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Tagline: Some men dream the future. He built it.
An original screenplay by John Logan, "The Aviator" tells the story of aviation pioneer Howard Hughes (DiCaprio), the eccentric billionaire industrialist and Hollywood film mogul, famous for romancing some of the world's most beautiful women.
The drama recounts the years of his life from the late 1920s though the 1940s, an epoch when Hughes was directing and producing Hollywood movies and test flying innovative aircraft he designed and created. A daredevil pilot, the most famous flyer since Charles Lindbergh, Hughes became a major force in commercial aviation. He was a mythic figure in the America of his day, imbued with an aura of excitement, glamour and mystery.
"The Aviator" looks at Hughes' emotional life, and his love affairs with two Hollywood legends, elegant, Yankee-bred screen star Katharine Hepburn in the 1930s, and the sensual and luminous screen beauty of the 1940s, Ava Gardner. It also chronicles Hughes' struggle with his physical disabilities and phobias, and with his increasingly erratic, obsessive-compulsive behavior that leads him ultimately to isolate himself from his associates and withdraw from the world.
Writing Howard Hughes: About the Screenplay
Though he is remembered today as the eccentric billionaire who became a mysterious recluse, few know the full story of the industrialist Howard Hughes – nor how Hughes, as a young man in love with risk, beauty and technology, became a towering figure who made bold leaps in business, aviation and movies, only to lose himself in a world of fear and paranoia.
This is the story that comes to the fore in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator. The project originated with Leonardo DiCaprio who, after reading about the biography of Hughes at a young age, became passionate in his quest to make a film about this uniquely American life. DiCaprio was well aware that several big Hollywood stars had tried to no avail to make movies about Hughes before.
DiCaprio originally brought the idea to director Michael Mann, who in turn brought in screenwriter John Logan (“Gladiator”). DiCaprio and Mann decided to take a different approach. They wanted to focus on Hughes’ explosively creative and visionary youth rather than his descent into madness in later years. After Mann chose instead to produce the film, he and DiCaprio agreed on a short list of directors. Topping it was the director Mann and DiCaprio esteemed most, Martin Scorsese. He agreed to direct.
After Scorsese was on board, Graham King's Initial Entertainment Group agreed to finance the movie and King became a producer along with Mann and his Forward Pass partner Sandy Climan. Once rights were secured from Forward Pass, King brought in Miramax followed by Warner Brothers to partner on domestic distribution.
King having worked with Scorsese as an executive producer and financier of Gangs of New York feels strongly that Scorsese’s love of movie history and filmmaking techniques mirrored the same qualities in Hughes in a wonderfully synergistic way – and that Scorsese brought his own sense of risk-taking and invention to making the film. “Marty is so terrific with detail and creating period realistically, and he has so much love and respect for the era of filmmaking during which Howard Hughes made his mark, he was clearly right for this story,” says King.
He continues: “Marty has certain things in common with the character of Howard Hughes in The Aviator in that he’s someone who’s very precise in what he wants, who can invent things, who loves the process of making movies. This was a chance for Marty to do something unlike anything he’s done before – a story set in Hollywood. It was such a pleasure to work by Marty's side, everyday, on set."
“Howard Hughes, The Aviator, performed feats of incredible bravery in his life, and I was drawn to the script,” Scorsese says. “Here was a Nineteenth Century-type figure who was a pioneer in two of the greatest phenomena of the Twentieth Century: aviation, with his innovative designs and speed records, and filmmaking, with such movies as ‘Hell’s Angels’ and ‘Scarface.’ Hughes was also a great showman, but his story is the story, ultimately, of greed, corruption and madness.”
“When I developed the screenplay with John Logan for over a year and half the earliest decision was to end the picture in 1947, with the first day of the rest of Howard’s life,” says Mann. “And that was because we decided the most interesting central conflict…the most personal... should be between Howard as a visionary, and his mental disease…including his awareness of it and all that it lost him in human terms, isolating him…”
Logan had been astonished by the sheer vastness of Hughes’ life. “There was so much in his story that fascinated me: American history and biography and the kind of large, complex characters that I love to write about,” he notes. “Also, I felt from the beginning that Leo was perfect casting for the role of Hughes, so I was very excited to write with him in mind.”
Logan spent an entire year researching Hughes’ life, reading every book, memoir and archival materials he could get his hands on – and coming away with an entirely fresh vision of Howard Hughes as less of a myth and more of a brilliant, yet flawed, human being. “It was a fascinating process of discovery,” he recalls. “I think most of us start out with a certain image of Hughes –and it’s usually the man at the end of his life, the crazy, deeply eccentric recluse in his hotel room with long fingernails and empty Kleenex boxes as shoes. But I found someone else altogether. I discovered Howard as a vibrant, young hero who was a driving force in both aviation and Hollywood at their most glamorous.”
