Before Scorsese’s The Aviator took off, Brian De Palma, Christopher Nolan, Milos Forman and the aptly-named Hughes brothers all had their own pet Howard Hughes projects
“I had lots of people calling me up to say it’s one of the best scripts they ever read, but of course they wouldn’t be making it. People say that to you all the time, even about dreck, but this time I kind of believed them.”
— screenwriter David Koepp on his unproduced script Mr Hughes
Considering the name Howard Hughes is as synonymous with Hollywood as it is with wealth, eccentricity and aviation — and crackpot schemes combining all three — it is surprising that more films have not been made about the famously reclusive billionaire.
Not that Hollywood hasn’t tried, however: in the decades between Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard (1980) and Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004), at least half a dozen directors of equal prominence, many of them with a more commercial track record than Messrs Demme and Scorsese, saw their own diverse Howard Hughes projects wither on the Hollywood vine. Nevertheless, the fact that so many tried, and failed, to bring to the screen their own vision, or version, of Hughes’ multi-faceted life is testament to Hollywood’s fascination with a man who, at one time, produced a plethora of films, bedded a string of starlets, and even ran a movie studio of his own. As Variety columnist, author and former studio head Peter Bart said recently, “Who else could have taken on the censors, the Mafia, the studio power elite and virtually every nubile star and starlet and still survive?” Well, almost.
Between his careers as aviator, inventor and corporate mogul, Howard Hughes somehow found time to foster such films as Hell’s Angels, Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story and The Outlaw, with advertisements for the latter implying that star Jane Russell’s ample bosom was “two great reasons” to see the film.1 But while Hughes was gaudy even by Hollywood standards, his heart seemed to be in the right place: when chief censor Will Hays, the driving force behind the Hays Code which hobbled Hollywood from the 1930s onwards, tried to alter the ending of Scarface and subtitle the film The Shame of the Nation, Hughes strongly objected — although ultimately backed down. Earlier, at the age of twenty-four, he orchestrated a lavish première for Hell’s Angels, described by Charlie Chaplin as “the greatest night in show business.” Fifteen thousand people massed around Hollywood Boulevard, resulting in the biggest traffic jam in the history of Los Angeles. Once, Hughes let it be known that he was simultaneously negotiating to buy Fox, Paramount, Universal and Warner Bros, though in the end he settled for RKO Pictures. Along the way, he kept gossip columnists up at night with his frenzied pursuit of such starlets as Jean Harlow, Ava Gardner and Katharine Hepburn, despite biographers’ claims of impotence, homosexuality, or both.
Away from Hollywood, Hughes’ lifestyle was as eclectic as it was eccentric: having inherited the family business at the age of sixteen, he led the Hughes Tool Co from strength to strength, founded Trans World Airlines and the Hughes Aircraft Company, and amassed a personal fortune large enough to make him America’s first billionaire — even though he blew millions on such crackpot inventions as the Spruce Goose, a gigantic seaplane. Despite his enormous wealth, success, popularity and matinée idol looks, following a near-fatal plane crash which left him dependent on painkillers, his last years were spent as a total recluse, living in a Las Vegas hotel in mortal fear of germs and nuclear fallout, growing his hair and fingernails long, wearing tissue boxes on his feet, and suffering a codeine dependence which made him alternately paranoid and incoherent. By the time he died in 1976, one biography alleged, his arms were spotted with broken pieces of hypodermic needles embedded in his skin.
Despite his association with Hollywood, there were no stars at Hughes’ funeral, and his long estrangement from his family meant that few of his own flesh and blood were at the graveside either. Octogenarian Terry Moore, Hughes’ legal widow, is one of the few who really knew him who remembers him fondly: “He had seen me in The Return of October, where I played an orphan girl,” she recalls. “He was an orphan himself, and had a very close-knit family and grew up very naïve.” The pair became friends while Moore was starring in Mighty Joe Young (1949) for RKO Pictures, and Hughes later taught the actress to fly, helping her to become only the third woman in the world to fly a jet engine aircraft. “Howard and I had so much in common in astrology,” she adds. “Our sun and our moon and rising signs were exactly the same — a horoscope that only one couple in ten million have. And we had the same interests: we loved flying and motion pictures. He was the first love of my life, someone you don’t forget, and raised me almost as much as my parents. I loved him then, I love him now and I will always love him.”
