Famed director Joel Schumacher, the maker of such 1980s hits like “St. Elmo’s Fire” and “The Lost Boys,” as well as 1990s duds like “Batman & Robin,” shocked the public this week when he claimed to have had up to 20,000 sexual partners in his lifetime.
Speaking with Vulture, the openly gay filmmaker pontificated upon his past promiscuity — from drug use to casual sex with other men.
“Have you ever guessed the number of partners you’ve had?” Andrew Goldman asked Schumacher in the interview.
“It would be in the double-digit thousands, but that is not unusual,” the director responded.
“Double-digit thousands. You mean like 2,000 or 3,000?” Goldman asked.
“That’s not double digits, that’s single digits,” Schumacher interjected.
When Goldman adjusted the numbers to “20,000 or 30,000,” the director said the number lies somewhere between “10 or 20” thousand.
As to why he experienced such a high number of sexual partners, Schumacher said that the gay lifestyle in his youth was far less staid than the lifestyle that exists today.
“Now, a lot of gay people are getting married, they’re adopting, or they’re having children,” Schumacher said. “There wasn’t any of that when I was young. If you went into a gay bar and there were 200 men in there, and you said, ‘Okay, who wants to have a little house with a white picket fence, and a dog, and a child, raise your hands,’ or ‘Who wants to get laid tonight?’ The concept of a lovely suburban life or raising children was not a high concept.”
In the same interview, Schumacher was asked what he thought of Dylan Farrow’s sexual abuse allegations against his longtime friend, Woody Allen.
“I saw the interview with Dylan. She believes it happened,” he said. “Her brother certainly believes it. Mia absolutely believes it. And I’m not saying it happened. I’m just saying they believe it happened. But she was so young at the time that I don’t know.”
Joel Schumacher has been openly gay throughout most of his career, though he has largely stayed clear of politics. Speaking with the BBC in 2017, the director said he believes in a higher power but rejects religion or rigorous spirituality.
“I’m sort of in that school of that quote from Hamlet. ‘There’s more in heaven and earth, Horatio.’ If you live long enough you will definitely get to understand that the universe is a profound mystery and I didn’t create it,” he told the BBC. “We’re on this mudball rolling around and I don’t know where we are, and nobody knows where we are. I definitely believe that I’m not the highest form of intelligence in the universe.”
“But I don’t like to use the word God because it’s so overused in the United States — not so much in Europe — but it’s become politicized and has this ugly meaning now,” he said. “Like asking someone if they believe in God has become an attack — like if you don’t believe in Jesus you’re not one of us! I loathe the use of God or any kind of spirituality as a form of discrimination or separation because that’s a total misuse of it.”