He continues: “I started by reading all the standard biographies and then branched out into the other areas in which Hughes was concerned. I read about aeronautics and engineering and why Hughes’ innovations were such amazing achievements; I learned about the world of commercial aviation and the corporate battles between Pan Am and TWA; and I also read about the days of early Hollywood filmmaking when silent film gave way to sound, about the fights over the Hollywood production code, and about the lives of the many magnificent women with whom Hughes was romantically involved.”
When Logan at last started writing he decided to concentrate the time frame of the story between two major milestones in Hughes’ life: opening with the production of “Hell’s Angels” in the late 1920s, when Hughes was just barely an adult, and culminating with TWA’s emergence as a major international airline in the late 1940s. Between these two junctures of high achievement, Logan began to explore the torment and tumult at the center of Hughes’ character so as to provide a glimpse inside both his dreams and his demons.
As with any film biography, Logan had to make some dramatic allowances along the way in order to fit the story to the art form. “Covering twenty years of a man’s life in a couple of hours necessarily meant that I had to compress some events, combine characters and shift around chronology,” explains Logan, “but the aim was always to capture the man, if not everything that happened to him, as truly as possible.”
Adds Graham King: “Howard Hughes led such a tremendous life, but John Logan found a way to distill it down to the most compelling and entertaining parts of the story, between the daredevil stunts of ‘Hell’s Angels’ to the triumph of Hughes flying The Hercules. He shows many different elements of Howard’s reality that people don’t really know about, from the Senate hearings to his love affairs.”
Once Martin Scorsese came aboard, Logan was inspired to explore the story in even greater depth, delving into every aspect of the larger-than-life character’s internal makeup. Logan, Scorsese and DiCaprio worked together for months, fine-tuning the story in their own ways. “Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio were the most exacting, supportive and willing of colleagues, and they challenged me to write the best script possible,” Logan says. “What was important to each of us was to maintain a honesty as we adapted the details of Hughes’s story. Marty and Leo are fanatical about the truth and were committed to understanding the character in the depth of his soul.”
He continues: “The structure of the story didn’t change so much, but it was more the approach to various scenes, the intensity of certain incidents. Marty brings an incredible visual panache to telling a story, and he has such an artistic feel for momentum, for keeping the action on track that he brought an enormous amount to the process. And Leo has a wonderful ear for period dialogue, for what seems appropriate to the character at any given moment. He was very creative about pitching story ideas and dialogue. Each of us is an alpha personality, and we all loved to talk about Howard Hughes, so it was like electricity shooting out of the room at every meeting.”
Although Hughes had affairs with a number of famous women, Logan also chose to narrow the story focus down to two of the most important in Hughes’ life. “We decided to focus first on his relationship with Katharine Hepburn, which is considered to be the most important relationship of his life, and secondly with Ava Gardner, who was a part of Howard’s life for two decades,” comments Logan.
Logan also explored some of Hughes’ medical maladies – his childhood loss of hearing that made him nearly deaf as well as the undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder that combined with his deeply-rooted germ phobia to provoke some of his strange behavior. “Howard was acutely aware of his fragility,” Logan says, “He had a constant fear of going mad.”
“I think he felt the darkness out there pressing in on him and knew that one day he would lose the battle, as he did. But to me, the man’s self- knowledge is what makes him so interesting and poignant, a sad, lonely yet brilliant man--a tragic figure.”
Summarizes Martin Scorsese: “One of the most fascinating elements of the story of The Aviator is seeing this extraordinarily handsome and bright young man, so full of life, become a man who’s tortured by his own shortcomings.”
Adds Leonard DiCaprio: “Howard Hughes is probably one of the 20th century’s most iconic and mysterious figures – and in some ways the more you learn about him the more mysterious he becomes. There are so many facets to Howard that it makes him an endlessly fascinating character. Just when you think you have him figured out, there’s another layer to the story. He was a dreamer and a visionary, but the irony of it all is that even after all of his accomplishments – huge industrialist, pioneering aviator, big-time producer and director – at the end of the day he felt very much alone.”
