Gotham City's New Boss

Schumacher is also prized for his nose for the cultural zeitgeist, tapping into yuppie angst for St. Elmo's a decade ago and taking an unblinking look at white rage in 1993's Falling Down, which was shooting as the L.A. riots erupted. ''Joel is very tuned in to what's happening on the street,'' says longtime friend David Geffen. ''He listens to everything, he goes to see everything. Joel has kept the kid in himself very much alive.''

As an adolescent running unchaperoned through his tough Queens neighborhood, Schumacher got an early education in sex and drugs while his widowed mother, Marian, worked long hours selling dresses. Graduating from New York's Parsons School of Design, Schumacher was gaining notoriety by the mid-1960s with such out-there creations as a short dress made entirely of mirrors. But by 1970, years of drug abuse had all but unraveled his life and career. ''I had reached the abyss,'' Schumacher says, so he simply set out on a cold January morning and buried his syringes and drugs in Central Park.

After getting clean (well, mostly clean — he didn't swear off alcohol until years later), he began rebuilding his life by landing a job redesigning the interior of Henri Bendel, the hip Manhattan emporium. He also created traffic-stopping store windows, like fur-bearing mannequins cowering behind shattered glass. He broke into commercials by designing the set for a revolutionary Cool Whip spot, in which he brought in sunlight from every window. ''The agency said, 'You can't have sunlight coming from three directions,' and I said, 'Why not?''' The ad won an award.

Film success has bought Schumacher an expensively cozy Bel Air house jumbled with paintings and dhurrie rugs. He doesn't discuss his private life (''At my age, who would care?'') and lives alone except for four Labrador retrievers, four cats, a security guard at the gate, and a young British butler who goes about his duties in jeans and shirttails. The two neo-Deco leather chairs in the study are gifts from Ralph Lauren. The tennis court is a present from producer Arnon Milchan (The Client).

The tranquillity of Bel Air is far from the steamy locations in Mississippi where Schumacher will begin work on A Time to Kill in September. His honeymoon with Grisham ended in a spat over casting. For the lead character — a Southern lawyer who defends a black man accused of killing the rednecks who raped his little girl — ''we looked at everybody from Paul Newman to Macaulay Culkin,'' he says, including Batman's Val Kilmer, Kevin Costner, and Brad Pitt. The most intense friction came over Woody Harrelson — favored by Schumacher, vetoed by Grisham. The impasse, which is said to have driven Schumacher close to quitting, ended when he screen-tested Matthew McConaughey, who played Drew Barrymore's hunky cop boyfriend in this year's Boys on the Side. ''John flipped for him,'' says Schumacher.

After that there's the prospect of a fourth Batman film, which Schumacher has said might be called Batman and Robin — if he decides he wants to make it. ''If Batman Forever is healthy, I'll think about it, but right now it's a little too soon,'' he says. ''It's like asking somebody who's giving birth if they want to have another baby.'' As one asexual, cartoony, wholesome airhead might say: Holy cigar smoke!