Bruce Logan: On the Beach and On the Moon

I first met Bruce Logan when he was getting married. Well, sort of. Back in 1974 I was serving as production secretary on the Roger Corman gangster romp, Big Bad Mama, which starred the odd triangle of Angie Dickinson, William Shatner, and Tom Skerritt. (Yes, there were some wild and crazy sex scenes.) Part of my job was to keep track of cast and crew. So I knew it was a very big deal that Bruce Logan was our director of photography. After all, he had been a young visual effects whiz, working directly with Stanley Kubrick and SFX master Douglas Trumbull on 2001: A Space Odyssey. A self-taught animator, he began work on 2001 in 1965, at age 19,  and stayed with the project through the film’s release in 1968. That same year, he left his native England, coming to California to collaborate with Trumbull on Antonioni’s apocalyptic Zabriskie Point (1970).

 Given his classy resumé, we were all impressed that Bruce Logan was willing to work on low-budget Roger Corman fare. But there he was, fitting in nicely with our misfit crew. The last day of our three-week Big Bad Mama shoot, we threw ourselves a wrap party on the site of our final location, Malibu’s Paradise Cove. To add to the fun, we staged on the sand a mock wedding for Bruce and his girlfriend, who were apparently planning to get hitched for real in the near future. A veteran actor, Royal Dano, had played a scoundrel of a minister in the film: he was persuaded to put on his clerical robes and conduct the ceremony with great theatrical flourish. If memory serves, most of the ad hoc wedding party ended up splashing in the waves. And a good time was had by all.

 I didn’t think much about Bruce over the years, until filmmaker friends invited me to a gathering at which he was being given a lifetime achievement award. This was around 2009, and his filmography had swelled to include providing visual and optical effects for the first Star Wars film (1977) and cinematography for the ambitious sci-fi epic, Tron (1982), in which a computer hacker is abducted into a digital world. I was then working on a book that took readers back to the film year 1967, and I had a hunch that Bruce would have some opinions about that era in which both he and I were youthful film enthusiasts.  He graciously invited me to his Pacific Palisades home for what turned out to be a long, fascinating chat. He was an imposing figure: tall, with white hair and beard. His clothing was conservative, except for a beaded necklace and that heavy silver skull bracelet on his left wrist. Underneath it all, I suspect, Bruce Logan would forever be a bit of a hippie, though he no longer had the long flowing locks of his 2001 days.

 Our conversation was wide-ranging. Of course we discussed Kubrick’s prescience in making 2001, which features convincing-looking computer screens and read-outs decades before desktop computers actually existed. With the advent of the U.S. space program, new data was coming in about the lunar surface, at the very same time that Kubrick and company were deciding what their moon’s back side should look like. They thought of altering their concept to match the science, then decided that, frankly speaking, “the moon looks kind of boring.” Ultimately, they stuck by their own artistic vision, one that would prove inspiring to countless Baby Boomers.

 Bruce Logan died on April 10, 2025. I wish we could have had another long, fruitful chat.

 

 

War is Hell: a Memorial Day Memory

The upcoming Memorial Day weekend seems an apt time to look back on my years as story editor to Roger Corman at Concorde-New Horizons Pictures. In that era, circa 1986 through 1994. many of our action thrillers were set among the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam. Some of our most prolific screenwriters were Vietnam War vets who could write accurately about military weapons and reproduce the slang of grunts in the field. I myself had no similar war experience to call upon when I was tasked with finishing up the script of a Concorde writer who’d dropped the ball on one of our projects. But I did my best, and Beyond the Call of Duty became one of my six Concorde screenwriting credits.

Roger Corman’s Vietnam movies were all shot in the Philippines, where Roger’s buddy -- the legendary Cirio Santiago -- had access to weaponry, jungle foliage, and legions of actual Filipino soldiers who were only too happy to put on Vietnamese uniforms and die dramatically for the cameras. Authenticity was never more than the vaguest of goals. But my writing colleague Frank McAdams is capable of much better. Frank, after thirteen months in Vietnam, entered UCLA Film School. He wrote Stagecoach Bravo, based on his own Marine Corps experience, as his thesis film, and it went on to win the prestigious Samuel Goldwyn Screenwriting Competition. Later, after years of teaching screenwriting, he published The American War Film: History and Hollywood. More recently the University Press of Kansas put forth his Vietnam Rough Riders: A Convoy Commander’s Memoir (2013).