Being Howard Hughes: About the Casting
Leonardo DiCaprio has been fascinated by Howard Hughes for a decade – ever since he first read Hughes’ biography – and pursued the role with a passion, becoming an executive producer on the film. Yet, he admits that even when The Aviator began to take off, DiCaprio remained a little daunted by the immensity of the character. A man of such huge contradictions – at once gallant and doomed, visionary and mad – poses many challenges and added to that was Hughes’ worldwide renown as a symbol of unimaginable wealth and eccentricity. “So many people already have a strong impression of Howard Hughes – and that alone made the role intimidating,” says DiCaprio. “To me, this meant I had to come off as authentic as possible.”
To achieve that authenticity the actor lived and breathed Howard Hughes for months, reading biographies, listening to tape recordings, watching old movies – and even going so far as to learn how to fly the daredevil aerial maneuvers that seemed, ironically, to keep Hughes grounded during his most productive years. As he delved further into the character, DiCaprio found himself relating to elements of Hughes’ life, especially Hughes’ struggles with celebrity and relentless pursuit by the media. “He was the last private man in America,” DiCaprio comments. “Despite his ambition, he had a strong need for solitude and I can definitely empathize with that.”
Most of all, DiCaprio believes Hughes represents the kind of adventurous, risk-taking, slightly unhinged personality that tends to make a large impact on the world. “He was an incredibly complex man, but the one thing I think you can say about him is that he took chances that nobody else dared to imagine during his time,” he says. “He loved aviation and movies, and he made a lasting mark in both worlds.”
Still, for all the glamour and adventure in the story, what really got to DiCaprio were the most emotional and intimate scenes when Hughes is naked and alone with only his fears keeping him company. “The best times for me were when we were filming the isolated Howard Hughes – then, it was Scorsese and I working together in the zone, so to speak, making things up as they came along, improvising, digging very, very deep,” he says. “For me, those are the greatest of memories making this film.”
Producer Graham King was impressed from the outset by DiCaprio’s drive to play Howard Hughes. “You could tell this wasn’t just another actor going after a normal role – he was truly passionate about it,” says King. “He lived this screenplay for so many years that there was a lot of emotion behind it. When Leo would talk about Howard there was a sparkle in his eyes and you could really envision him in the part. Once on the set, it was just remarkable how he carried it off, transitioning from a young man full of ideas to the older Howard with his demons.”
King explains that DiCaprio even consulted with experts in the field of obsessivecompulsive disorder to better understand the illness that troubled Hughes even as he was making pioneering efforts in aviation and film. “Leo knew that he had to play Hughes dead-on,” says King. “He gives a surprisingly emotional performance that I think really captures the man. And I have to say that I’ve never seen an actor work as hard as Leo did everyday on The Aviator.”
Joining DiCaprio in bringing the world around Hughes’ to life is an ensemble of topflight actors – each of whom found a unique fascination in the historical, and in some cases iconic, figures they bring to life. In the role of Katharine Hepburn – perhaps the greatest love of Hughes’ life – is Cate Blanchett, whom Martin Scorsese sought out for the role. Blanchett is no stranger to playing characters from real life, having won a Golden Globe and received an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth I in “Elizabeth,” but she saw playing the legendary blue-blooded Hepburn as an entirely different challenge.
“It’s one thing to play on screen someone who has lived and breathed, someone people have an image of and regard as an icon, but it’s another thing entirely to play her in the very medium in which she has become so revered,” Blanchett says. “The truth is that I don’t think I would have attempted such a feat for anyone other than Martin Scorsese.”
She continues: “Marty and I talked about it a lot. He didn’t want me to do any kind of burlesque or cabaret act in recreating her. He wanted something deeper. He wanted me to observe her mannerisms and her gestures and her screen persona, and try to capture the truth of her personality and something of her extraordinary energy.
“I must say it was great fun trawling through her films, seeing them all over again. She came from an era in American cinema in which people like herself and Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart are remembered for the way they spoke in addition to the way they looked. Her voice is so distinctive, but I know as an actor myself the voice one uses playing a part is different from one’s private voice, so I looked at the broadcast interviews she gave. She didn’t give too many when she was young, but the one she gave to Dick Cavett in 1973 when you could still hear the youthfulness in her voice was very helpful.”
Blanchett also found herself wondering about the attraction between Hepburn and Hughes. “Howard and Katharine are very similar in many ways,” she observes. “They’re both outsiders, both extremely eccentric, both so attractive. Yet, in a way, what they see as their deficiencies is the very thing that draws them to each other. They are from different social backgrounds, true, but they both have enough money to liberate themselves from the constraints of society. Even though Katharine is positive and outgoing and Howard more quiet and introspective, I think they saw something similar in one another.”
