Batman Forever and The Lost Boys director Joel Schumacher died on Monday, June 22, at the age of eighty after a yearlong battle with cancer. In an industry where branding is sacrosanct, his brand, as it were, was his steadfast refusal to be artistically pigeonholed: Hit-and-miss though his track record may be, he was a rare breed of filmmaker who worked in virtually every genre, from comedy (D.C. Cab; Bad Company) to drama (Cousins; Dying Young) to sci-fi/horror (Flatliners; Blood Creek) to crime thriller (Falling Down, 8mm) to legal thriller (The Client, A Time to Kill) to musical (The Phantom of the Opera). His filmography is as winding and unconventional as was his path to commercial success:
Schumacher was born in New York City in 1939 and studied design at Parsons and the Fashion Institute of Technology. . . .
When Schumacher eventually left fashion for Hollywood, he put his original trade to good use, designing costumes for various films throughout the Seventies. . . . He also started writing screenplays during this time, including the hit 1976 comedy Car Wash and the 1978 adaptation of the musical The Wiz.
In 1981, Schumacher made his directorial debut with, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, a sci-fi comedy twist on Richard Matheson’s 1959 novel, The Shrinking Man, starring Lily Tomlin. Fitting the pattern that would define his career, the film was a financial success but a flop with critics. . . .
Schumacher’s true breakout came a few years later in 1985, when he wrote and directed St. Elmo’s Fire, the classic post-grad flick with the Brat Pack cast, including Rob Lowe, Demi Moore and Judd Nelson. Two years later, he wrote and directed The Lost Boys, a film about a group of teen vampires that marked the first film to star both Corey Feldman and Corey Haim, effectively launching the heartthrob duo known as “the Coreys.”
Jon Blistein, “Joel Schumacher, Director of ‘Batman & Robin,’ ‘St. Elmo’s Fire,’ Dead at 80,” Rolling Stone, June 22, 2020
Though Schumacher did not write The Lost Boys (1987) as the Rolling Stone piece erroneously asserts (the screenplay is credited to Janice Fischer & James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam), neither his creative imprint on the project nor the cultural impact of the movie itself can in any way be overstated. Sure, teenage vampires may be a dime-a-dozen cottage industry now, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Twilight to The Vampire Diaries, but if you happened to grow up on any of those Millennial staples, it’s worth knowing that pubescent bloodsuckers had never really been done prior to The Lost Boys—no, that celebrated iteration of the vampire’s pop-cultural evolution is entirely owed to the pioneering vision of Joel Schumacher.
When Richard Donner left the project to direct Lethal Weapon instead, the script Schumacher inherited was essentially “The Goonies… with vampires.” By aging up the characters from preteens to hormonal adolescents, Schumacher saw a creative opportunity to do something scarier—and sexier. A cult classic was thusly born, and though The Lost Boys itself never became a franchise (save a pair of direct-to-video sequels two decades later, and the less said about them, the better), its fingerprints are all over the subgenre it begat. We owe Schumacher a cultural debt for that.
And I owe him a personal debt. Over any other formative influence, The Lost Boys is directly and demonstrably responsible for my decision to study filmmaking in college and then to pursue a screenwriting career in Hollywood. More than simply my professional trajectory, in point of fact, my very creative sensibilities were indelibly forged by that film: The untold scripts and novels I’ve written over the past quarter century have almost exclusively been tales of the supernatural with a strong sense of both humor and setting—the very qualities The Lost Boys embodies so masterfully and memorably. All of that can be traced to the summer of 1994.
BATMAN EPHEMERAL
First, a quick detour to the summer of ’95, when Schumacher put his stamp on another of my impressionable imagination’s muses: Batman. By utter cosmic coincidence, I revisited Batman Forever for the first time in ages—certainly well before I began writing critically about comic-book culture—a mere three days prior to Schumacher’s death, so he’d been very much on my mind that weekend. Though his one-two cinematic contribution to the Bat-mythos, Batman Forever (1995) and Batman & Robin (1997), is mostly derided as an unfortunately goofy and mercifully brief neon-and-rubber-nipple fever dream that nearly “killed the franchise” (as if Hollywood would ever let a profitable IP die), I had a very different reaction to Forever on its twenty-fifth anniversary: I think in some respects it just may be the best—certainly the purest—of all the Batman movies ever produced.
More fundamentally than Tim Burton’s Gothic noir, Christopher Nolan’s surveillance-state mythopoeia, Zack Snyder’s grimdark nihilism, or Batman & Robin’s shamelessly toyetic camp, Forever captures the intended spirit of the comics upon which it is based: It is truly a Saturday-morning cartoon writ large, with just enough pop-psychology—its well-integrated motif of duality—to give it sufficient emotional resonance without overburdening the narrative with undue subtextual nuance or complexity. It makes no attempt to explain how technological wonders such as the Batmobile or Batcave were built the way Nolan’s films do—because only neurotically literal adults need that explained; preadolescent children intuitively understand stories abide by different rules from reality—and it skirts the edge of campiness without descending into an unrestrained orgy of kitsch à la Schumacher’s own follow-up effort, Batman & Robin.
