' because my other films were much smaller and had just found success with the audience and not often with the critics, which is really why we wrote them. And then after Batman & Robin, I was scum. It was like I had murdered a baby."
He went on to say that ultimately, "a lot of it" was his choice, adding: "No one is responsible for my mistakes but me."
Schumacher died in June 2020 at the age of 80 after living with cancer for a year or so, according to Bebe Lerner, a spokesperson for his family.
He was living in Greenwich Village, New York at the time.
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