Half of Hollywood tried to film Howard Hughes before Scorsese did
Christopher Nolan wrote a Howard Hughes script with Jim Carrey in mind. Nicolas Cage was going to play both Hughes and his hoaxing biographer Clifford Irving. Johnny Depp, Edward Norton and John Travolta were all linked to the part at some point. Martin Scorsese's arrival on The Aviator sent most of those rival projects to the shelf.
The chase began with Warren Beatty, who planned to direct and star as Hughes in the early 1970s and kept returning to the idea for decades, finally releasing Rules Don't Apply in 2016. In 1998 Universal bought rights to a Hughes biography, entering a contest already under way at Disney, where Brian De Palma was developing the Cage version; Universal later dropped its own project, which the Hughes brothers were to direct, rather than rush to beat Disney. Disney tried again in June 1999, pairing director Michael Mann with star Leonardo DiCaprio on a John Logan script, then got cold feet after Mann's The Insider disappointed at the box office.
New Line picked the project up almost at once, and Scorsese, fresh from Gangs of New York with DiCaprio, eventually replaced Mann. He later conceded he had badly underestimated the cost. Shot in Montreal, the film opened in the United States on December 25, 2004, and took $214 million against a $110 million budget.
Its story spans 1927 to 1947: Hughes turning Hell's Angels into a talkie after The Jazz Singer arrived, crash-landing his H-1 racer in a beet field after a speed record, circling the globe in four days, and buying control of TWA. After nearly dying when his XF-11 spy plane came down in Beverly Hills, he mortgages airline assets to keep building the H-4 Hercules flying boat, while his obsessive–compulsive disorder drives him into a sealed room for three months before a Senate hearing.
Awards bodies rewarded it heavily. It topped the 77th Academy Awards with 11 nominations and five wins, including Cate Blanchett's supporting turn as Katharine Hepburn, and DiCaprio won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a drama.
Source: The Aviator (2004 film)