I am in no way arguing it is a remarkable or even ambitious piece of cinematic storytelling the way, say, The Dark Knight (2008) is, but of all the modern Batman films, Forever—like the Adam West series of the 1960s—understands the intrinsically silly nature of the source material as well as its intended audience (guileless ten-year-old boys), and respects that enough to strike a felicitous balance between comic-book spectacle for the kiddies and wry humor for their parents. Whereas the self-serious MCU and “Arrowverse” cater to lifelong superfans to the exclusion of everyone else, and R-rated offerings like Logan and Deadpool and the “ultimate edition” of Batman v Superman are the ultimate fuck you from manchildren to actual children, Batman Forever invites one and all to enjoy its pop-operatic pleasures on their own level.
Schumacher rightly recognized superhero fantasies as juvenile exercises in bright colors, big action, and larger-than-life characters who defy rational explanation. Neither Burton nor Nolan, for example, could justify the inclusion of Robin in their interpretations because he wasn’t “realistic” (as though Batman himself were); Schumacher didn’t view that inherent quixotism as a flaw of the source material but rather a virtue—even the very point of it. He made a grand-scale Batman and Robin adventure work as a live-action blockbuster—one meant not for fanboys, just boys. If any of the Batman movies should earn a permanent place in the cultural canon—and whether they ought to is an altogether different debate—my vote, seconding the motion intimated by the film’s own title, goes to Batman Forever.
LOST IN THE SHADOWS
In November of 1993, I was a high-school senior afflicted by what I now recognize as an undiagnosed clinical depression. Wandering a comic convention at the Hotel Pennsylvania in Midtown Manhattan, I came across a bin full of movie screenplays for sale: inch-thick reams of white paper bound between cardstock covers with brass brads. I’d never even seen a screenplay before; I had no idea what they looked like, inside or out. Flipping through the offerings, I found one titled LOST BOYS II. I asked the vendor what this curio was all about: It was a script for an unproduced sequel—to one of my favorite movies, as it happens. This was an unimaginable find in the pre-Internet era—a lost pop-cultural treasure I’d inadvertently happened upon.
Though the script contained no title page—no authorship attribution or draft date—it appears by all evidence to be an authentically studio-commissioned screenplay, probably written by Jeffrey Boam in the late eighties or perhaps 1990; it’s polished, professional, and follows the formula of the first film to a T. It’s one of those “same-plot sequels” so common during that period—think Die Hard 2, Home Alone 2—in which this time it’s a teenage girl and her preadolescent sister who’ve recently moved to Santa Carla, the latter of whom soon enlists the help of the two Coreys to rescue the former from the witching influence of the vampire gang under whose spell she’s fallen.
After I’d read it cover to cover, I lent it to my best friends (and fellow Lost Boys fanatics) Chip and Sean; when they returned to discuss it, I told them I had no interest in discussing it—I wanted to make it.
As fate would have it, the winter of 1994 was a particularly savage one, weather-wise, and we spent what seems like half of it home from school for an endless (and welcome) series of snow days; we devoted every moment of that ocean of time to rewriting the Lost Boys II script, which turned out to be a hands-on crash course in the discipline of storytelling and craft of screenwriting. The story’s structure and dialogue needed little retooling—as I said, the script had clearly been written by a pro—but there were certain set pieces we could in no way hope to pull off, like a slapstick routine at an upscale French restaurant (a prohibitive location given our means), and an action sequence in which a rollercoaster is yanked off its track into the night sky by the vampires.
When we reached one of those scenes, we asked ourselves (in so many words): What is the dramatic function and intent of this beat, and how do we preserve that while rewriting it as something we can actually shoot? Chip was—and remains to this day—one of the most well-read people I’ve ever known, and English lit was the only class at which I ever routinely excelled, and we found ourselves putting our osmotic narrative acumen to use as we rewrote the Lost Boys II script. (Sean lived in Lower Manhattan and joined us on weekends.)
We spent all day, every day doing this, often ordering pizza and Jamaican patties for lunch, only to have the exact same delivery guy drop off dinner six hours later. This project was happily consuming all my concentration; schoolwork was, at best, an afterthought at that point, and I was objectively better off for it: Reenergized, I was, day by day, emerging from the inertial depression of the previous two-plus years.
TALES FROM THE CRYPT
With the script taking shape and the branches outside our window budding ever greener, we turned our attention to matters I later learned are formally known as preproduction: storyboarding, location scouting, casting (we held sessions in Van Cortlandt Park), and scheduling (because we’d intended to spend the summer shooting our epic); through purely intuitive reasoning, we figured out the entire soup-to-nuts production process. Christ, if only we’d shown such initiative at school. One of our key aesthetic challenges was making the Bronx, New York, credibly resemble Santa Cruz, California: The Hudson River and New Jersey Palisades doubled for the towering bluffs along the Pacific, and we shot the cliffside steps that descend to the caved-in resort hotel–cum–vampire lair way the hell out on Long Island, where I knew from family vacations of a suitably rickety beach-access staircase that would fit the bill perfectly.
