Aviator Max
Marcelene Vasconez
The Aviator is a 2004 American epic biographical drama film directed by Martin Scorsese and written by John Logan. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes, Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn, and Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardner. The supporting cast features Ian Holm, John C. Reilly, Alec Baldwin, Jude Law, Gwen Stefani, Kelli Garner, Matt Ross, Willem Dafoe, Alan Alda, and Edward Herrmann.
Shot in Montreal, Canada,[5] The Aviator was released in the United States on December 25, 2004, to positive reviews with critics praising Scorsese's direction, its cinematography and the performances by DiCaprio and Blanchett. It grossed $214 million on a budget of $110 million, thus emerging as a moderate commercial success at the box-office.
In 1913, Houston, eight-year-old Howard Hughes' mother gives him a bath and teaches him how to spell "quarantine", warning him about the recent cholera outbreak. Fourteen years later, in 1927, he begins to direct his film Hell's Angels, and hires Noah Dietrich to manage the day-to-day operations of his business empire.
In 1935, Hughes test flies the H-1 Racer, pushing it to a new speed record, despite having to crash-land into a beet field when the aircraft runs out of fuel. Three years later, he breaks the world record by flying around the world in four days. He subsequently purchases majority interest in Transcontinental & Western Air (TWA).
Juan Trippe, company rival and chairman of Pan Am, gets his crony, Senator Ralph Owen Brewster, to introduce the Community Airline Bill, which would give Pan Am exclusivity on international air travel. Hepburn grows tired of Hughes' eccentricity and workaholism, and leaves him for fellow actor Spencer Tracy. Hughes quickly finds a new love interest with 15-year-old Faith Domergue, and later actress Ava Gardner. However, he still has feelings for Hepburn, and bribes a reporter to keep reports about her and the married Tracy out of the press.
In 1947, with the H-4 Hercules flying boat still in construction, Hughes finishes the XF-11 reconnaissance aircraft and takes it for a test flight. However, one of the engines fails midflight, and he crashes in Beverly Hills, miraculously surviving the crash. The army cancels its order for the H-4 Hercules, although Hughes still continues the development with his own money. Dietrich informs Hughes that he must choose between funding the airlines or his flying boat. Hughes orders Dietrich to mortgage the TWA assets so he can continue the development.
As his OCD worsens, Hughes becomes increasingly paranoid, planting microphones and tapping Gardner's phone lines to keep track of her, until she kicks him out of her house. The FBI searches his home for incriminating evidence of war profiteering, searching through his possessions.
Brewster privately offers to drop the charges if Hughes sells TWA to Trippe, but Hughes refuses. Hughes' OCD symptoms become extreme, and he retreats into an isolated "germ-free zone" for three months. Trippe has Brewster summon him for a Senate investigation, certain that Hughes will not show up. Gardner visits him and personally grooms and dresses him in preparation for the hearing.
An invigorated Hughes defends himself against Brewster's charges and accuses the Senator of taking bribes from Trippe. He concludes by announcing that he has committed to completing the H-4 aircraft, and that he will leave the country if he cannot get it to fly. Brewster's bill is promptly defeated.
After successfully flying the aircraft, Hughes speaks with Dietrich and his engineer, Glenn Odekirk, about a new jetliner for TWA. However, he begins hallucinating men in germ-resistant suits, and has a panic attack. As Odekirk hides him in a restroom while Dietrich fetches a doctor, Hughes begins to have flashbacks of his childhood, his love for aviation and his ambition for success, compulsively repeating the phrase "the way of the future".
The Aviator was a joint production between Warner Bros. Pictures, which handled Latin American and Canadian distribution, and Disney, which released the film internationally under its Miramax Films banner in the United States and the United Kingdom. Disney previously developed a Hughes biopic with director Brian De Palma and actor Nicolas Cage between 1997 and 1998. Titled Mr. Hughes, the film would have starred Cage in the dual roles of both Hughes and Clifford Irving. It was conceived when De Palma and Cage were working on Snake Eyes with writer David Koepp.[6][9] Universal Pictures joined the competition in March 1998 when it purchased the film rights to Empire: The Life, Legend and Madness of Howard Hughes (ISBN 0-393000-257), written by Donald Barlett and James Steele.
