Joel Schumacher's Fire: How The Batman Director Shaped The Past And Present Of MTV

By Aaron Cooley


As soon as director Joel Schumacher died at the age of 80 last week, the lion’s share of the media attention focused on his iconic four-decade filmography, from St. Elmo’s Fire and The Lost Males in the 1980s, to two John Grisham adaptations and two Batmans in the ’90s, to Phone Booth and Phantom of the Opera in this century. And needless to say, his resumé includes his own personalized stamp on the music video era of early MTV, with videos for INXS, Seal, U2, and Bush.


Although left largely anonymous — just the way he wanted it — was the work he actually thought the most crucial of his life. This was work he also did for MTV, and he did it all for free.


Any time Whenever I began working for Joel as his assistant in 2002, there was no better perk of the job than traveling to New York at his side. Joel grew up in the city, and the bustling energy of Manhattan was very much his lifeblood. Spending most of the year drowning in the claustrophobia of Los Angeles vehicle culture, Joel thirsted for periodic injections of New York like drinking water, and that meant walking its avenues, being a real New Yorker again. We made most of our trips there to work for MTV, so Joel’s best possibilities to hit the streets were lengthy walks from his hotel in SoHo up to the company’s Times Square offices, with not a block spent in a taxi or underground. On a warm day, he’d even do it in flip flops.


A slender, 6’3” figure, he had once dabbled in amateur modeling. Right now topped with flowing silver locks and clad with his own sense of unassailable high style, Joel commanded every room like a movie star. This was never truer than any time we would stop by MTV, where legions of young, aspiring artists and filmmakers clamored to hear him hold court. Judy McGrath, former CEO of MTV Networks, still recalls, “the clusters of MTV staff gathering around Joel to hear him talk about creativity and taking chances and discovering talent and making your mark.”


Joel started working with the agency in 1998 once his friend Stephen Friedman (who would go on to be president of MTV and right now is an advisor to SYPartners and Chris McCarthy, head of Entertainment and Youth Brands, which includes MTV, at ViacomCBS) was suggested his first job there. Friedman was hired to prepare design a social impact department that would produce in-house campaigns around contemporary justice issues and movements to air across MTV, MTV2, VH1, and eventually, mtvU. Anyone who ever knew Joel felt an insatiable need to go to him as soon as faced with a huge decision in either career or romance — he was like the Delphic oracle of sex and Hollywood — so needless to say, as soon as Friedman was presented with this job allocate, he first bounced it off Joel. “Of course you have got to take it,” Friedman remembers Joel telling him. “Look at the scope and the possibility and the potential reach of this possibility. You’ve got to take it — and I’m going to help you.”


At first, Friedman thought Joel meant he would distribute him occasional filmmaking insights, however he soon realized Joel meant he would literally help him; he wanted to direct the spots for MTV himself. And for free.


Let’s take a step back. In 1998, Joel had just directed Batman & Robin, one of the highest-budget Hollywood photos of 1997. No matter what you think of that movie (the reconsideration the movie’s getting online is probably the most surprising side-effect of his death for me), Warner Bros. Had already asked him to direct another John Grisham adaptation (his second one, A Time to Kill, had been a surprise top 10 hit of ’96) and also his third Batman. He was unquestionably a A-List director. And here he was, volunteering to do free work for a cable network?


Arnold Schwarzenegger, Alicia Silverstone, Joel Schumacher, Chris O'Donnell, and George Clooney at the premiere of Batman & Robin.


Networking with with MTV suggested Joel something much more valuable than money: a possibility, maybe for the initial and only time in his already two-decade career, to do what he really wanted to do with film. He had gotten his biggest paycheck for Batman & Robin (rumor had it, the biggest ever for a director to that date), but left that set feeling like his only job was to sell toys. On a fateful beach stroll with his then-assistant Eli Richbourg, Joel would determine to leave big budgets, private jets, Batman, and Grisham in back of to go indie and dark, ushering in the third act of his career, which would bring, if not his most popular, his most unique and original work, in movies like 8MM and Tigerland. Joel had realized he wanted to do more with his talents — and like these more personalized films, MTV gave him a possibility to do a lot more. “The idea that MTV would create an entire department to harness the power of storytelling to change lives,” Friedman describes. “He loved everything about that.”


As a gentleman who routinely knew he would never have children of his own, one of Joel’s passions was being a surrogate parent and mentor to dozens of young people, the most well known of which have been well-documented since his passing: the Sutherlands, the Farrells, the McConaugheys of the world. The Julias, the Sandys. Mentees of Schumacher have gone on to run studios, win Emmys and Oscars as producers, edit major magazines, and even direct and write their own movies and series. One is even a vice president at MTV.


