Tales From Development Hell (24 page)

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.