Bruce Logan: On the Beach and On the Moon

I first met Bruce Logan whenhe was getting married. Well, sort of. Back in 1974 I was serving as productionsecretary on the Roger Corman gangster romp, Big Bad Mama, which starredthe 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 ofcast and crew. So I knew it was a very big deal that Bruce Logan was ourdirector 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 in1965, at age 19,  and stayed with theproject through the film’s release in 1968. That same year, he left his nativeEngland, coming to California to collaborate with Trumbull on Antonioni’sapocalyptic Zabriskie Point (1970).

 Given his classy resumé, wewere all impressed that Bruce Logan was willing to work on low-budget RogerCorman fare. But there he was, fitting in nicely with our misfit crew. The lastday of our three-week Big Bad Mama shoot, we threw ourselves a wrapparty on the site of our final location, Malibu’s Paradise Cove. To add to thefun, we staged on the sand a mock wedding for Bruce and his girlfriend, whowere 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 persuadedto put on his clerical robes and conduct the ceremony with great theatricalflourish. If memory serves, most of the ad hoc wedding party ended up splashingin the waves. And a good time was had by all.

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

 Our conversation waswide-ranging. Of course we discussed Kubrick’s prescience in making 2001,which features convincing-looking computer screens and read-outs decades beforedesktop 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 thatKubrick and company were deciding what their moon’s back side shouldlook like. They thought of altering their concept to match the science, thendecided that, frankly speaking, “the moon looks kind of boring.” Ultimately,they stuck by their own artistic vision, one that would prove inspiring tocountless Baby Boomers.

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