Since the early 1970s, while Hughes was still alive, actor-producer-director Warren Beatty had talked of making a biographical film about the reclusive billionaire, which, after a proposed collaboration with Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader fell through, he planned to write with Bo Goldman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). When this, too, failed to coalesce, Goldman ultimately wrote his own script, Melvin and Howard, which won him the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1981 and Jason Robards a Best Actor nomination for his take on Hughes. Although Howard Hughes subsequently appeared as an incidental character in several films, played by Dean Stockwell in Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream and Terry O’Quinn in The Rocketeer, the first of the new wave of proposed Hughes biopics did not begin until the 1990s, when the declassification of 2,500 FBI and CIA documents shed light on the last years of Las Vegas’ most famous recluse, sparking a new wave of biographies, including the critically-acclaimed bestseller Howard Hughes: The Untold Story by Pat Broeske and Peter Harry Brown, and Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele’s Empire: The Life, Legend and Madness of Howard Hughes. Suddenly, Howard Hughes was news again.
Barlett and Steele’s book became the first firm subject of a proposed film when, in March 1998, Johnny Depp signed on to star in an adaptation, to be directed by the aptly named Armenian-American film-makers Allen and Albert Hughes (Dead Presidents) from a screenplay by Terry Hayes (Dead Calm). Though the project ultimately went nowhere, Depp, Hayes and the Hughes brothers later collaborated on an adaptation of Alan Moore’s Jack the Ripper saga From Hell. In the meantime, Mutual Film Company and producer Mark Gordon had announced plans to produce their own film based on The Hoax, Clifford Irving’s 1981 book about a fake Howard Hughes autobiography he sold to publisher McGraw-Hill a decade earlier, and the prison term he served when Hughes alerted the publisher to the fact that he hadn’t written a word of it. Irving claimed that Hughes had read the book and changed his mind about publishing it, but was exposed when the reclusive billionaire himself came out of hiding — for the last time — to deny its authenticity. Irving later revised and released the book on the Internet. “I was caught up in a rushing stream from which I could not free myself, even though it was self-destructive and crazy,” Irving commented later, “because everyone else was just as crazy as I was in accepting the legitimacy of it. I couldn’t get off the speeding bus.” It would take a number of years, however, before The Hoax would materialize.
Then, in August 1998, Variety announced that three key figures behind that summer’s thriller Snake Eyes were planning to collaborate on a unique and intriguing take on the Hughes legend: actor Nicolas Cage, an Oscar-winner for Leaving Las Vegas, and star of the action thrillers Face/Off, Con Air and The Rock; director Brian De Palma, who had helmed a loose remake of the Hughes-produced Scarface; and screenwriter David Koepp, who had written De Palma’s Mission: Impossible and Carlito’s Way, in addition to such blockbusters as Jurassic Park. As Koepp recalls, “I was working on Snake Eyes and Nic Cage mentioned to De Palma that he’d always been interested in playing Hughes. So Brian and I bought a bunch of books and started digging into it.” Koepp had initially suspected that they had taken on an impossible mission: “The impossible part about telling anyone’s life story is it never plays out in three acts; lives aren’t inherently dramatic, structurally speaking. Aristotle would not approve of the way your average human life is laid out. But then Brian hit on the idea of telling the story of Howard Hughes from the point of view of Clifford Irving, and that seemed to me to be genius, because Irving’s hoax had a perfect dramatic structure for the spine of the film — conception (of the hoax idea and of Hughes as a young man), execution (of the hoax itself and Hughes as an adult running his empire and his love life), and collapse (hoax revealed and Hughes’ descent into mental illness).”