Probably the biggest location obstacle we faced was the vampire cave itself, which is prominently (if limitedly) featured in a few scenes in the original movie, and was called upon to serve as the setting for the entire third act of the proposed sequel. I recall thinking when I first read Lost Boys II how the story took an almost Temple of Doom turn, with its vampire-hunting heroes trekking from one subterranean chamber to the next, encountering all sorts of escalating hazards. It was the most exciting—and original—portion of the script, and there would be no “writing around it.” We needed a cave.
The Bronx community of Spuyten Duyvil is set on a hilltop at the confluence of the Harlem and Hudson Rivers (an astonishing aerial shot of the neighborhood is featured in the 2011 Tom Hanks film Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close), and in the 1960s and ‘70s, many of the turn-of-the-century dwellings that dotted its lofty perimeter were criminally demolished to make room for a rampart of luxury high-rises. One of these—a thirty-story monolithic monstrosity—stands on a steep slope overlooking John F. Kennedy High School (itself long said to be the inspiration for the 1984 Nick Nolte film Teachers); the building’s massive foundational pillars are housed within an enclosed subbasement accessible only by an exterior service door on the edifice’s backside, which itself is concealed behind layers of dense foliage on a winding uphill street with relatively infrequent foot traffic.
To even know about this cavernous understructure (and I suspect many of the building’s residents did not and do not), you’d have to have hiked from the sidewalk up a precipitous dirt incline, copsed with trees and littered with debris, and happened upon the access door, which, at that time, had rusted right off its hinges—a testament to just how long it had been since anyone had bothered to check on the subterrane. Fortunately, having spent our entire childhood exploring every facet of our hometown, from its streets to its rooftops to its fallout shelters, we were well aware of this secret hideaway when the question of where to shoot the vampire cave arose. With its banked earthen flooring, concrete support columns, discarded Pepsi cans and takeout containers strewn about, and three distinct sectional vaults (mirroring the high-rise’s triptych architectural arrangement), we couldn’t have asked for a better location…
All that was really required was a little atmospheric lighting, so we strategically positioned tiki torches around the substructure, figuring that would also serve as an added bit of production design; it seemed in character with the stoner-surfer mise-en-scène we aspired to evoke. We trekked “the company” up the hill one sweltering day in July to shoot the first scenes of the movie’s climax. We’d tried a few takes, but none of the actors could quite deliver their dialogue: To our puzzlement and frustration, they were wheezing and coughing, their bloodshot eyes tearing up… and so, we soon realized, were ours. Mercifully, before mass asphyxiation took hold, the group of us fled the smoke-choked subbasement. And when he was finally able to speak again, I remember Chip saying that, yeah, perhaps an open flame in an unventilated space wasn’t, upon reappraisal, the best idea. So much for our “perfect” location.
NEVER GROW OLD, NEVER DIE
That summer was filled with those kinds of filmmaking misadventures (including a trip to the emergency room for me), and as the days grew increasingly shorter, it became undeniably clear to us that our ambitious reach had exceeded our grasp. The movie never got finished, and precious little of the footage we did manage to shoot (on VHS-C, at that) even exists anymore. But finishing Lost Boys II, I realized many years later, was never the point of the enterprise.
The enduring movie that galvanized the project, Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys, is itself a story about summertime—about that vast gulf of free time between school years when young people are looking for camaraderie, for adventure, for meaning, and even for purpose, and how perilously easy it is to lose one’s way in that unstructured season of youth. It’s a teenage world whose orbit only occasionally intersects with that of the adult world, and when it does, the adolescents that inhabit it long to be taken seriously by parents and figures of authority, to have their interests and concerns and dreams treated with respect by those upon whom their welfare still depends.
Such is the place in which Chip, Sean, and I found ourselves during the summer of 1994, when we embarked on the grand adventure known as Lost Boys II. That autumn, I started college at the City University of New York, where I met the woman I would marry fourteen years later, and pursued a degree in film production. Within a few months of graduating in 1998, a spec script Chip and I cowrote—a tongue-in-cheek supernatural actioner about a coven of demonically possessed teenagers that had taken over an abandoned resort island off the California coast (any similarities to The Lost Boys were entirely coincidental)—scored us a Hollywood manager, and I moved out to Los Angeles only a few years later. The novel I’ve been writing under quarantine, in fact, is a horror-comedy that owes no minor creative debt to The Lost Boys.
Perhaps every story I write is, in a way, an attempt to “finish” Lost Boys II—to realize what was begun over a quarter century ago. To this very day, when I watch the sun go down on a sultry July evening, I’m immediately and involuntarily reminded of all the hours Chip, Sean, and I spent together in 1994 with the shared purpose of getting our movie made, how our imaginations were so inspired by the singular vision of the late Joel Schumacher. He didn’t merely appreciate the true nature of superheroes; he understood the secret heart of teenagers. His message spoke to me. My life was never quite the same.
