‘Aviator’ writer’s career takes off

Actor-director Frank Galati tells the quintessential John Logan anecdote.

“His home in Evanston was gorgeous, an immense, yellow brick villa with a capacious garden,” Galati says. “You walked up these broad stone stairs onto a terrace and into rooms with Minimalist decor and exquisite art objects.

“But, as you gazed down a long, long corridor, there, at the end, stood a giant, life-size statue of the Alien.”

Logan to a T: elegant, tasteful, history conscious, slightly mischievous and increasingly a player in Hollywood.

Consider the list: “Any Given Sunday,” “Gladiator,” “The Last Samurai,” “The Time Machine,” “Star Trek: Nemesis” and Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator.” All were written or co-written by Logan, a prodigious Chicago playwright in the ‘80s and, until a year ago, a resident of Evanston, where he quietly became one of Hollywood’s top screenwriters, within the shadows of his beloved alma mater, Northwestern University.

For “Gladiator,” he earned an Oscar nomination, and he’s a top contender this year for “Aviator,” the current biopic on the younger Howard Hughes. His is the sole writing credit.

Reluctant Malibuite

Logan, 43, left Evanston reluctantly last year to be closer to his work. Relaxing comfortably on a recent afternoon in his sunlit study in Malibu, backed by posters of his movies and a sweeping view of the Pacific, he reminisced with the same boyish, chatty enthusiasm he exhibited with his instant success as 22-year-old author of “Never the Sinner,” a 1985 drama (and junior-year college writing project) about the Leopold and Loeb murder case.

Make no mistake: He has “gone Hollywood” only so far. His spacious, airy, open and ultra-California living room boasts one wall entirely of glass, except for a petite fireplace. But along the wall overlooking the dining room table is a series of signed Matisse prints, and across from that is a bookshelf jammed with hundreds of books, some of them first editions by favorite authors, Thomas Wolfe and Sinclair Lewis among them.

“When I started earning money from screenwriting,” he says, “for a long time my only indulgences were books.” And Malibuite he may be, but much of his everyday life remains that of a scholarly, research-oriented and workaholic scribe. “When I first started coming out to work here, my agent insisted I go to parties. I quickly found that lifestyle not for me. I’m a very private person, a very bookish person. The social world of Hollywood I know nothing about because I choose not to take part.”

Nor has he adopted Hollywood’s love of personal revelation. Though openly gay, he prefers all other details of his private life to remain private.

Though his dramas written in Chicago met with varying degrees of success, Logan’s astonishing movie record doesn’t especially astonish mentors and colleagues from Chicago.

Suggests Galati, “He’s a natural for the screenplay form, drawn to the epic, the historical and the sweeping narrative even as a playwright.”

“He so easily tackled the huge and vast, and with such focus,” recalls Arlene Crewsdon, artistic director of Pegasus Players in Chicago, which premiered Logan’s “Snow,” a stage epic about the Russian revolution, in 1987. “And he was so calm. That’s not my memory of a lot of writers who come through here. They usually tear their hair out. John really loved the collaborative process.”

Terry McCabe, the freelance director who first staged “Never the Sinner” at the old non-Equity Stormfield Theatre after just about every Equity company in town took a pass, says, “Nobody in Chicago was writing plays back then as good as he was.”

And this from recent collaborator Scorsese: “When I started reading ‘The Aviator,’ I was immediately engrossed,” he writes in his introduction to the upcoming published version of the screenplay. “I was fascinated by the drama of this young man, possessed by a vision of speed and flight and committing all of his resources to sharing that vision with the world.

“And then I realized that the young man happened to be Howard Hughes. This is rare, to take a real historical figure ... and get the audience involved in the drama of his life from page one.... John had written a wonderfully complex character, rather than a Famous Man, a story rather than a historical pageant.”

All movie folks wax enthusiastic about their current projects, but Logan is persuasive when discussing the personal importance of “Aviator.”

“I’ve been working on it for five years, and altogether I wrote 15 drafts, which is highly unusual,” he says. “I wanted to keep hacking away until I made it the best it could be.”

Logan grew up the son of a naval architect, living in a handful of U.S. port cities as a child, including Seattle, San Diego and various cities in New Jersey. Around age 7 or 8, his father suggested they watch a movie on TV, promising ghosts and swordfights.

“It was Laurence Olivier’s ‘Hamlet,’ ” Logan says. “It changed my life. Here was a swashbuckler more exciting than anything from Errol Flynn, but with this extraordinary element, the language of Shakespeare.”

At first, at Northwestern, Logan studied acting.

“He realized he’d never be a great actor and that his imagination really flourished in writing,” recalls David Downs, associate professor of theater and one of Logan’s teachers. Logan took a playwriting course his junior year, opting to work on an obsession dating back to junior high, the Chicago murderers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Logan’s pattern of working -- endless, fanatical research followed by rapid-fire writing -- began then.

“Everyone else was turning in scenes all year, and my teacher kept asking me for mine,” Logan remembers. “I did nine months of research and wrote the play in two weeks.”

Football saga

In the early ‘90s, a former HBO executive courted Logan as a client for a major Hollywood talent agency.

“I flew to Hollywood with 10 ideas, including this one-line one, ‘King Lear in the NFL,’ ” Logan says. They suggested he write that. He quit his day job, borrowed money and spent the next year working on nothing else but the screenplay that became “Any Given Sunday.” He was in Australia, where a theater was working on a new play, when his agent called and said, “Oliver Stone is calling in five minutes.” Stone told Logan to meet him in Japan in three days.

There is a thematic thread through his work. He chooses dark, damaged characters from whom he unearths redeeming qualities: the dipsomaniacal Nathan Algren in “Samurai,” Al Pacino’s tempestuous football coach in “Sunday,” Hughes and even Leopold and Loeb.

“Drama for me is ambiguity,” he says.

His next project, a musical, may be the darkest musical in the canon: “Sweeney Todd,” the chance to work with Sam Mendes (“American Beauty”) and an idol, Stephen Sondheim.

But the darkness is at odds with his Irish leprechaun-like personality. “My mother’s the sweetest little Irish woman in the world, and I called her one day and said, ‘Mom, you’ll be happy, I’m doing a musical.’ ” When he told her it was “Sweeney Todd,” she paused and replied, “Couldn’t you make it ‘My Fair Lady’?”

He adds, “I couldn’t write a happy movie or romantic comedy to save my life. Yes, Noel Coward’s an idol, but his plays are serious to me. ‘Private Lives’ and ‘Design for Living’ both have an edge. Without psychoanalyzing myself, I think I exorcise my demons in my work.”

Ask anyone in the Chicago theater and they all mention his generosity. He continues to donate to theaters there, including Victory Gardens Theater, where he’s still a member of the playwriting ensemble.

How does he marry his schoolboy self-image as a young Noel Coward with his reality as Malibu screenwriter today?

“Do you want the honest answer? It breaks my heart. I enjoy all forms of writing, but playwriting is what made me what I am. Not only working with the ghosts of Chekhov and Ibsen and Shakespeare, but what it is to be a playwright, to be interacting with human beings in the live theater and affect people on such a direct, emotional level.

“Chicago theater in the ‘80s was my Paris in the ‘20s,” he says. “But it’s a difficult life, difficult to earn a living. I’ve been infinitely more successful as a screenwriter and, don’t get me wrong, I have a good life. But does it give me as much personal satisfaction?

“No.”