Leonardo DiCaprio is speed-talking. He’s making his pitch. Forget everything you might remember about the old Howard Hughes, the creepy billionaire dude with the three-inch toenails.
Forget the racist, red-baiting germ freak and pill-head who shuffled around in a pair of Kleenex boxes for shoes in darkened Vegas hotel suites, storing his urine in jars, attended by codependent vampires.
Not that Howard Hughes,.
That spooky recluse died mysteriously at 70 in 1976, withered to munchkin size, of renal failure or dehydration or overdose while flying from his hotel hideaway in Acapulco to Houston, the town of his birth, the fountainhead of his family wealth from the invention of the diamond-studded oil-drilling bit. Erase that disk.
Insert: the young Howard, the one DiCaprio plays in “The Aviator,” opening Saturday.
The matinee-handsome boy millionaire of the 1920s, “the fastest man on the planet” in the 1930s, who designed and flew his own experimental planes, broke speed records for transcontinental and around-the-world flight, acquired TWA and fought corporate trench warfare against his nemesis at Pan Am.
The movie mogul who bedded Katharine Hepburn, who designed an early prototype of the Wonder Bra for the top-heavy Jane Russell.
That Howard. The one played by DiCaprio in the Martin Scorsese epic film, already shortlisted by the critics for Oscar nominations across the board.
DiCaprio is taller and longer than he seems on-screen. He’s over 6-feet tall, with large, knuckly hands. Though he still appears incapable of growing a full beard, he is not so much the boy anymore; he just turned 30.
There is a line early in “The Aviator” where the young Hughes, in his early 20s, while filming his runaway-budget production of “Hell’s Angels” about World War I flying aces, instructs a hireling that he ain’t “junior” anymore. (The young Hughes was actually called “Sonny” in real life; his parents died when he was in his teens and he inherited his fortune at 19.) “It’s Mr. Hughes now,” the character barks in a Texas drawl that DiCaprio gets almost just right.
You wanna talk about Howard Hughes? DiCaprio can, talk about him all day long. Because this was not a role that was offered to DiCaprio; this is a movie that the actor got made.
He originally took the project to Michael Mann (director of “Collateral”), who brought in screenwriter John Logan (“Gladiator”). And then DiCaprio and Mann, both working as producers, secured the services of Scorsese, who had worked with the actor on “Gangs of New York.”
When he was a younger screen idol, DiCaprio read Peter Harry Brown’s “Howard Hughes: The Untold Story” as he prepared to make “Titanic,” the movie that would change his life.
“I think what people know is the old man locked away in the hotel in Vegas, buying all the hotels he can buy that he can see from his view,” he said. “This insane man with the long beard, right?”
He keeps going. “When I read the book about Howard Hughes, I knew nothing about him being a pilot, this man flying around in these airplanes, crashed them four times. I knew nothing about him being this rebellious figure in Hollywood, this anti-studio renegade producer who made the most expensive movie of his time, ‘Hell’s Angels,’ cost 4 million bucks, all his own money. Then he went and did ‘Scarface,’ the most violent film ever, then ‘The Outlaw,’ the most sexually explicit.”
Wisely, the filmmakers and DiCaprio decided to focus their movie on Hughes’ younger years from the start of filming “Hell’s Angels” in 1927 (the movie consumed thousands of extras, a fleet of 87 vintage aircraft and the lives of three pilots).
During his preparation for the film, DiCaprio had the luxury of spending a year researching his character.
“There’s this thing about Howard Hughes,” DiCaprio said. “As many different conflicting reports as there are. Some people think he’s a homosexual. Some think he’s a megalomaniac. Some think he’s this shy, coy billionaire. No one really knows, though some know more than others. But in trying to define the man, one thing is consistent, from all the people I talked to – Jane Russell, his mechanics – they all loved him and thought he was such a kind man.”
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