“That’s a vast project,” De Palma told Entertainment Tonight Online, “because his life has so many aspects to it. To convey it into a compelling dramatic story is a great challenge.” Nevertheless, Koepp says that this approach, “influenced by half a dozen books, not least by Irving’s own boastings about his scheme, in various public record articles and books,” gave him a unique advantage over the other Hughes projects, since he was not limited to the facts of Hughes’ life, but Irving’s portrait of him. “Since we were telling the story via his lying Boswell,” he explains, referring to Dr Samuel Johnson’s biographer, “we had access to the whole of his life. We encapsulated his childhood in a speech or two, then focused on three eras, which roughly paralleled the three chapters of the Irving story: conception, execution, collapse.” There were many aspects of Hughes’ life — or, at least, Irving’s interpretation of it — that interested Koepp. Above all, though, “it was the fingernails. I just remember being a kid and watching the CBS news during the Irving hoax, and they had all those reporters crowded around a speaker box in Los Angeles interviewing Hughes over the phone line, and he was denying all the eccentricities of his lifestyle that Irving had posited, and it just had the opposite effect of what he intended. Because you couldn’t see him, your mind drew a truly insane portrait of the guy on the other end of the line.”
One equally bizarre aspect of the De Palma/Koepp project, entitled Mr Hughes, was the fact that Nicolas Cage planned to play dual roles in the film: Howard Hughes and Clifford Irving. “That was Brian’s idea, but I never agreed with it,” Koepp admits. “I felt they were both such strong roles that we had a great chance to get two terrific actors. I also felt the stunt would be distracting, and didn’t contribute much.” Nevertheless, the conceit of having Oscar-winner and $20 million man Cage play the subject and architect of the fraudulent autobiography arguably gave the project an advantage over the Hughes brothers’ proposed film, and Mutual Film Company’s own take on The Hoax, scripted by William Wheeler. Nevertheless, says Koepp, “There have been Howard Hughes projects floating around for decades. We tried not to worry about them. We knew [ours] was probably doomed, but we figured since we had a director and a star we probably had a leg up.”
Echoing the last years of Hughes himself, Koepp holed up in a hotel room in New York, writing the script in “a crazy burst in May and June 1998. The first draft was dated July 4th, which I liked,” he recalls. “I was very happy with it. Brian loved it. I still think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written.” Unfortunately, in the interim, Snake Eyes had failed to match its box office and critical expectations — as Koepp puts it, “just not big enough: didn’t lose money, but didn’t make any either” — as a result of which Disney put the project in turnaround, despite having spent a reported $1.75 million on the script. “Nobody wanted Brian and Nic back on another movie, especially a (very) expensive biography. It was sad, I had lots of people calling me up to say it’s one of the best scripts they ever read, but of course they wouldn’t be making it. People say that to you all the time, even about dreck, but this time I kind of believed them. Foolishly, probably. I don’t know, I loved it. Still do.
“I made a brief run at directing it myself for a much smaller budget than Brian felt he needed,” Koepp adds. “[I] had dinner with Nic to talk about it and he seemed very enthusiastic, but then I never heard back. He’d lost his nerve, I think.” By that time, Cage had arguably satisfied his desire to play dual roles in a single film with his Oscar-nominated turn in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation, in which he plays screenwriting twins trying to crack an adaptation of an eccentric man’s biography. Would Koepp, who has since directed Stir of Echoes and an adaptation of Stephen King’s novella Secret Window, Secret Garden, consider anyone else for the role of Howard Hughes? “Johnny Depp,” he says. “He’s one of our greatest actors. Fearless and inventive. I’m biased,” he adds, referring to his collaboration with Depp on Secret Window, Secret Garden, “but I know I’m hardly alone in this opinion. Unfortunately, Nic Cage is also one of the producers of Mr Hughes and won’t let the thing go, either. So it’s stuck in limbo. Maybe someday I’ll try to pry it out of his fingers.”