What a great coming-of-age story, Sean, where you figured out who the adult Sean would be. Unlike so many, yours stuck, from HS to now. I’m sad that you’ve lost this voice from your past.
Thank you, Jacqui! Yes, 1994 is certainly a time in my life I look on with tremendous fondness — the last summer of adolescence, in many ways. As I said in the closer, this particular time of year (midsummer) invariably reminds me of those halcyon days, so it was fitting — if bittersweet — that I found myself writing about them now. I always figured I’d write about Lost Boys II someday — my screenwriting origin story! — but, aside from some brief allusions to the project elsewhere on this blog, I never felt compelled to fully chronicle it; there was never sufficient reason to do it before Schumacher’s death.
I’ve thought about those adventures a lot in the ensuing 26 years, but the process of writing about them here yielded yet further emotional insight into that time. That’s what I love about blogging: You think you know how you feel about something until you force yourself to sit down and write about it; in doing so, the author himself walks away with a much richer understanding of how a particular experience has shaped his thoughts, feelings, worldview, and/or work. That “The Lost Boys of the Bronx” resonated with you is icing on the cake!
You’re not the only one who did something like this
http://scriptshadow.net/screenplay-review-daniel-clowes-raiders-project/
Based on a true story, in the summer of 1982, three kids innocently attempt to recreate Raiders of the Lost Ark, a task that ultimately ends up taking them seven years
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BTW, I grew up in a suburb community that was barely older than I was. You’d think there was no magic, no mystery there. But there was
Every time some family moved away, by the next day that house was haunted. Never mind that we’d seen that house built a few years ago. Never mind that we’d been inside three days ago. We were scared to go near it. Then a new family would move in, and we’d forget that it had ever been haunted
A small copse of trees was a thick forest. You could get lost in there for days, weeks or forever, assuming you didn’t get eaten by bears or wolves. Unless you actually walked ten feet in any direction, and you’d be back on a suburb street. And closest animals we had to bears or wolves were raccoons and the family dog
Imagination can thrive almost anywhere
Yes, I’ve heard that story of the three Mississippi teenagers who produced a homemade shot-for-shot remake of Raiders over a seven-year period! There’s no question that the availability of camcorder technology in the 1980s — the iPhone camera of its day, I suppose — opened the door for an entire generation of would-be Spielbergs (myself included) to exercise their grand filmmaking ambitions. So many kids who grew up in that era later went on to do semiautobiographical television shows in which the young protagonist was an aspiring filmmaker (Kevin Williamson’s Dawson’s Creek, Adam F. Goldberg’s The Goldbergs). It was just a perfect confluence of timing, with home-video technology hitting the market during what was in many ways a Golden Age of blockbuster fantasy filmmaking; it really inspired the imagination of an entire generation. It’s only a shame Gen X is still remaking its childhood favorites (the Star Wars sequel trilogy, Halloween H40, Terminator: Dark Fate, Cobra Kai) instead of telling new stories, but…
To your second point, Dell: Yes, children can turn any mundane landscape — a basement, a construction site, a playground, a garage, a backyard — into a perilous jungle, or an alien world, or the Hall of Justice or the Batcave. At my grandmother’s house in Paramus, New Jersey, my cousin and I would sit in my father’s Plymouth Duster parked in the driveway, pretending it was the General Lee (the name of which now makes me cringe); we’d climb through the windows and slide into the front seat, and set off on an overland race across Hazzard County. I think in some respects the desire my friends and I had to shoot Lost Boys II was sort of the next phase of our imagination’s evolution — an attempt to try to put what was in our heads onto film (or, more accurately, videotape). I’m privileged, in one respect (cursed in another), that I never lost my childlike ability to imagine fictional worlds and scenarios — that I simply couldn’t conceive of a happier life than one in which a person traffics in his own daydreams. The Lost Boys II project opened that door for me.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so much fiction (particularly works of magical realism) about preadolescent adventure is set during the summertime, from The Lost Boys to Stranger Things 3 to Dan Simmons’ Summer of Night to Stephen King’s It (the chronologically earlier sections of the narrative) and The Body (Stand by Me). With all that time and (space in your brain) to fill, the season just lends itself to adventure, be it merely conjured or actually undertaken. Our imagination calcifies as we age, which in part explains all of the ideological tribalism and purity tests plaguing our democracy at present; we don’t allow ourselves to see new or at least different paths forward — we’re too busy protecting the ground we’ve gained (be it Confederate statues or capitalistic advantage) rather than exploring brave new frontiers. Such is the reason why Chip, Sean, and I had the adventurous imagination to discover that hidden subbasement, but no adults — including the people who lived in the building — ever knew or suspected it was there: We imagined a secret world hidden in those woods… and we discovered one! Hopefully the summer of 2020 is one of renewed imagination — of a renewed sense of the possible — for us all.
On that Scriptshadow page, a commenter named Tom mentions a documentary made of two of the kids (now adults) attempting to finish the movie 25 years after they ended the project (http://scriptshadow.net/screenplay-review-daniel-clowes-raiders-project/#comment-3900756372):
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You see all these clips of these inventive children fudging their way through the recreation of a Hollywood blockbuster. And then you see their adult selves raising funding to construct an elaborate set, rig it with pyrotechnics, and hire a full film crew.
