September 24, 1961– John Logan:
“The thing that made me monstrous to some people is also the thing that empowered me…”
Back in spring 2012, I caught an excellent, rather thrilling production of Red, an exciting and intense two character play about a slice in the life of one my most favorite painters Mark Rothko. Red was not, thankfully, an art appreciation class, but instead, a character portrait of an angry and brilliant artist. Set in Rothko’s NYC studio on The Bowery in the late 1950s, the play follows the initiation of a newly hired assistant, into the uncompromising aesthetic of Rothko (who grew-up in Portland), at that time that he was working on a commissioned series of paintings for the famous Four Seasons restaurant in the brand new Seagram Building.
Red captures the compelling relationship between an artist and his creations. Stephen Sondheim’s brilliant stage musical Sunday In The Park With George (1984) seems to me to be similarly successful in relating this theme.
The original London and Broadway cast of Red was cutie pie Eddie Redmayne and Alfred Molina. It won the Tony Award for Best Play and Redmayne won Best Supporting Actor.
Digging for a bit of information about the history of Red, I discovered that the gifted playwright John Logan is responsible for the disparate screenplays: Hugo (2011), Coriolanus (2011), Rango(2011), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street (2007), The Aviator (2004), The Last Samurai (2003), Star Trek: Nemesis (2002), The Time Machine (2002), Gladiator (2000), and Any Given Sunday (1999). He has worked with some truly great directors: Tim Burton, Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, and Sam Mendes, providing adapted and original screenplays, and often producing.
Logan is from Chicago where he worked as an actor for a decade before starting to write for the stage. Besides that 2010 Tony Award for Best Play, he has been nominated for an Academy Award three times, including the delightful Hugo, one of my favorite films about movies.
In the 2013 theatre season, Logan had two new plays produced: Peter And Alice, about the fictional meeting of the real life inspirations for Peter Pan and Alice In Wonderland, starring favorite Dame Judi Dench and sexy gay actor Ben Whishaw in London, and on Broadway I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers, directed by gay actor/director Joe Mantello and starring Gay Icon Bette Midler.
Logan provided the taut, smart story and screenplay for the 23rd James Bond flick Skyfall (2012). This Bond had a more obvious homoerotic subtext already inherent in the Bond series, but, this one includes a scene in which Bond, played by the delicious Daniel Craig, is tied to a chair as former MI6 agent-turned-villain Raoul Silva, portrayed by yummy Javier Bardem, the best Bond villain ever, who unbuttons his shirt after making a sexually charged remark, and Craig’s Bond responds: “What makes you think this is my first time?” The film sees the return of two recurring characters to the series after an absence of two films: Q, played by Logan favorite Whishaw, and Moneypenny, played by Naomie Harris. Skyfall is the last film of the series for Dench, who played M, a role that she had played in the previous six Bond flicks.
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Penny Dreadful, photograph from Showtime
Logan created and scripted my favorite series of 2014-2016, Penny Dreadful. The Showtime series is filled to the brim with gay sensibility and hot homo sex scenes. The title referenced penny dreadfuls, a kind of 19th century cheap, pulpy fiction publication with lurid and sensational subject matter. Logan’s brilliant thrill ride of a series draws upon a bunch of 19th century literary characters including Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray from The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Mina Harker and Dr. Van Helsing from Bram Stoker‘s Dracula, Victor Frankenstein and his monster from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, plus Dr. Henry Jekyll from Robert Louis Stevenson‘s The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Logan:
“I just love monsters. I’ve always loved monsters. When I was a kid I built models in my bedroom and I watched horror movies and read horror comic books. Only as I’ve grown up have I realized that the affection I have for them is a kinship.”
“Growing up as a gay man, before it was as socially acceptable as it might be now, I knew what it was to feel different from other people, to have a secret and to be frightened of it, even as I knew that the very thing that made me different made me who I was. I think all the characters grapple with a version of that, with a version of exceptionality. Can they come to peace with that thing that marks them as alien to their families and their loved ones? It was very personal to me, which is why I was so committed to writing all of it.”
“There’s a strong sort of outlaw tradition of queer response to horror. It’s a growing trend and a growing sociological and literary school of thought. The gay response to horror literature is very much en vogue currently and I hope I’m part of that tradition.”
Last year, he provided the screenplay for Genius, a bio-pic film directed by Michael Grandage based on the 1978 National Book Award-winner Max Perkins: Editor Of Genius by gay writer A. Scott Berg. It tells the story of Southern writer Thomas Wolfe and his connections with New Yorker Maxwell Perkins, his publisher. Perkins had already previously published works by the great American writers Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The film stars Colin Firth as Perkins, Jude Law as Wolfe, Dominic West as Hemingway and Guy Pearce as Fitzgerald.
Up next, Logan is adapting Nathan Hill’s bestseller The Nix as a limited series for Netflix with J.J. Abrams producing and directing, and bringing Meryl Streep to her first television series.
His latest project was providing the screenplay for Alien: Covenant about you-know-what. Released at the start of the summer, it is a sequel to Prometheus (2012), the second installment in the Alien prequel series and the sixth installment in the Alien film series. It seems completely unnecessary to me, except that it stars Michael Fassbender. Still it was a worldwide hit. This installment was directed by Ridley Scott who did the original Alien (1979). More monsters!
Logan is no monster though. He is very attractive, in that butch, but broken impish Irish manner. He lives in Malibu and NYC. He has discreetly thanked an unnamed partner in his Tony Award acceptance speech for Red, and he has referred to him obliquely in interviews.
“I get out of bed very early. I’ve never been attracted to a Hollywood lifestyle. I live modestly. I don’t collect Porsches or do blow. I’m not comfortable socializing. I don’t go to Oscar parties. And nobody knows who I am. I value my anonymity. I’m rigorous about it.”
In the delightful Penny Dreadful I was very drawn to the fascinating character of Sir Ferdinand Lyle, a classic closeted gay character, played to perfection by gay actor/writer/musician Simon Russell Beale. He’s a dandy, his speech is a little lisping, his hair is kind of Trumpian ridiculous. Logan:
“Ferdinand Lyle is a fop, a joyous fop. But he’s also a very serious linguist and Egyptologist, and as the series unfolds, you see the intensity and the poignancy of that character emerge. The London of 1891 was not a time when gay men could be celebrated for their displays or affectations, as Oscar Wilde would be the first person to comment. So Lyle is, in one way, my attempt to grapple with the many complex sexual mores in the Victorian era.”
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Beale in “Penny Dreadful”, photograph from Showtime.
For me, the best characters are the most complicated ones.
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