out and they sold it, in January 1985, to a
company called Producer Sales Organization
(PSO), who had a deal with Warner Bros.,
for a whopping $400,000. PSO then went
bankrupt, and Warner Bros. hired Richard
Donner, fresh off his Goonies success, to
direct it. Donner liked it but wanted the Peter
Pan references jettisoned. “He wanted to make
the boys older,” says Jeremias. “He said, ‘Old
enough to drive,’ but what he meant was, ‘Old
enough to fuck.’”
Donner wanted them to write a third
draft with him, but by that point Jeremias
and Fischer were unavailable, writing
a screenplay for Paramount, so Donner instead
hired Jeff rey Boam, who had written David
Cronenberg ’s The Dead Zone. Then, though,
Donner was off ered Lethal Weapon and,
enthusiastically responding to a fully formed
screenplay, jumped onto that, staying on Lost
Boys as executive producer.
Donner’s wife, producer Lauren Shuler,
had just produced Schumacher’s St. Elmo’s
Fire, and said he’d be perfect for it. At a lunch
meeting, however, over Bloody Marys with
Warner Bros. executive Mark Canton,
Schumacher was sniff y. “I was such an asshole,”
he recalls. “I’d only made three movies, and
I said, ‘Are you off ering me some kids’ vampiremovie?’ Mark swallowed the words that were
probably, ‘Will you shut the fuck up? You’re
lucky we’re asking you,’ and he said, ‘Well,
would you do me the honour of reading it?’
It was so humbling. I said, ‘Mark, I’m so sorry.
It’s probably the Bloody Mary.’”
Schumacher read the original draft. “It
was very much ‘Goonies Go Vampire’, he says.
“Charming and adorable, and very G-rated,THE LOST BOYS was an unholy production: an
organic, ever-evolving beast held together by
hard graft, extreme partying, some of the most
beautiful young actors New Hollywood had to
off er and an obscene amount of talent. This was
not your dad’s Dracula — this was sexed-up
vampires, maggot hallucinations and death by
stereo, lensed by the cinematographer of Taxi
Driver, brought to life by the director of hot
young graduates drama St. Elmo’s Fire.
“Warner Bros. took a big chance with
this movie, and with me, because they really
didn’t know what the heck I was doing,”
chuckles a now 80-year-old Joel Schumacher,
by his fi replace at home in New York, The Lost
Boys on the TV for reference. Well, it has been
33 years. In that time, though, adoration
for it has only grown. And while the fi lm
wasn’t quite forged in the fi res of hell, it
was certainly bedevilled.
JAMES JEREMIAS WAS A FIRST-
time screenwriter, working as a grip on
studio lots when he had the idea for The Lost
Boys. “I had read Anne Rice’s Interview With
The Vampire,” he says, “and in that there was
a 200-year-old vampire trapped in the body of
a 12-year-old girl. Since Peter Pan had been
one of my all-time favourite stories, I thought,
‘What if the reason Peter Pan came out at night
and never grew up and could fl y was because he
was a vampire?’”
So was born ‘Lost Boys’, back then without
a ‘The’, referencing Peter Pan’s kiddy gang. The
screenplay, which Jeremias wrote in the summer
of 1984 with childhood friend Jan Fischer,
concerned two young brothers living in Santa
Cruz with their divorced mother. There they
meet the leader of a vampire gang before
connecting with the Frog brothers, identical twin
eight-year-old vampire-hunting boy scouts. All
of the kids were pre-teens. “It was about that
time in life before sex rears its ugly little head,”
says Jeremias. That would soon change.
Jeremias and Fischer’s agent sent the script