In June 1999, Variety announced that Michael Mann, director of Heat and The Insider, had set up a Howard Hughes project under his deal with Disney — the same studio which had bailed on De Palma’s project. Leonardo DiCaprio was reportedly on board to portray Hughes as the dashing, womanising aviator of the 1930s, from a script by Gladiator co-screenwriter John Logan, who had detailed the making of one RKO Pictures production, Citizen Kane, in RKO 281. “Leo’s been phenomenal to work with,” Logan later enthused to BBCi Films. “He is such an intelligent and polite and responsive young artist. When I first met him, I didn’t know what to expect. I thought, ‘Is he just going to be a movie star?’ But he was so polite and so completely committed and involved and going through it page by page, discussing and tweaking things, I couldn’t be more impressed.” Charles Higham, author of Howard Hughes: The Secret Life — which documented Hughes’ alleged homosexual affair with Cary Grant, and his arrest for molesting a young man in Santa Monica — was among those to comment on DiCaprio’s casting. “Hughes was childlike in many ways, pampered and spoiled, and he was very self-centered and self-absorbed,” he told the New York Post. “There is something in DiCaprio’s personality which is very singular and concentrated, and I think [he’d] do well at conveying a self-obsessed, self-concerned personality.” Added Mann, “Leonardo has all of those qualities of the young Hughes — he’s high flying, has lots of sexuality and is iconoclastic.”
After the commercial failure of Mann’s critically lauded The Insider and the lacklustre performance of The Beach, DiCaprio’s first starring role in the wake of Titanic, Disney appeared to have second thoughts about what would inevitably be another big-budget production, and soon put yet another Howard Hughes project in turnaround. While Mann went on to direct another biopic, Ali, New Line picked up his still-untitled Howard Hughes film in February 2000, with studio president Michael De Luca describing the film as “Hughes’ formative years while he was setting air-speed records and charging through Hollywood,” and Mann as “the quintessential actor’s director who has proven time and again that his gift for dramatic storytelling is rivalled by none.” The fact that Logan’s take on the Hughes story ended with the triumphant test flight of the Spruce Goose on 2 November 1947, long before the dashing womaniser became a reclusive paranoiac, suggested that it would be easier to secure financing for the film, since Titanic star DiCaprio would not be required to cover his matinée idol features with heavy makeup to play the older Hughes. Nevertheless, when De Luca left New Line, the untitled project was put in turnaround again, although Mann and DiCaprio remained committed to it.
In March 2000, Alan Ladd Jr entered the fray with a project closely linked to actress Terry Moore (née Helen Koford), who was married to Hughes between 1949 and 1956, and won the right to call herself Hughes’ widow after a protracted legal battle. “I never got a divorce from Howard,” she explains. “I left him because I thought he was cheating on me, and married Stewart Cramer.” A staunch defender of Hughes and naturally antipathetic to many of the published biographies, Moore met Ladd through a mutual friend and urged him to tell her version of events in a film project to counterbalance productions focussing on the more bizarre, and possibly baseless, stories surrounding the troubled tycoon.
“Much of what has been written about him was just false,” Ladd told Variety. “He never had those huge fingernails and toenails, that was just not true.” Nevertheless, he added, “There are some wonderful anecdotes. He was deaf in one ear, which caused his shyness, and his mother had a major clean fetish. In fact, when he came over, he would have to wash his hands in lye — all kinds of awful stuff.” More shocking were Moore’s claims that her ex-husband’s death was caused by a group of former employees who kept him isolated from the world. “He was kept a drugged, virtual prisoner,” said Ladd. “It’s just a horrible story.” The basis of the film would be two books by Moore which Ladd had optioned, The Passions of Howard Hughes and The Beauty and the Billionaire, as well as Moore’s ‘life rights.’ “What I want to tell is the story of his true genius,” he stated. “I’m not interested in his sleeping with Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Katharine Hepburn. This would approach the genius of a man, while exposing the myths and truths, not the sexploitations.” Whether this was the version of events likely to appeal to Hollywood, however, was open to question. Although no actor was connected with the Ladd project, Moore herself reveals a number of candidates whom she would find suitable. “Jeremy Irons, Pierce Brosnan or Nicolas Cage would all be very interesting,” she says. “You could go with Tom Hanks — he’s got the same kind of qualities that Howard had: he’s tall and lanky and has that kind of sweetness about him, and great charisma.” Moore claims that licensed pilot John Travolta had bought one of Hughes’ old aircraft to endear himself to her, and that Nicolas Cage took flying lessons in a bid to win the role. “So when you come down to it, there’s really a lot of people.”