(SPOILER ALERT: The pyrotechnics fail to fire as planned, and a crew member gets seriously injured. As boys, they escaped injury, but now people are actually getting hurt.)
There are also scenes of one of the guys having to beg his boss at his real job for more time off because the filming has been so delayed. He’s the primary income earner for his family, and now he’s close to getting fired so that he can complete his teenage movie (he may have actually been fired after the conclusion of the doc).
The documentary doesn’t explore this all, but I couldn’t help but watch these grown men try to create Raiders and think to myself that the magic is all gone. It was an amazing project for teenage boys, but these grown men didn’t have the wonder or imagination. For grown-ups to go through all this, it’s kind of sad. They needed to focus on their lives and becoming adults, and not try to recreate the glory days of their high school years. They had lost their childlike inventiveness and curiosity, but hadn’t yet discovered an adult’s maturity. These were man-children in limbo.
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BTW, are you familiar w/ Scriptshadow.net? Though meant primarily for movie and TV scripts, much of the advice is applicable to any form of fiction
Just to be clear, everything between the two dashes is quoted from Tom’s comment. I don’t know if I made that clear
Well, in that case, I would concur with Tom’s assessment! But I appreciate your bringing his comment into the conversation!
I’m not familiar with that documentary, but based on what you’ve described here, I would absolutely concur with your assessment: that what started as a glorious celebration of juvenile imagination devolved into a pitiable attempt to recapture the magic of youth. It was a moment in time, and now it’s gone. (Lest we forget the lesson of “Orpheus 3.3”: Don’t look back.) That was what compelled my own epiphany that finishing Lost Boys II had never actually been the point of starting it — that the undertaking was instead a sort of “Adolescent Passage” narrative (like American Graffiti or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or Can’t Hardly Wait) in which I came to terms, in a very healthy and constructive way, with the end of adolescence. It was the last hurrah for me — of endless carefree summer nights with my friends. Lost Boys II was my way of processing that — of transitioning from the misery of high school to the much happier world of college. That The Lost Boys itself is a story about upper-limits adolescents searching for action and meaning in that yawning season between schoolyears was the cosmic connective tissue that made this story worth telling — that made it kind of meaningful, even poetic.
I’m very familiar with ScriptShadow, on the other hand. I haven’t read any of his articles in years, though — for two main reasons. The first is that I never thought his site was particularly helpful. He would read scripts, pull examples of what he felt worked and what didn’t, and then sum up the lesson in a short What I Learned postscript. And while some of his observations were occasionally intriguing, he never really — as far as I know — developed a codified system of techniques; rather, it was all just a grab-bag of tips without any consideration for the context and genre in which they were used. It was more like, This worked, so try it in your script! (He also had an annoying writing habit of transitioning to new paragraphs with Honestly or To be honest or If I’m being honest or some variation, and it started to stick in my craw.)
The second reason I eschew his site is directly connected to the first reason. For whatever reason, his opinions (often on in-development screenplays, no less, a big no-no) held tremendous sway in Hollywood. I say “for whatever reason” because he was, as I recall, a former tennis instructor with zero industry experience! I suppose the reason for his influence was that he is — much like I’ve become on this blog — unapologetically opinionated, and he was speaking to an industry in which no one has an opinion until someone else does. Managers, agents, producers, and even writers pretty much refrain from expressing views on a given project in Hollywood until they’ve had a chance to take the town’s temperature on it: If something’s got “heat,” then it becomes safe to endorse. (As Steve Buscemi so concisely said in John Carpenter’s Hollywood send-up Escape from L.A.: “This town loves a winner.”)
Here’s why that was annoying: Carson would publish one of his What I Learned tidbits, and then I’d get a call from my managers first-thing on Monday morning saying, “You know what your script needs…?” (Like I hadn’t also read ScriptShadow that morning!) And I got so fuckin’ irritated that ScriptShadow’s stupid screenwriting tips were being foisted on me, without any consideration as to whether they even applied to what I was writing. (I also had terrible managers, but that’s a different saga.)
Furthermore, when Carson would express a strong opinion (good or bad) about a movie or franchise — something already produced and in the cultural consciousness, be it a relatively recent blockbuster or a classic — all of a sudden that was now everyone’s opinion in Hollywood. I’d be at cocktail parties with my management, or at dinner with my writers group, and somebody would invariably say something to the effect of, “Well, you know, the problem with The Fugitive is that it doesn’t have a third act…” (I don’t know that ScriptShadow ever said that, exactly, I’m just pulling an example out of my ass.) And again: They’d say that shit with complete confidence as if it were their own insight — and as if I hadn’t read the same fuckin’ post! And I just reached a point where I couldn’t stand the fact that Carson’s analysis of script X or take on movie Y had become the standard-bearer for the entire industry. And then once I got out of the business in 2015, I unsubscribed to all the industry trades and sites — it was both an exorcism and a form of PTSD management — and I frankly have no idea what ScriptShadow’s been doing since.
