The Aviator Script Story
MC
January 9, 2005
John Logan's Solo Show
By DENNIS McDOUGAL
THESE days, the screenwriter John Logan is living the dream. He and his
longtime partner, Marty Madden, share a place in Malibu with their
basset hound, Bill, and his companion, Shaft, a dachshund. Once a
struggling playwright who only a decade ago paid his bills by shelving
books at Northwestern University, Mr. Logan drives a Lexus convertible,
vacations around the world ("I was in Kigali, Rwanda, a month ago to
track gorillas for a week") and takes meetings with some of the biggest
stars and directors in Hollywood.
Such are the rewards on moviedom's fast track, where Mr. Logan has
gained a reputation as the writer who can lift your picture into the
Oscar race. Last year, it was "The Last Samurai" for Tom Cruise and
Warner Brothers. The film earned four Academy Award nominations, a
disappointment only when compared with the 2000 movie "Gladiator," a
best picture winner, for which Mr. Logan shared a screenwriting Oscar
nomination.
This year, already nominated for a Golden Globe, Mr. Logan is in the
thick of the awards chase with his original screenplay for "The
Aviator," the saga of the billionaire-madman Howard Hughes, directed by
Martin Scorsese and distributed by Miramax. A 20-page pullout in Vanity
Fair ran snippets of the script behind a cover that read simply, "The
Aviator - the Screenplay by John Logan."
It is an extraordinary tribute to a 43-year-old writer who has become
known as that rarest of birds: a true author who creates from scratch in
an era of sequels and adaptations. The solo credit endows Mr. Logan with
pride of ownership increasingly reserved for writer-directors like Bill
Condon ("Kinsey").
As with much in Hollywood, however, the honors mask a more complicated
reality. While Mr. Logan enjoys the limelight for writing "The Aviator,"
he stands on the shoulders of others who contributed material and either
received no credit or have had to fight for recognition in a dog-eat-dog
scramble for a place on the film. And his rise to the top - in which Mr.
Logan was caught up in a spat over his contributions to "The Last
Samurai" - appears to illustrate a cardinal rule of contemporary film
writing: success depends on the fine art of positioning, as well as a
way with words.
"Call it tenacious, call it lucky, call it ambitious, call it fortune
smiling on me, but I've had really good experiences," Mr. Logan said of
his Hollywood career in a recent interview. He attributes much of that
good fortune to being a team player while suffering the occasional fool.
"You just want to bang your head against a wall," said Mr. Logan, whose
next venture is an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's musical "Sweeney
Todd" for the director Sam Mendes ("American Beauty") and DreamWorks.
"But I raise my notepad up and take notes, and I get past it. That's
what you have to do. You hold your notepad like a shield in front of you
and you take down ridiculous notes."
Mr. Logan's handlers at the Creative Artists Agency also enhanced his
status before he began writing "The Aviator" by building into his deal
an unusual provision guaranteeing him sole screenplay credit, Charles
Evans Jr., one of the film's producers, said in an interview. The
guarantee blocked the producers, who included the normally hands-on
filmmaker Michael Mann, and even Mr. Scorsese from hiring writers to
revise Mr. Logan's work or from professing any part in the screenplay's
authorship, whatever they may have contributed.
Asked whether he had such protection, Mr. Logan smiled. "I don't know,"
he said.
Mr. Evans, who is one of the film's four credited producers and spent 12
years on the project, said, "Of course, he knew." Among other things,
Mr. Evans, a nephew of the producer Robert Evans, acted as Mr. Logan's
first Hughes tutor. This was shortly after Mr. Mann, then Mr. Evans's
business partner, hired the screenwriter in spring 1999, after scripts
by Dean Ollins and John Fincher had been set aside.
"I gave John everything," Mr. Evans said of material that went to either
Mr. Mann or Mr. Logan. "Everything" included boxes of research material,
though not the earlier scripts, which he had acquired from the
biographers Peter Harry Brown and Pat H. Broeske, authors of "Howard
Hughes: The Untold Story," as part of their 1996 option agreement with
Mr. Evans.
With that research and a video of historical Hughes film, Mr. Evans
said he also brought aboard Leonardo DiCaprio, who would eventually star
in "The Aviator." In 2001, however, Mr. Evans sued Mr. Mann in Los
Angeles County Superior Court, claiming his former partner had absconded
with the project by setting up "The Aviator" at New Line Cinema with Mr.
Logan, but without him.
Mr. Evans settled the suit and received a producing credit on the film.
There was no arbitration over writing credits, he said.
Mr. Mann, meanwhile, optioned another biography, Charles Higham's
"Howard Hughes: The Secret Life." Mr. Higham said he received a
"handsome six-figure check" from the production on the first day of
principal photography. He also said he recognized his material in some
key scenes, including one in which the young filmmaker Hughes keeps
crews on "Hell's Angels" waiting for weeks because of his demand that
the backdrop for aerial dogfights be huge clouds that resemble
milk-filled breasts.
Yet neither the Higham nor Broeske-Brown books appears in the "Aviator"
credits, and Mr. Logan emphasizes his originality, saying he used the
public record or multiple sources for everything, including the clouds.
"The sources that I drew from were vast," he said when asked if he had
relied on those optioned books.
"People don't hire me for my research," he continued. "They hire me for
my perspective. If you were to give all my research to Ben Hecht or
Robert Towne or Robert Altman or Bill Condon or Oliver Stone, you would
have a different movie, and perhaps it would be called 'The Tycoon,' or
perhaps it would be called 'The Moviemaker,' or perhaps it would be
called 'The Carpetbaggers.' But for me, certain elements of Hughes's
life historically, certain aspects of what his character suggested to
me, emerged into a movie called 'The Aviator.' That is where it is
original."