The Hughes brothers were going to direct Johnny Depp as Howard Hughes, based on a script by Terry Hayes.[10] Universal canceled it when they decided they did not want to fast-track development to compete with Disney. In the mid-1990s and early 2000s, director Miloš Forman was in talks to direct a film about the early life of Hughes with Edward Norton as the eccentric young billionaire.[11] In 2001, another version was announced to be produced and directed by William Friedkin, who intended to make a three-hour film about Hughes based on the book Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters by Richard Hack.[12] Also, in the early 2000s, director Christopher Nolan had developed a film about Hughes, itself also based on Hack's biography. All other versions were shelved when Martin Scorsese came aboard to direct The Aviator, though Nolan would later return to his Howard Hughes project after completing The Dark Knight Rises in 2012, using the book Citizen Hughes: The Power, the Money and the Madness by Michael Drosnin as the source. Nolan wrote the script himself, which followed the darker and final years of Hughes's life. Nolan, once again, shelved the project when Warren Beatty was developing his long-awaited Hughes film. It was reported that Nolan's version would have starred Jim Carrey as the reclusive, elderly billionaire.[13]
Disney restarted development on a new Howard Hughes biopic in June 1999, hiring Michael Mann to direct Leonardo DiCaprio playing the role of Howard Hughes, based on a script by John Logan.[14] The studio put it in turnaround again following the disappointing box-office performance of Mann's critically acclaimed The Insider. New Line Cinema picked it up in turnaround almost immediately, with Mann planning to direct after finishing Ali.[15] Mann was eventually replaced by Scorsese, who had worked with DiCaprio on Gangs of New York. Scorsese later said that he "grossly misjudged the budget".[16] Angelina Jolie was approached by the studios to have a role in the film but she turned it down after learning executive producer Harvey Weinstein was involved with the film.[17]
Hughes suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), most notably an obsession with germs and cleanliness. Scorsese and DiCaprio worked closely with Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, MD of UCLA, to portray the most accurate depiction of OCD. The filmmakers had to focus both on previous accounts of Hughes' behaviors as well as the time period, given that when Hughes was suffering from the disorder, there was no psychiatric definition for what ailed him. Instead of receiving proper treatment, Hughes was forced to hide his stigmatized compulsions; his disorder began to conflict with everyday functioning.
DiCaprio dedicated hundreds of hours of work to portray Hughes' unique case of OCD on screen. Apart from doing his research on Hughes, DiCaprio met with people suffering from OCD. In particular, he focused on the way some individuals would compulsively and repeatedly wash their hands, later inspiring the scene in which his hand starts to bleed as he scrubs it in the bathroom. The character arc of Howard Hughes was a drastic one: from the height of his career to the appearance of his compulsions, and eventually, to him sitting naked in a screening room, refusing to leave, and later repeating the phrase "the way of the future."[18]
In an article for the American Cinematographer, John Pavlus wrote: "The film boasts an ambitious fusion of period lighting techniques, extensive effects sequences and a digital re-creation of two extinct cinema color processes: two-color and three-strip Technicolor."[19] For the first 52 minutes of the film, scenes appear in shades of only red and cyan blue; green objects are rendered as blue. This was done, according to Scorsese, to emulate the look of early bipack color films, in particular the Multicolor process, which Hughes himself owned, emulating the available technology of the era. Similarly, many of the scenes depicting events occurring after 1935 are treated to emulate the saturated appearance of three-strip Technicolor. Other scenes were stock footage colorized and are incorporated into the film. The color effects were created by Legend Films.[20]
Scale models were used to duplicate many of the flying scenes in the film. When Martin Scorsese began planning his aviation epic, a decision was made to film flying sequences with scale models rather than CGI special effects. The critical reaction to the CGI models in Pearl Harbor (2001) had been a crucial factor in Scorsese's decision to use full-scale static and scale models in this case. The building and filming of the flying models proved both cost-effective and timely.[21]
The primary scale models were the Spruce Goose and the XF-11; both flyable scale models were designed and fabricated over a period of several months by Aero Telemetry, an aerospace company that specializes in building unmanned air vehicles.[22][23]
The 375 lb (170 kg) Spruce Goose model had a wingspan of 6.1 m (20 ft) while the 750 lb (340 kg) XF-11 had a 7.6 m (25 ft) wingspan. Another set of miniatures was built as a motion control miniature used for "beauty shots" of the model taking off and in flight as well as in dry dock and under construction at the miniature Hughes Hangar built by New Deal Studios.[clarification needed] The XF-11 was reverse engineered from photographs and some rare drawings and then modeled in Rhinoceros 3D by the Aero Telemetry engineering department and New Deal art department. These 3D models of the Spruce Goose as well as the XF-11 were then used for patterns and construction drawings for the model makers. In addition to the aircraft, the homes that the XF-11 crashes into were fabricated at 1:4 scale to match the 1:4 scale XF-11. The model was rigged to be crashed and break up several times for different shots.
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