I’m not suggesting to anyone that they shouldn’t follow him, I’m just explaining why I don’t follow him: I thought his writing style was pedestrian and I hated how frustratingly influential his opinions were in Hollywood. (Perhaps that’s changed in the intervening years — I wouldn’t know.) And I was one of those timid screenwriters, too, who would always defer to the viewpoints of others because screenwriters by nature apologize for their existence with every breath they draw, and Hollywood is a town where buzz is the only benchmark of quality (one need only study the Oscars to know that). Getting out was the best thing I ever did, because I finally felt unmuzzled and unleashed — free to say what I think and to write what I want. I spent a lot of years trying to be a Hollywood insider, but I’ll give Carson this: Being an outsider is so much more fun.
> a former tennis instructor with zero industry experience
True. But I get the feeling that, unlike Jon Peters, he wants to learn
I agree he has a grab-bag approach. But, to be fair, his attitude is not so much “do this” as “if your script isn’t working, try this”
And I do like the idea of trying to learn at least one thing from everything you read, no matter how good or bad, though I admit it seems a bit forced sometimes
Also, he has contests and things that, whatever else they’re worth, they get people to write, not just daydream about writing. That alone is a good thing
As for managers, producers, etc, reading a post and telling you to put that in your script whether it fits or not, they use Blake Snyder’s stuff the same way. In fact, on Mythcreants they were recently talking about how a writer will gratuitously add a “save the cat” moment when it didn’t fit the structure. They didn’t mention, perhaps they didn’t know, that Snyder was all about structure. That if any of those writers had truly learned from Snyder instead of third- or fourth-hand, structure would not have been an issue
Maybe this happens-
Producer’s note: Your script’s good, but it needs more craft. In your next draft I want you to make a case for craft
Listen: God bless him, you know? He’s been very successful at what he does — I wish my blog had such a following! — and he at least takes a critical deep-dive into the screenplays he reads (whether one agrees with his takeaways or not), which is more than I can say for virtually any manager, agent, producer, or development exec I ever knew (and I knew a lot). He reads a given work carefully and comes away with a strong opinion on it; by stark contrast, producers and studio execs, etc., can barely be counted on to skim a single-page piece of coverage! I wonder if Carson realizes just how much sway he holds (held?) over Hollywood opinion? During the early 2010s, his impressions of a project were parroted by every screenwriter, producer, and manager in Hollywood (and passed off by each of them as an original thought). It’s not ScriptShadow I have a problem with, I guess, so much as it is this fickle industry.
The only thing I’ll say — with the stipulation that I haven’t visited ScriptShadow’s site in at least five years — is that there’s no spec marketplace anymore (the 2008 WGA strike was the death knell, and it’s been a downhill snowball roll from there), so encouraging people to write feature specs is misguided at best. There’s no such thing as a closed-ended two-hour feature anymore; now we have multimedia franchises — “I.P.-driven creativity and expanded-universe cinema,” as critic A.O. Scott recently said.
Furthermore, all the IPs that fuel those mega-franchises are based on preexisting properties. So, the days of writing a spec like Back to the Future or Lethal Weapon or The Lost Boys (all of which were written and sold on spec) and seeing it turned into not only a movie but a franchise are gone — and they’re never coming back. (I personally don’t believe theatrical exhibition is going to survive the pandemic.) It’s a different ballgame now — one in which no one really understands the rules. The only certainty is that Hollywood now is all about open-ended multimedia initiatives, and those are virtually impossible to get a foothold in unless you’re fortunate enough to fall under the wing of, say, a J. J. Abrams (note the way his protégés produce more or less all Hollywood content nowadays). I don’t know how one breaks into Hollywood anymore — and I came closer than most who try ever do — but the one thing I can tell you with absolute certainty is that writing feature specs ain’t it.
If someone has an idea for a spec, I encourage them to write it as a novel. Or if you really want to be a filmmaker, go produce a short — like my friend Adam Aresty’s Laws of the Universe — and put it up on YouTube and see if you can’t get traction like that. But writing specs is a waste of your time — period. No one wants them and no one reads them.
A loss despite his long life. What an eclectic resume of many memorable films! Thanks for sharing your memories of growing up with his work, Sean, and your “Lost Boys II” is a wonderful tribute to his talent and influence. Happy Fourth, my friend.
Is life ever long enough, you know? Schumacher was blessed to spend his time here on earth expressing himself artistically, and certainly many of the films he made have assured, in their way, his immortality. I’m certain there have been tributes written that more directly address his life/career itself, and/or take a more comprehensive look at his filmography, but I thought the best tribute I could pay him was to focus on The Lost Boys and talk about its influence on me. It’s certainly been a sad year for me personally, with the loss of so many artists I admired, from Schumacher to Neil Peart to Batman writer/editor Dennis O’Neil, whose “From the Den” columns in the lettercols of Batman and Detective Comics made me want to be an essayist.