As the twenty-first century dawned, more Hughes movie projects began to emerge. New Regency, which was once lined up to partner Disney in the Mann-DiCaprio production, revealed its intention to make a film of its own, pairing Edward Norton — who had won his breakthrough role in Primal Fear after DiCaprio backed out — with veteran director Milos Forman. The untitled film had been scripted by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who had co-written two other biopics for director Forman: The People Vs. Larry Flynt and Man on the Moon, the story of comedian Andy Kaufman. “Ten years ago, we would have said, ‘How can you go up against Warren Beatty?’ and now it’s, ‘How can you go up against Michael Mann and Leonardo?’” Alexander told Variety. Karaszewski, meanwhile, admitted that fierce competition from fellow filmmakers made the project a dicey prospect. “As writers, the problem is we’d have to spend the year working hard before finding out the project across the street had gotten a green light and we’ve wasted our time,” he said. “With both Andy Kaufman and Larry Flynt, we knew we were the only ones.”
Events took a turn for the weird in February 2001, when Inside.com reported that Charles Evans Jr, nephew of one-time studio head and film producer Robert Evans, was suing New Line Cinema, Michael Mann and Artists Management Group (AMG), claiming that the Howard Hughes project he had nurtured for years had been taken away from him. “No one has worked harder to bring the story of Howard Hughes to the screen in contemporary Hollywood than Evans,” Pat Broeske, co-author of Howard Hughes: The Untold Story, asserted. “It is a passion of Charlie Evans.” In his lawsuit, Evans claimed to have conceived the idea for a film about Hughes’ tempestuous youth in 1993, and spent several years poring over the details of his life, before securing the rights to adapt The Untold Story for a film. Through his company Accapella Films, Evans hired actor Kevin Spacey to direct the film, securing financing from New Regency, which hired Jack Fincher to write a screenplay. Meanwhile, Evans learned that DiCaprio was interested in playing Hughes, and entered into negotiations with DiCaprio’s manager at AMG, Rick Yorn. “As a result of these discussions,” the lawsuit stated, “Yorn, acting on behalf of DiCaprio, informed Evans that DiCaprio would never join the project as long as any director (i.e. Spacey) not selected by DiCaprio, was attached.” After what he described as “many sleepless nights”, Evans picked DiCaprio over Spacey, and when DiCaprio settled on Michael Mann as his favoured director and made a studio production pact, Evans found himself cut out of the deal. The lawsuit was eventually settled, with Evans winning the right to a credit as producer, along with Mann and his partner Sandy Climan, DiCaprio, and co-financer Graham King, president of Initial Entertainment Group.
Yet another Howard Hughes project emerged when Variety announced in September 2001 that William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist and The French Connection, would produce and direct a “feature film or telefilm or miniseries” based on Richard Hack’s book Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters: The Definitive Biography of the First American Billionaire, based on archive material supplied by Hughes associate Robert Mahue, who would serve as a consultant on the film. “I’ve been fascinated by Hughes ever since I came to Hollywood in the sixties,” said Friedkin, then preparing to direct Tommy Lee Jones (who had, coincidentally, portrayed the title character in the 1977 TV movie The Amazing Howard Hughes) in The Hunted. “He is a kind of King Lear — without the daughters. There are so many stories: his genius as a visionary, the weird Hollywood saga, how he transformed Vegas, how he revised the airline industry — and, of course, the sex.”
Friedkin went on to reveal that he intended to begin the epic biopic, which he admitted could run to three hours, with Hughes as a sixteen-year-old schoolboy who, upon his father’s death, inherits the family business, the Hughes Tool Co. Asked about casting, Friedkin listed the usual suspects: Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp, Edward Norton — all of whom were already attached to, or hovering around, other Hughes projects. At the time, Friedkin was embroiled in a court battle over profits for Warner Bros’ The Exorcist, and the fact that the rights to Hack’s book had been purchased by Warner Bros subsidiary Castle Rock suggested that the film might find a home there. Within a few months, however, Friedkin had ceded the director’s chair to writer-director Christopher Nolan, who had followed his mind-bending Memento with a star-studded remake of Scandinavian thriller Insomnia. “It was the extreme nature of his story [that attracted me],” Nolan told SF Chronicle. “Here was someone who had everything and nothing at the same time.” Speaking to christophernolan.com, he added, “It’s about the extremes to which one man can live — the glamour, the wealth, then the claustrophobic unhappiness.”