Mr. Logan's insistence on purity of authorship - a difficult stance in a
collaborative medium - may owe something to a stage mentality spawned in
New Jersey. There, this son of immigrants from Northern Ireland says, he
became hooked on Shakespeare at a tender age: "Olivier's 'Hamlet' when I
was a kid changed my life."
By the time he was ready for college in the late 1970's, Mr. Logan
chose Northwestern, near Chicago, and a future acting career; but three
years of studying drama led him to read Shakespeare's entire canon, and
that inspired a yearlong course in playwriting.
Mr. Logan's first subjects were Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb of the
1920's Chicago murder case, in which two young gay men kidnapped and
killed a 14-year-old boy. After his 1983 graduation, Mr. Logan spent two
years honing his "Never the Sinner," about the killers, which in 1985
opened to rave reviews at the Stormfield Theater in Chicago. He then
moved to other historical crimes, basing one play on the Lindbergh baby
kidnapper-killer Bruno Richard Hauptmann and another on the killing of
the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini.
"John is fascinated by scary, brilliant characters, but like attracts
like, doesn't it?" said Susan V. Booth, artistic director at the
Alliance Theater in Atlanta and a friend.
Mr. Logan wrote more than a dozen plays while covering expenses by
shelving books at Northwestern's law school. In 1995 his play about a
religious heresy trial attracted an HBO executive, Brian Siberell, who
considered buying the rights before joining Creative Artists Agency. The
new agent asked Mr. Logan to meet his peers and bring 10 movie ideas. A
one-liner caught on: "King Lear in the N.F.L."
The result was "Any Given Sunday," which the director Oliver Stone
snapped up. Mr. Logan abandoned his apartment and invested his movie
money in a house near Northwestern, where he taught playwriting, and
commuted between Hollywood and Chicago until last year. By the time he
and Mr. Stone had a shooting script, Mr. Logan had also written
"Tornado!," a television movie, and "Bats," a horror film. Next, he went
after "Citizen Kane."
"I heard that Ridley Scott wanted to do a movie about the making of
'Citizen Kane' " he said, referring to the film director, "and that old
familiar feeling, as the song goes, stirred my gut. I said, 'I have to
do it!' "
Mr. Logan researched "Kane," then begged Mr. Scott for a meeting. He
became the writer of "RKO 281," named for the soundstage where Orson
Welles filmed his story. Mr. Scott soon hired Mr. Logan for "Gladiator,"
and the writer shared credit with David Franzoni and William Nicholson.
"Gladiator," with 5 Oscars and 12 nominations, put Mr. Logan on
Hollywood's A-list. But it left him yearning for the control he enjoyed
as a playwright, and he resolved to reclaim it. As he explained in a
court deposition on June 9, 2004: "I've done rewrites, like, earlier in
my career, and didn't like doing rewrites and haven't done one for years
before that and haven't done one since."
Mr. Logan was testifying for Ed Zwick, director and producer of "The
Last Samurai," and Marshall Herskovitz, also a producer on the film.
Michael Alan Eddy, who was hired earlier by other producers on the
project to write a script, had sued the pair, accusing them of ignoring
his contributions on the same subject: 19th-century Americans who awaken
Japan to modern times.
Mr. Eddy said the producers conveyed his work to Mr. Logan, who then
created the story of a Civil War veteran fighting for a Samurai warlord.
While Mr. Eddy's story of cowboys staging a cattle drive in Japan
differed from Mr. Logan's, a dispute followed over whether Mr. Eddy
would have access to the Writers Guild of America's screen arbitration
process. Ultimately, the union gave Mr. Logan sole story credit and said
he should share script credit with Mr. Zwick and Mr. Herskovitz. Mr.
Eddy sued, but in a summary judgment in October, a federal judge sided
with the producers and declined to interfere with the arbitration.
According to court records, Mr. Logan, whose script fee was $1.8
million, exchanged e-mail messages with his agents grumbling about
sharing the credit. When deposed two years later, however, he agreed
that the pair had contributed significantly to the script.
Court records include a 1999 letter in which Mr. Logan told Mr. Zwick
about joining Michael Mann on a Hughes project. "I constantly count my
lucky stars that such a terrific subject has fallen into my lap," he
wrote. "Or, more accurately, I have worked hard enough to earn a subject
like this."
Soon, however, Mr. Logan was sparring with those who would say their
work, as well as his, contributed to the success of his script. That
included the breast-shaped clouds, which Mr. Higham said were drawn from
his biography. "I heard that story from Lewis Milestone," Mr. Higham
said, referring to the film director. "It could only have come from my
book."
Mr. Logan responded, "It is simply untrue to say that the story of
Howard Hughes waiting for those clouds can only be found in that book."
Mr. Evans - who had handed seven years' worth of research and
connections to Mr. Logan and then spent a year and $200,000 suing Mr.
Mann for joining the writer at another studio without him - is barred
from talking about his dispute under a settlement that ended his court
case.
But he isn't shy about expressing his view of Hollywood's credits
scramble. "Morality has nothing to do with what finally shows up on the
screen," he said.
Mr. Logan points to "The Aviator," along with his "RKO 281" script, as
his proudest film achievements. They "are really the two best things
I've written for movies," he said.
"I think they're completely mine."
Correction: January 9, 2005, Sunday:
A front-page article in Arts & Leisure today about "The Aviator," the
screen biography of Howard Hughes, misstates the circumstances of
Leonardo DiCaprio's early association with the project. The producer
Charles Evans Jr. introduced Mr. DiCaprio to the project through a
fellow producer, not through the writer John Logan, whom Mr. Evans had
not met at the time. Some research material provided by Mr. Evans was
sent to the fellow producer, not directly to the writer.
--
Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed
in the back while climbing a ladder.
--William Faulkner
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