Hope you had a Happy Fourth, Diana, and that this strange summer nonetheless brings you both great adventure and creative prosperity.
Second try for the comment! I loved Lost Boys so much–it was like the undead “Outsiders” and Kiefer Sutherland was so good in it. Your story about the sequel was excellent and made me pine for lost opportunities–when I was doing my film degree, the dean of the faculty told me not to bother taking any practical courses, just the theoretical, because I was a girl. Stupidly, I acquiesced. It wasn’t until years later that I was supervising my high school’s AV Club and got the chance to co-direct with one of my female students. Our short, “The Carolers” did very well at the regional “Charlie Awards”. I hope she went on to bigger things. I still have a copy of VHS–I found it the other day and thought I’d see how to get it digitized. Have you thought about turning the story of how you made the Lost Boys 2 into a novella? It would be amazing!
Thank you, Suzanne, for your perseverance! So sorry about your original note getting lost in the WordPress ether! As I mentioned on your blog, I updated my SSL certificate yesterday morning, which may or may not have prompted the gremlin that ate your first response! Who knows?
Sutherland has said he fields more fan questions about The Lost Boys than any other project, including Stand by Me, A Few Good Men, and 24. It was just one of those movies that, if you were the right age when you saw it, really affected a generation. I know young fans of Buffy and The Vampire Diaries would look at it now and go, So what?, because it doesn’t have the expansive mythology of the former or the emo-romance of the latter, but I don’t think you have any of those series without The Lost Boys. (If I’m remembering correctly, Joss Whedon has said his script for the 1992 Buffy movie was inspired by The Lost Boys.) You’re absolutely right: Whereas the version of The Lost Boys Richard Donner developed to direct was “The Goonies… with vampires,” Schumacher’s was “The Outsiders… with vampires.” The tagline on the one-sheet read: “Sleep all day. Party all night. It’s fun to be a vampire.” I mean, if that wasn’t a teenager’s fantasy life, I don’t know what was!
The early days of this blog were heavily craft-centric, before I found a way to integrate personal anecdotes with storytelling insights, and part of what I was trying to do in essays like “The Case for Craft” was to say that film theory is interesting and often fun, but it doesn’t really teach you anything practical about cinematic storytelling. No, the way you learn is by studying codified principles and techniques, and by doing. If I were to teach a Storytelling 101 course, I would make sure my students had a rudimentary grasp of mythic structure, genre, and characterization, and from there I would just have them write scripts and produce shorts and learn from experience. My first film school was really the Lost Boys II undertaking — that’s where I learned screenwriting and preproduction and why you should never light a bonfire in an enclosed basement (the last of which has applications far broader than merely filmmaking, it’s worth noting).
You can absolutely find tape-transfer services that can take your old VHS cassettes and digitize them. There are a lot of those places here in L.A., but Toronto has its share of film labs, so I bet it wouldn’t take much searching to find a facility that could digitize “The Carolers.” You’ll have to send me the file when you have it — I’d love to see the short!
About a decade ago, I outlined a novel that was a fictionalized account of my own youth; it was divided into two sections: the childhood years (1985–90) and the adolescent years (1990–94). The making of Lost Boys II — a more complete version of the anecdote found here — figured very prominently into the second half of the story. It was a big, ambitious novel that I was going to write with my best friend (the older brother of the Sean I mention in this post, in fact) — and I still someday hope to — but life got in the way before we could get much done on the project by way of a draft. (We do have an extensive outline, though.) I don’t know — one of these days, I might do something with this account, though, if not for that proposed quasi-autobiography than perhaps as a novella, sure. As someone who read my previous novella, Spex, you already know how influential Lost Boys has been on me (because the Frog brothers get more than a passing shout-out in that story)!
I guess all of our experiences find their way into our writing — our fiction and our nonfiction — in the end. As I said to Jacqui above, I’d always intended to write this story down in one form or another, and then when Schumacher died a few weeks ago — right after I’d watched Batman Forever, oddly enough — I thought, “Maybe it’s finally time…” It was fun going back to the summer of ’94. Every July, I long for the open-ended freedom of adventure the summers used to stand for in my youth, and never so much as I do this summer…
Sean, your articles are always fascinating and so in-depth. Although I don’t read in the genres of most of these movies, nonetheless fascinating. I was surprised to read that a screenplay of Lost Boys II was available for the taking. I would have thought that would have kept with the writer. Smashing find! 🙂
Thanks, Debby! Yes, that Lost Boys II draft I discovered in a for-sale bin at a comic convention in 1993 was an astonishing find at the time. In those days, very few screenplays were formally published, and unproduced scripts for the most part never saw the light of day; now, however, a PDF scan of most screenplays (both produced and unproduced, like the Darabont draft of Indiana Jones IV) is a Google search away. I actually still have the original hardcopy of Lost Boys II — as well as the version we rewrote — and I ought to at some point scan it, just for posterity.