Nolan set to work on the script after Insomnia wrapped, only mildly concerned about the legacy of unproduced Howard Hughes scripts. “It is the sort of great unmade Hollywood movie, and if you ask me why, I don’t know and I don’t want to find out,” Nolan stated. “But I think casting is a large part of it, and I think Jim Carrey is just perfect for the role. He’ll be able to pull off something I don’t think many performers could.” Speaking to The Calgary Sun, he added, “Jim was born to play Hughes. He has this amazing gift to channel real people. I’m convinced his Howard Hughes will be every bit as astonishing as his Andy Kaufman was in Man on the Moon.” As Carrey himself told Entertainment Weekly, “In certain ways, I probably am him. I want to find out what personal chasm needed to be filled — his ‘Rosebud’,” he added, a reference to the obsessive subject of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. “Hughes is like everyone else, trying to find that thing you’re missing, but it’s in the fire and you have to let it go, you don’t go on and you don’t grow up.”
When Carrey became attached to the Christopher Nolan project, Michael Mann decided to step aside as director of the John Logan-scripted Howard Hughes film, to which Leonardo DiCaprio had remained attached since Mann had brought it to New Line from Disney two years earlier. Mann’s decision allowed director Martin Scorsese, then busy directing DiCaprio in Gangs of New York, to take over as pilot of the Hughes project, newly titled The Aviator. As Variety reported it, “Mann apparently agreed to step aside as director because the Carrey-Nolan project looked ready to go, and he didn’t want to hold up the DiCaprio pic; when their first choice, Scorsese, said yes, his decision was made easier.” Scorsese’s love of old Hollywood made him a natural choice as director of a film about Hughes’ Hollywood years. And yet, as he later told Variety, “I was never, like so many others, obsessed with Howard Hughes.” It was DiCaprio, he said, who brought the script to his attention during the shooting of Gangs of New York, “but by page three of the screenplay I knew this was a film I had to do.”
By early 2002, the race between the various competing Hughes projects had been won, with The Aviator having emerged as the front-runner, thanks to a financing deal struck between Miramax, Warner Bros and IEG (which also co-financed Ali and Gangs of New York) to back the $100 million-plus picture, which amassed an impressive supporting cast, including Cate Blanchett, Kate Beckinsale, Willem Dafoe, Ian Holm, Alec Baldwin, John C. Reilly, Alan Alda and even pop star Gwen Stefani (as Jean Harlow). Although The Aviator won five Academy Awards from eleven nominations — including a Best Actor nod for DiCaprio as Hughes — the film was hardly a financial success, and did not inspire many Hollywood studios to fast-track their own Howard Hughes properties.
One exception was Mark Gordon’s long-gestating film adaptation of The Hoax, released to widespread critical acclaim in 2007, with Richard Gere portraying Clifford Irving for director Lasse Hallström. In the meantime, even the success of Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and Inception didn’t empower director Christopher Nolan to get his own Howard Hughes film off the ground, although rumours persist that he might make it after The Dark Knight Rises, for release in 2014 — giving The Aviator a ten-year-wide berth. “There’s no sense of any kind of race,” the director told The Z Review, “simply because it’s too difficult a subject. And I think that’s why these projects have tended not to happen in the past. Any time you go into making a film there are other factors around and you just have to believe in the project you are doing, that it will find its way to get made.” Nevertheless, David Koepp, who has described his own project, Mr Hughes, as “deader than a doornail,” suggests that there might still be room for his own film to be made at some point in the future — especially if he can get Johnny Depp, now a bona fide box office star, on board. After all, he says, “Stranger things have happened, many of which are documented in Mr Hughes!”
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1 It was later followed by a 3D Russell vehicle, The French Line, which, the ads promised, would “knock both your eyes out!”