The role of Ava Gardner, the legendary 1940s screen goddess with whom Howard forms an enduring emotional attachment went to Kate Beckinsale. Beckinsale was delighted to play a woman with such a famously iron-jawed constitution. “I think the story goes that it was Clark Gable who said, ‘Oh, Ava Gardner’s a great guy who can drink with the boys and curse with a sailor’s mouth but who happens to be trapped inside the body of the world’s most beautiful woman.’ In other words, she was a terrific gal, big-hearted and salt-of-the earth, and messed up like everyone else.”
John C. Reilly, who co-starred in “Gangs of New York” and received a 2002 Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his performance in “Chicago,” was cast in another vital role: that of Noah Dietrich, Hughes Aircraft’s chief financial officer, who became one of Howard Hughes’ most intimate associates. The role of Dietrich -- the man who held the fabric of Hughes’ company together amidst all the chaos – intrigued the actor. “When you hear about Howard Hughes and his eccentric behavior and his grandiose plans, you understand someone had to stand behind him and take care of all the nuts and bolts. That someone was Noah,” the actor says.
For the role of Howard Hughes’ chief rival and arch-nemesis – the Yale-educated head of Pan American Airlines, Juan Trippe – the filmmakers looked to Alec Baldwin, who was recently nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in “The Cooler.” Baldwin, too, found himself deeply interested in his character, a man who though nowhere near as well known as Howard Hughes is considered by many to be largely responsible for the development of the modern commercial airline in the United States. A man renown for his tremendous powers of persuasion and savvy instincts, the role seemed a perfect match for Baldwin.
“Trippe was a great visionary,” says Baldwin. “He had the foresight in the 1920s and 30s to make commercial aviation the tremendous going concern it was going to be.” In many ways, Trippe was Hughes’ polar opposite – while Howard was a Texan maverick who always worked outside the system, Trippe hailed from the East Coast elite and was politically well connected – but they shared the same deep passion for flying. “I think they saw something similar in one another, which is often true of the greatest rivals,” observes Baldwin.
Alan Alda also joined the cast in an unusual turn as Maine Senator Owen Brewster, the powerful man who tried to bring down Howard Hughes with a public investigation, only to have the tables turned on him. “It was unusual casting,” admits Graham King, “but Marty had faith in Alan as a terrific character actor, and he really made the role come alive in unexpected ways. He played it so well you can just feel the corruption.”
Co-starring in other important roles are Academy Award nominee Jude Law as Errol Flyn, the “bad boy” of Hollywood; rock singer Gwen Stefani (No Doubt) who plays Jean Harlow, the 1930s blonde bombshell who became an enormous star in Hughes’ “Hell’s Angels”; Matt Ross as Glenn Odekirk, Hughes’ chief aeronautical engineer; Danny Huston as Jack Frye, the president of TWA; Ian Holm as an academic who gets drawn into Howard’s aeronautical exploits; Adam Scott as Howard’s press agent Johnny Meyer; and Kelli Garner as Faith Domergue, the fifteen year old beauty Howard hopes to make the next big star.
About Howard Hughes: His Life and Times
Born in 1905, at the start of the 20th Century, in Houston, Texas, Howard Hughes was the only child of Howard Robard Hughes, an oil wildcatter who made a considerable fortune patenting a revolutionary, rock-penetrating oil drill bit, and Dallas heiress Allene Gano Hughes, who taught Howard not to socialize with anyone who might be carrying diseasecausing germs. Ironically, during a childhood illness, Hughes lost much of his hearing and was plagued by a continual ringing in his ears throughout his life.
Howard demonstrated genius early on in math and mechanical engineering and by age 11, he had constructed what was likely the first wireless broadcast set in Houston.
At the age of 14, Howard took his first flying lessons and a life-long passion was born. As a child, he declared that he would one day be the world’s best pilot, the world’s best filmmaker and the world’s richest man – and he remained obsessed with flying, movies and wealth throughout his lifetime.
In 1922, Howard’s mother, Allene, passed away, followed in 1924 by the death of his father. At age 18, Hughes was now an orphan. He inherited an estate valued at close to a million dollars.
In 1925, Howard fought for control of his father’s company, Hughes Tool. Since he was not yet 21, he had to go to court to be declared a legal adult. Winning the judgement, Hughes became the company head, but rather than run it, he soon left for Jazz Age Hollywood to pursue a career in film, financed by the company’s substantial earnings.
