1976

DIRECTOR: MICHAEL ANDERSON PRODUCER: SAUL DAVID SCREENPLAY: DAVID ZELAG GOODMAN, BASED ON THE NOVEL BY WILLIAM F. NOLAN AND GEORGE CLAYTON JOHNSON STARRING: MICHAEL YORK (LOGAN), RICHARD JORDAN (FRANCIS), JENNY AGUTTER (JESSICA), ROSCOE LEE BROWNE (BOX), FARRAH FAWCETT (HOLLY), MICHAEL ANDERSON JR. (DOC), PETER USTINOV (OLD MAN)

Logan’s Run

MGM • COLOR, 118 MINUTES

An elite policeman and his girlfriend escape a sealed-off city of the future where no one lives past the age of thirty.

The ritual of Carrousel

Logan’s Run is 1970s sci-fi at its flashiest. Released in 1976 (one year before Star Wars completely rewired the genre), it was a landmark production, shot with new Todd-AO anamorphic lenses and boasting the first holographic effects ever seen on film. Its $9 million budget made it the costliest movie produced by MGM in the entire decade. During a slump in the sci-fi market, when gritty dramas like Serpico (1973) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) reveled in realism, Logan’s Run offered pure escapism, recalling the grandeur of Hollywood’s golden age.

Michael Anderson, director of the first film version of George Orwell’s 1984 in 1956, collaborated with producer Saul David to conjure a twenty-third-century utopia for Logan’s Run. Rainbow-colored and bursting with pyrotechnics, this future has everything, even its own vernacular. Michael York stars as Logan, a Sandman whose job is to “terminate” those who try to run from Carrousel, the public execution ritual everyone faces at age thirty. In a giant sealed pleasure dome, Logan and his friends enjoy themselves day and night—until the computer that controls the city orders Logan to run. He brings Jessica (Jenny Agutter) with him, and they escape in search of Sanctuary with Sandman Francis in hot pursuit. Assisted by a team that included cinematographer Ernest Laszlo and production designer Dale Hennesy, Anderson and David affectionately crafted a hedonistic playground of tomorrow. In 1976, David said the utopia in the film “exists in a series of extrapolations on what seem to be pretty obvious tendencies today.”

Michael York and Jenny Agutter

Jenny Agutter, Michael York, and Roscoe Lee Browne as Box

Shooting the first meeting of Jessica and Logan

Consequently, Logan’s Run says more about the Me Generation than it does about the year 2274. The city’s attractive young citizens live in what appears to be a disco shopping mall. Their shimmery, diaphanous clothing (described by Time magazine as “togas designed by Frederick’s of Hollywood”) is easily removed for frequent casual liaisons. When Jessica introduces herself to Logan, he replies, “You’re beautiful. Let’s have sex.” Futuristic gadgets—pocket-size communication devices and a computer-dating teleportation circuit—mingle with an array of 1970s artifacts: Jacuzzis, leather sofas, blue eye shadow. Before they reach the outside world, Logan and Jessica must navigate through an orgy with more laser lights and smoke machines than a Pink Floyd concert. This is unpretentious sci-fi at its most enjoyable; a movie that doesn’t aspire to answer deep philosophical questions, but simply to entertain.

Shooting on location in ultra-contemporary buildings in the Dallas/Fort Worth area saved the production around $3 million, most of which went into special effects. Veteran effects master L. B. Abbott won a special Oscar for his complex Carrousel effect (created by dangling wire-rigged stuntmen over a flashing, revolving plate built into the floor) and the then-advanced use of holographic technology in Logan’s final interrogation scene. Holographic expert Chris Outwater supervised the filming of Michael York’s face in a three-dimensional hologram, a process that was shot in black and white but appears red, green, and blue because of the varying bands of wavelengths.

Farrah Fawcett and Michael York on the set

After making their way through an ice realm ruled by the creepy robot Box (Roscoe Lee Browne), Logan and Jessica find not Sanctuary, but a bombed-out wasteland populated by hundreds of cats and one elderly man who speaks in T. S. Eliot poems—a part offered to James Cagney, but ultimately played by Peter Ustinov. Logan’s Run almost starred Lindsay Wagner as Jessica, William Devane as Francis, and Jon Voight as Logan, until York—whose first reaction was to throw the script in his wastebasket—had a change of heart. The Shakespeare-reared actor adds a certain gravitas to Logan, a role that easily could have descended into one-dimensional action-hero.

York also did some talent-scouting for the picture, spotting Farrah Fawcett (billed as Farrah Fawcett-Majors, being married at the time to Lee Majors) “playing tennis on a friend’s court one weekend, a vision of blonde perfection,” he later wrote, “and suggested her for the role of Holly, the laser cosmetician.” Her brief but showy Logan’s Run cameo—along with a best-selling poster and the popular TV series Charlie’s Angels—helped Fawcett ascend to superstardom.

FAR-OUT FACTS

Producer Saul David had rejected the novel Logan’s Run when he was an editor at Bantam Books in the early 1960s. “When I bought the project for the movies,” David said in 1975, “I changed what I didn’t like about it ten years ago.”

Roscoe Lee Browne not only voiced Box, but performed inside the unwieldy mechanical costume. The contraption “was top-heavy,” recalled Anderson, “and on a number of occasions he started to fall and people had to rush forward to catch him.”

Farrah Fawcett would return to science fiction in 1980, then in a leading role as Alex in the outer-space thriller Saturn 3. Fawcett was top-billed over costars Kirk Douglas and Harvey Keitel.

MIND-BLOWING MOMENT

After interrogating Logan with a mind probe and finding his information “unacceptable,” the computer begins to malfunction. Grabbing a gun, Logan blasts the mainframe and sets off a chain reaction of explosions in the city. Two crew members were injured in the explosion, one requiring hospitalization for third-degree burns on his arms and hands.

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