Some of the stories told in Frank’s memoir were already familiar to me from conversations we had had over lunch. There was, for instance, the major who took it upon himself to withhold from his troops those movies (like The Graduate and Dr. Strangelove) he considered offensively countercultural. But the episode that really stood out for me in Frank’s book began when, while in the process of writing a letter, he heard a commotion coming from the neighboring hooch (or canvas-walled living quarter). Peeking inside, he discovered a young Marine holding an M-16 rifle on eight U.S. Army officers and South Vietnamese Rangers. Hopped up on booze or drugs (or both), this Marine was mourning the deaths of two buddies by threatening the lives of eight men who were on his own side in the conflict. His weapon was set on full-automatic, and bloodshed seemed inevitable until Frank stepped in and managed to disarm him. For this gutsy act Frank received the Army-Marine Corps Medal. He continues to marvel that, in a few seconds’ time, he managed to prevent the sudden deaths of eight comrades-in-arms.

This dramatic real-life episode came back to me when I heard about the death of an actor named R. Lee Ermey. Ermey, who died this past April at age 74, was an actual Marine Corps drill instructor during the Vietnam era. After moving into acting, he found fame as the foul-mouthed  gunnery sergeant in the opening scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 military drama, Full Metal Jacket. The foul but funny language Ermey’s character uses to intimidate new recruits was drawn from his own Marine Corps experience. It’s a raw and powerful way to open a film, especially when it culminates in one of the newbies suddenly turning on  this man who has never let up on him. The resulting bloodshed slams home Kubrick’s war-is-hell message. Like Frank’s story of the young Marine, it reminds us that in wartime there’s death around every corner, and it sometimes comes from places we don’t expect.

Stanley Kubrick and the Joy of Turning Books into Movies

Stanley Kubrick, the subject of a major exhibit now at the L.A. County Museum of Art, was a great believer in turning to outside sources to spark his creative imagination. In the course of his directing career he adapted novels by writers as different as Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita), Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange), William Makepeace Thackeray (Barry Lyndon), and Stephen King (The Shining). At times he was extremely faithful to the author’s intentions. Elsewhere he took vast liberties. (For Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, he turned Peter George’s Red Alert from a cold-war thriller into the blackest of black comedies.) Kubrick explained his fondness for adaptation by saying, “What I like about not writing original material . . . is that you have this tremendous advantage of reading something for the first time.” He went on to call this a “falling-in-love reaction” to an existing text.

I came across this quote from Kubrick soon after having read Joseph McBride’s Writing in Pictures, which suggests that the best way to learn screenwriting is through the exercise of adapting a classic story from the page to the screen. (McBride shares his own adaptation of Jack London’s almost dialogue-free adventure story, “To Build a Fire,” as an example.) I myself have played hooky of late from my serious interest in Hollywood biography to read several recent novels. One of them would be a disaster as a motion picture. The other two are so nicely suited to cinematic adaptation that if I were a film producer I’d think about snapping them up.

Colm Toibin’s The Master (not to be confused with this year’s Paul Thomas Anderson film), is a fictionalized account of the later years of a great novelist, Henry James. Sticking closely to the known facts about the author’s life, Toibin’s work suggests how James’s writings evolved, and at what cost to the writer. It’s a quietly brilliant portrait of an artist who could see into the souls of others but kept his own inner life off-limits, even to himself. But there’s no conventional action, and few opportunities for visuals: this would be a really tough sell as a movie.

Then there’s March, an intense and surprising novel by Geraldine Brooks. March, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, takes the story of Louisa May Alcott’s prim Little Women family in a new direction. It shifts its focus from the four girls and their mother in Concord, Massachusetts to the father who was so largely absent from their lives because of his service as a Civil War chaplain. Brooks gives us battle scenes and grim hospital scenes aplenty, but also allows the idealistic Captain March an up-close look at the tragedies wrought by slavery. And yes, there’s a thread of raw sensuality that’s certainly absent from Alcott. Sex, violence, and period costumes -- what more could a movie want?

Another award-winning period novel is last year’s The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick DeWitt. But where March is serious and elegiac, The Sisters Brothers is a ribald fable. Set in the California of Gold-Rush days, it features two scruffy varmints who are killers for hire. One of them, Charlie, enjoys his trade. But his brother, Eli, tempers his vicious strength through the workings of a warm heart. Their story is a grizzly one, but it also contains such endearing moments as Eli’s discovery of the pleasures of tooth-brushing. I’m told John C. Reilly has optioned this novel. He’d be perfect casting, but I’d love to see the Coen Brothers get their hands on The Sisters Brothers.