Throughout the late 1920s, Hughes worked feverishly on his epic, “Hell’s Angels,” acquiring the largest private air force in the world in the making of the film. During filming, Hughes did many of his own stunts and even crashed his scout plane, breaking his cheekbone. Chasing after perfection, at the end of production, Hughes decided to re-shoot the entire film to accommodate the latest movie technology: sound. The film ultimately cost a record $3.8 million, a stunning revelation after the Stock Market Crash of 1929.
“Hell’s Angels” was released in 1930 in the midst of the Great Depression to resounding success and box office records. It rocketed the then-bit-actress Jean Harlow to superstar status. He followed that film with “The Age For Love,” “The Front Page,” “Cock of the Air,” the legendary “Scarface” and “Sky Devils.”
Having developed an indelible passion for aviation, and believing it to be the industry of the future, Hughes founded Hughes Aircraft in 1932, and hired the best and brightest engineers in the country to push aviation to new heights of speed and efficiency.
In 1935, Hughes set the new air speed record, flying at an unprecedented 352 mph in the H-1 airplane he designed. One year later, he set another record, this time for transcontinental flight, journeying from Los Angeles to New Jersey in a then-speedy 9 hours and 27 minutes.
One of Hughes’ most famous flights took place in July of 1938, when he set a new record for flying around the world in 3 days, 19 hours and 17 minutes. Upon his return to Manhattan, he was greeted with a ticker tape parade down Broadway.
4 By the late 1930’s and early 40s Hughes has become a Hollywood legend, romantically linked with a number of leading screen stars, including Bettie Davis, Ginger Rogers, Rita Hayworth and perhaps most importantly, Katharine Hepburn, with whom he had a three-year relationship and Ava Gardner, with whom Howard Hughes had an on-again-off-again tumultuous relationship for two decades.
It was 1939 when Hughes bought up a majority of TWA stock and took over the airliner. Making a deal with Lockheed, he asked their engineers to secretly design a plane that could out-perform any currently in service and provide a more comfortable flying experience. The result was The Constellation, which would be a tremendous success for more than a decade.
During World War II, Howard Hughes hoped to transform Hughes Aircraft into a major supplier of planes for the war effort but his ambitious experimental planes were never successful.
In the mid 1940s, as part of his effort for the war, Hughes began a massive project to build the largest airplane in history – made mostly of wood. Known to Hughes by the mythic title The Hercules, it was ridiculed by detractors as “The Spruce Goose”
In 1943, Hughes produced and directed “The Outlaw,” a Western starring Jane Russell in a specially engineered push-up bra that caused the film to be banned leading to a protracted battle with the censors.
In 1944, Hughes was rumored to have suffered from the first of several mental breakdowns, showing signs of what is now known as obsessive-compulsive disorder and deep-seated paranoia.
1946 brought tragedy to Hughes when he crashed his experimental XF-11 reconnaissance plane into a Beverly Hills house, resulting in devestating, near-fatal injuries that would cause him pain for the rest of his lifeb
In 1947, Senator Owen Brewster of the Senate War Investigating Committee – a close friend of Hughes’ rival at Pan Am, Juan Trippe – announced that he was investigating Hughes for corruption. When Hughes fought back, revealing that Brewster had illicitly asked him to merge with Pan Am to avoid trouble, the Committee halted its investigation.
Later in 1947, Howard Hughes flew The Hercules in its one and only demonstration flight. The plane still holds the record to this day for the flying machine with the longest wingspan.
In 1953, Howard Hughes founded the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, one of the largest non-profit medical institutions in the United States.
Having perceived the imminent arrival of the Jet Age for years, in 1956, Hughes and TWA bought a fleet of Boeing 707s.
In 1958, Hughes gave his last public interview, avoiding the press for the next two decades.
In 1961, Hughes expanded further, founding Hughes Space and Communications, a designer and builder of commercial satellites, including the world’s first synchronous communications satellite, Syncom.
In 1966, Hughes sold his TWA stock for $546 million and moved to Las Vegas, where in the late 60s and 70, he turned his attention to buying hotels, casinos and land. Rumors of his eccentric behavior began to circulate widely and when the Desert Inn Hotel where he was living tried to evict him, he simply bought it and continued his reclusive life there.
Hughes was inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame in 1973 but was too ill to attend the ceremony.
Howard Hughes died in April, 1976 on an airplane en route from Acapulco, Mexico, with assets rumored to be worth $2 million but estimated at about $360 million by the IRS. He had become so reclusive and unrecognizable that the Medical Examiner was forced to lift Hughes’ fingerprints to assure it was really he who had died.
 Production notes provided by Miramax Films. |
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The Aviator