In 2011 or ’12, I had a meeting with one of the producers of either Lost Boys: The Tribe (2008) or Lost Boys: The Thirst (2010) — I can’t recall (possibly both films) — and I mentioned to him that in the early ’90s I’d found an unused script for a direct sequel; he’d never heard of the project, and I’ve found few if any references to this draft online in the years since. My best guess is that Warner Bros. had Jeffrey Boam write a copycat sequel to the original project, probably in ’88 or ’89, to cash in on the two Coreys craze. For whatever reason — either reaction to the script was tepid, or Coreymania was already waning — the movie never got made. (This is probably for the better; the sequel was not up to the original’s snuff. There were also other aborted attempts at follow-ups, including a prequel script called “The Lost Boys: The Beginning” by Near Dark screenwriter Eric Red and Joel Schumacher himself, so perhaps they were trying, without success, to figure out how to franchise the original movie — commissioning different drafts to see what, if anything, worked.) Somehow, though, the Lost Boys II script found a path out of the Warner vault, got Xeroxed, and made its way to the comic-con circuit — and the only known attempt to produce it has now been officially documented here!
I love that this is your summer story–it’s a fantastic one. The ambition, the excitement, the planning, the scouting. . . All of that–kids united in purpose–is the magic behind any good summer story, and you LIVED IT. It’s too bad there is so little physical evidence of that summer, but your telling of it is compelling evidence on its own. What a perfect read for my rained-out summer day, Sean. Your commentary about how “only neurotically literal adults need that explained; preadolescent children intuitively understand stories abide by different rules from reality” really stuck with me. It would be lovely to spend more time with our beliefs suspended (the state of current politics, the world, and actual science notwithstanding. . .), but with enjoyment and escape being the goal. We all need a little happy escapism these days. Thanks for being that for me today.
Oh, thank you, Wendy, for not only reading and commenting — which you do with cherished regularity — but for expressing how deeply this anecdote resonated with you. As bloggers — and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you this — we just want to feel that what we post isn’t entirely self-indulgent, but rather has some measure of value to those who spare the time in their busy day to read it.
The story of our Lost Boys II initiative is one I’ve thought about often over the years — I included the bit about smoked-out subbasement in my best-man speech at Chip’s wedding last fall — but I don’t think I’d fully considered until I wrote this formal retrospective how that summer was really my last season of pure adolescence, and how the filmmaking project we undertook was my way of coming to terms with the fact that I was heading off to college and things would never quite be the same. It was a rite of passage — a way for me to transition from the unhappiness of high school to the newfound possibilities of college life, and to celebrate what would soon be the bygone days of hanging out with my friends, “sleeping all day and partying all night,” as the one-sheet for The Lost Boys so aptly describes the experience. I must’ve had an intuition that there would be no more opportunities for carefree camaraderie quite like those — that I was leaving the teenage world for good and all once that summer concluded. We certainly went out with a bang, that’s for sure.
Much the same way the Christmas season is, simultaneously, a welcome and unwelcome reminder of the “lost years” we long for at midlife, midsummer invariably recalls for me — in living color — the halcyon times I wrote about in this post. I meant what I said: Watching the sun go down on a July night from my balcony inspires direct and tactile memories of 1994. I had by no means planned to write about those events this July, but the death of Schumacher prompted the recollection; that it happened at the precise time of year I most associate with The Lost Boys was simply a case of uncanny cosmic timing.
And not merely this time of year; that it happened this year, in our season of self-quarantine, made the reminiscences even more poignant, because the simple pleasures I find myself aching for — unstructured time spent in the company of friends and family at a neighborhood hangout — seem permanently out of reach at the moment. I know they’re not — I mean, I think and hope they’re not — but they feel, at present, as though they’re never coming back. So, I am certainly feeling especially maudlin this summer, and writing this post at least offered some small measure of catharsis.
With respect to your second observation, Wendy — about how adults require that fantasy adhere to the rules of reality as they understand them — that’s a subject I explored at length in “Tim Burton’s ‘Batman’ at 30 — and the Cultural Legacy of the Summer of 1989.” I won’t recap any of my points here, but suffice it to say, I long for the days when there was a type of fiction for every age group — when ten-year-olds could have a Batman Forever, teens could have a Lost Boys, college students could have a St. Elmo’s Fire, and adults were fed fiction that spoke to their experiences and preoccupations, like Falling Down and A Time to Kill and Veronica Guerin.
I think that was a healthier use of fantasy as a way of understanding reality, versus what we have now, in which grown adults attempt to take children’s fiction seriously, making sense of the nonsensical by calling it a “multiverse” and measuring a given story’s value not by the insight into the human condition it has to offer, but rather its adherence to the grander continuity in which it exists — its respect for the “rules” established by the previous entries in the mega-franchise. That’s not healthy escapism; it’s psychoneurotic OCD — an attempt to discern order and causality in a fictional reality so as to not feel quite so meaningless and ineffectual in this reality.
I hope somehow, Wendy, the summer of 2020 is providing happy moments and memories for you and yours. It is a magical season, in its own special way, and The Lost Boys stands as a perennial reminder for me of that. The original movie itself is the only memento I need to take me back to the summer I was eighteen; thanks for coming along with me this time!