In 1998, MTV offered Joel the possibility to create this sort of indelible mark on a whole generation. This began with those “clusters” of MTV staff that gravitated to Joel as a fount of entertainment industry knowledge. “If you’ve ever hung out at MTV,” Friedman says, “you realize it’s a lot of young people.” Although it was with MTV’s vast and diverse audience that Joel had the possibility to impact the most lives.


after Friedman took job because the head of the new social impact division, Joel would send him an episode of Ira Glass’s iconic NPR show This American Life. Rattling out of Friedman’s speakers came the voice of Lucia Lopez, a 16-year-old who'd recently appeared as herself in an ensemble theater piece describing the traumatic experience of watching her brother’s best friend get shot and killed on the streets of Chicago. Joel envisioned building an anti-violence PSA campaign around Lucia’s story.





The idea matched up properly with what Stephen was already reading in surveys with young viewers compiled by MTV’s studies department: Young people were worried about violence, a sentiment that rings painfully true to this day. “Our statistics department was constantly doing deep dives into our audience,” Friedman explains, “and listening to what was bothering them.” Within days of Joel’s first spot featuring Lucia debuting on the networks of MTV, a young man named Matthew Shepard was beaten and tortured to death in Wyoming for the crime of being gay. Six months later, two men shot up their high school in Columbine, Colorado, in what is currently believed the opening modern school shooting. The timing of MTV’s Fight For Your Rights: Take a Stand Against Violence campaign which prominently featured the Lucia Lopez PSA, was eerily prescient, struck a deep chord with MTV’s audience, and won a network — which had been imagined by several at the time as nothing more than rot for teenagers’ brains — a coveted Governor’s Award, maybe the most prestigious award given out at the Emmys.


On his next trip to New York, Joel was taken to dinner by Friedman and his bosses, Judy McGrath and Van Toffler (former head of the Music and Logo order at ViacomCBS and right now CEO of Gunpowder and Sky), to thank him for his generous contribution to MTV. Joel’s response? “Don’t thank me. Let me do more.”


Over the next 16 years, Joel would create and produce spots for campaign right after campaign on a nearly annual basis, a number of of which went on to win numerous Emmy and Peabody Awards. Catalog the themes of Joel’s MTV work and also you have top list that still seems ripped right from the struggles of today: from LGBTQ+ sexual health to voting rights, from online bullying to depression and suicide. “Joel used his superpowers for good,” McGrath says, especially “his ability to tease out their stories, stories few others knew or wanted to hear, so we may blast them out across MTV like a beacon to a kid alone in a bedroom in Iowa.”


As a fan with a front-row seat, what I imagine the period of peak MTV-Schumacher teamwork might have come once Friedman was tasked with beginning the new channel mtvU. He immediately realized that bringing Joel over was a must. He involved the director in the creation of a mental health campaign called Half of Us in which celebrities from the Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan to Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz spoke openly and honestly about their struggles with mental health. Today, it’s a ubiquitous topic, nevertheless in 2008, there was still a stigma attached to starting up about depression, even for celebrities under the scrutiny of the public eye.


Joel Schumacher photographed in 1993 while promoting Falling Down.


“I had the pleasure of networking with with Joel” on Half of Us, recalls Mary J. Blige, “and he was a genius.” Over a decade soon after watching Joel shoot this series, hers is the episode that still sticks with me the most, a searing confession to being a victim of sexual abuse and contemplating taking her own life even at the height of her fame. Joel conducted all celebrity interviews himself. “To this day, I marvel at how Joel conjured up a safe environment for people to share things they had never mentioned out loud before,” reflects Amy Campbell, a senior vice president of creative and production at MTV who oversaw all of Joel’s shoots on set. Stephen Friedman right now teaches “The Art of Creating Social Impact Campaigns” at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, and the Half of Us campaign is included in his syllabus. The initiative would go on to win the Oscar of pro-social media, the Peabody.


Through all of this work, Schumacher not only resisted to be paid, he didn’t want any recognition at all. (He’d probably fire me just for writing this article.) “I once gave him a Emmy we had won for one of the campaigns he helped to produce,” Friedman says with a laugh, “and while he walked out, he left it in my frigging office.”


Watching Joel create social impact content for MTV was any time While I saw him at his best: guerilla filmmaking methods with little financial range. Bringing people’s truths out of the cores of their souls. Helping young people. I created seven movies with Joel, and never saw him as passionately invested in his work as he was on those MTV campaigns. If the youngest generation of Residents of the
U.S. Has been teaching us older fogeys something throughout the pandemic, I think it’s that the time for charity donations and social media platitudes is over; we all need to be throwing our complete passion and energy and talents and much of our time into hitting the streets to create change in this country.


Joel already knew this. Any time once he wrapped a movie, Joel could’ve flown first class to some private island, nevertheless as a substitute, would travel house to New York to throw himself into another campaign.


Like several Residents of the United States, one of the opening things I'll do any time we're all healthy again is to return to New York, to walk its streets bustling with people who don’t have to concern themselves with social distancing. I think I’ll honor Joel by walking from SoHo up to Times Square — nevertheless I won’t be doing it in flip flops. Only he might do that.


Aaron Cooley is a former assistant and development executive for Joel Schumacher, who right now is writing and executive producing First Ladies for Showtime.