Trivia for
Logan's Run (1976) More at IMDbPro »

• The costuming was originally intended to be relatively scanty for all the actors in the film, but it was decided the resulting demands on makeup were prohibitive.
  
  
• The first choices for the roles of Logan and Jessica were Jon Voight and Lindsay Wagner. The role of Peter Ustinov's character, the Old Man, was offered to James Cagney.
  
  
• The character of Francis was originally to be played by William Devane, but he pulled out of the film.
  
  
• According to Michael Anderson, the old man's buttons are United States pennies. He made makeshift buttons out of them because he couldn't find any real buttons.
  
  
• The shots of the pistons that controlled the elevator leading to the scene in the ice cave were taken directly from director Michael Anderson's previous film, The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959)
  
  
• The life clocks on everyone's hands all start out clear (at birth), turn yellow at age 8, green at 16, and red at 23. Everyone wears clothes the same color as their life clocks (except Sandmen, who wear black uniforms). As Lastday - age 30 - approaches, the life clocks flash red and black, then, at 30 turn totally black.
  
  
• During the encounter between the old man and the runners Logan and Jessica, the old man often quotes poems out of "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" by T.S. Eliot.
  
  
• The waterfalls and steps that Logan jumps into to get back into the dome are real. This is the "active pool" of the Water Gardens located in Ft. Worth, Texas. The main pool used to be 9 feet deep, but after four people drowned there in 2004 (near the spot where Logan and Jessica dove in) the pool was closed. When it reopened in 2007, the depth had been reduced to 2 feet.
  
  
• Michael York, Richard Jordan and Michael Anderson Jr. were all over 30 when they made the film.
  
  
• This was originally going to be produced by George Pal, but by this time, Pal had already left the studio.
  
  
• Though the model of the dome city's interior lacks sufficient detail to give it any sense of realism, it was nonetheless constructed on a fairly large scale in order to accommodate the rail system for the miniature maze cars. Many of the buildings in the foreground of the model were three to four feet in height. The buildings were built at differing scales based on their distance from the camera, to give the model landscape a greater sense of depth (a common photographic/special effects technique known as "forced perspective").
  
  
• At least two full-sized maze cars were built for the film, powered by electric golf cart motors.
  
  
• The stairs which Logan and Jessica climb down to escape from the "Love Shop" actually led to the catwalk above one of the MGM sound stages.
  
  
• The "Love Shop" sequence originally ran much longer, but had to be cut down under pressure from the MGM censors. Other cut scenes include Box making a nude ice sculpture of Logan and Jessica, and several characters visiting the "Hallucimill" shop in Arcade (the latter was cut for its depiction of drug use). All of the additional footage and its background music score were subsequently lost in what is now known as "the great MGM purge", when studio owner Kirk Kerkorian sold off what he could of the studio's extensive archives and simply threw out the rest.
  
  
• The pool from which Logan and Jessica emerge when they re-enter the city is the famous "Esther Williams" tank at MGM.
  
  
• The "Carousel" sequence is one of the most complex flying wire stunts ever done for a motion picture. A circular rig was constructed above the set, designed to rotate in sync with the revolving floor plate below. Initially, the performers were all supported by a single winch driving the mechanism for their thin support cables. Unfortunately this resulted in the cables becoming tangled during rehearsal; each stuntman had to be untangled and brought down from the rig in a maintenance lift. The rig then had to be redesigned so that each stuntman was on their own separate winch, with all of the winches connected to a "panic" switch that cut the power in the event of an emergency. For reversal shots, the white crystal on the arena ceiling was built on the floor of the stage, and the performers were lowered down towards it. These shots were then filmed upside-down so as to make it appear that the performers were moving upward.
  
  
• The sandmen's laser guns worked using tiny butane gas cartridges, and were difficult to make work reliably on set as the gas did not always ignite when the trigger was pulled.
  
  
• When the Old Man is showing Logan some of the portraits that used to hang on the walls of the capital, one of them was originally to have been of President Richard Nixon; "They used to call him tricky... something". According to director Michael Anderson, the gag was considered too controversial at the time and was dropped.
  
  
• The ice cave sequence was actually filmed in the middle of the summer in Los Angeles. The people frozen in the ice were not mannequins, but extras who were spray painted white. The extras all had to stand perfectly still for several minutes at a time for each take.
  
  
• Roscoe Lee Browne both voiced and performed Box the robot on-set. The unwieldy costume made it impossible for Browne to right himself if he fell over.
  
  
• On the day of shooting, director Michael Anderson and producer Saul David decided that Logan should look more "casual" for the first scene in his apartment. Costume designer Bill Thomas threw together Logan's black house robe in about two hours while the set was being lit. Michael York kept the robe as a souvenir after filming.
  
  
• The interior shots of the main hall were filmed in the "Great Hall" at the Appearel Mart in Dallas Texas.
  
  
• If you pay attention to Jerry Goldsmith's score, you'll find that he uses a full orchestra with no electronic instruments when the action is outside of the city. When inside the city, his orchestra consists solely of strings, piano, and electronic instruments (though the "New Face" segment has some metal percussion instruments that are heard). The music at the beginning of the film during the credits does add the electronic instruments with the full orchestra though.
  
  
• In the Carousel sequence at the beginning of the film, there are approximately 36 citizens (give or take a few) who are "Renewing". If we assume that all citizens are required to enter Carousel on their thirtieth birthdays, that all birthdays are distributed fairly evenly throughout the year, and that the number of people who "run" is fairly small, a bit of mathematics allows us to conclude that the city's population is about 400,000 people.
  
  
• Rod Serling had written for his anthology "Twilight Zone" a rejected episode called "The Happy Place" describing a society where people were executed when they turned not 30 but 60.
  
  
• Before producing the film himself, 'Saul David' shopped the property to producer 'Irwin Allen', who picked up the book rights as an option. Unfortunately, Allen was at the top of his game with his legendary disaster films The Poseidon Adventure (1972), and The Towering Inferno (1974) and so put "Logan's Run" on the back-burner. Unfortunately, the property rights lapsed and so the film was eventually produced by David himself. Interesting note: Producer David used Irwin Allen's trusted special effects man L.B. Abbott on "Logan's Run". And when David was at 20th Century-Fox during the 1960s making movies like Fantastic Voyage (1966) and Our Man Flint (1966), L.B. Abbott was the man responsible for the FX in those films as well.
  
  
• Despite having a major extended cameo in the second half the film. No footage of Peter Ustinov appears in the trailer.
  
  

• SPOILER: An extra makes the Vulcan salute from "Star Trek" (1966) when waving to the old man after everyone escapes the exploding city.
  
  

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