by David Hughes
“What we asked Tab to do was try and update the version that Roland and I had written together,” says Devlin, “because we’d only ever done a first draft, we’d never really gotten to ‘write it out.’ When Tab came in, we were like, ‘Let’s really flesh this thing out the way we want to do it,’ and he did. He did a great job at it.” Murphy’s advantage, he says, was that the conceptual artwork was on hand to inspire the writing. “Tab had all of Roland’s artwork. I’ve got at least forty paintings of what the world looks like, some of whom he’d done with Dante Ferretti, and others with people he had worked with since Germany. It was Roland’s idea to turn the train into a kind of Titanic — this five-storey über-train, designed to look like it came out of the 1920s. And then of course this is supposed to take place in a world that exists underground. So it’s got this amazing design element to it.”
Hopes that Murphy’s take on the material might finally get ISOBAR the green light proved unfounded. “I never really heard the ins and outs of how aggressively they tried to get it set up and made, but I just know it was going to be an expensive movie — $120 million at the time, although I think he was trying to get it down to $80 million.” Says Devlin, “it was a $90 million movie back in 1991, so it would be more like $200 million today.” In the wake of his and Emmerich’s post-Patriot split, Devlin was having a difficult time getting anything made: while Emmerich went on to direct such mega-budget films as The Day After Tomorrow, 2012 and 10,000 B.C., Devlin’s output as producer had been somewhat lower profile, including the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, the bona fide box office flop Flyboys and TNT’s television series Leverage. Nevertheless, says Devlin, “We brought it out to Cannes, in about 2007, and much to our surprise all the buyers remembered it from way back when, so suddenly we had all these very high numbers for foreign sales, almost enough to go out and make the picture without anybody attached. But at the end of the day we weren’t able to get all the financing together, so I put it back into my refrigerator, and we’ve just kept working on it.”
More recently, Devlin found himself working with Marco Schnabel, who had graduated from crew member on the Austin Powers films to director of Mike Myers’ unloved comedy The Love Guru, and written two TV movie sequels for actor Noah Wyle (and producer Devlin): The Librarian: Return to King Solomon’s Mines (2006) and The Librarian III: The Curse of the Judas Chalice (2008). “We started talking about ISOBAR,” says Devlin, “and Marco just had this idea, this concept, that would make it much more emotional in the third act. And I just loved it, so I said, ‘Take a shot at it.’ We hired him, and he did. It was always fun, and the latest draft has all the fun, but now it’s more emotional.”
In the years since Stallone was on board, action heroes have evolved, with brains and heart winning out over muscle and firepower. Two decades after Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and one-time ISOBAR star Sylvester Stallone ruled, the new box office champions are Johnny Depp, Christian Bale and Robert Downey Jr. According to Devlin, ISOBAR’s central role reflects that change. “It’s a much grittier character now,” he says, “and it doesn’t have to be an action hero. What it has to be is someone who can carry the depth of the character because he’s going through a lot and he’s reliving a crisis in his life that happened years earlier, so it’s pretty tough. To me, someone like Clive Owen would be amazing.
“I think it’s a great project,” he adds, “and I still intend on making it. I’m still very optimistic that we’re going to get this thing going in the next couple of years.”
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1 Species director Roger Donaldson ultimately used the train as part of Sil’s dream, giving science fiction fans their only chance to see what might have been if Scott had decided to board The Train.
2 The scientific principle, at least, was sound: a vacuum-propelled locomotive developed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel was in use for some time, until the amount of sealant required to constantly re-seal the vacuum tubes running along the centre rail began to reach impractical levels, and the whole system was scrapped.
3 Murphy’s draft unscrambles the acronym to ‘Intercontinental Superconducting Oscillating Ballistic Automatic Railway’, in place of Uhls’ ‘Intercontinental Subterranean Oscillo-magnetic Ballistic Aerodynamic Railway.’
4 Reminiscent of the mutated ‘Plant 42’ in Resident Evil.
5 The answer, of course, is ‘Yes.’ The scientists who created it could presumably make another one using the same formula.
WHO WANTS TO BE A BILLIONAIRE?
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 h
is 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 peopl
e 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.”
