Concordia Magazine 2025

Bruce Logan

(1960–1963)

Marriages to Kathryn Fenton and Margaret Mayer ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife, Mariana Campos, and two children from his second marriage, Mary Grace and Campbell (an animator and film-maker). The above is an edited extract from an obituary published in The Times (22 May 2025) In March 2021 Bruce Logan was interviewed by the Development Office team, as he was keen to support the MTS Together online talks that had begun during the Covid lockdown. He had enjoyed hearing some fellow OMTs speak about their passions and careers. What will be familiar to the backstage crew of any Merchant Taylors’ School production is that Bruce said his first work was painting scenery for HMS Pinafore , at the request of Hugh Elder, the Head Master. Bruce developed his interest in film further with his first animated film, The Battle of the Blackboards , which was shot at School and for which he and his fellow directors won a national film competition. The Taylorian describes the film, which was part of the Speech Day art exhibition: ‘Pride of place must surely be taken by Logan, Pollard and Joyce for their delightful and most professional film recording, in seven minutes, an amazing and bloody battle between some animated blackboards and themselves, helped by their Merchant Taylors’ allies’. It was shortly after leaving Merchant Taylors’ School that Bruce joined an animation company and worked on special visual effects in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey . Bruce Logan thought that he had been blessed with an extraordinary career, allowing him to work in an industry that he loved and, at an exciting time in film, to be an innovator as a cinematographer, visual-effects artist and a writer/ director/producer. *

(Michael) Bruce Logan was born in London in 1946 and grew up in Bushey. His father was Campbell Logan, a BBC director. One of Bruce’s earliest memories was watching his father use pieces of plastic and string to ‘block’ a multi-camera show on a sheet of paper. Bruce took photographs with his father’s Kodak camera and by the age of 12 had taught himself key animation methods. When Logan was 19 he was engaged by Douglas Trumbull, the special-effects maestro , to work on the film 2001 : A Space Odyssey , thanks both to his prodigious skills and, he suspected, his long hair, which made older colleagues think he was hip to the latest trends. Working on live action, miniatures and animation, and shooting the opening title sequence, he called the experience ‘my film school’. It was a dream job, working for Stanley Kubrick, his favourite director — and lasting two and a half years in a capricious industry. In 1968 Trumbull offered Logan a special-effects job in California, where he moved permanently. He worked on a string of films with Roger Corman, the B-movies king, and produced the music video for Borderline , an early Madonna hit. He went on to collaborate on about 300 television commercials and music videos, including for Prince, Rod Stewart and Aerosmith, and directed a 1986 B-movie, Vendetta . He was the second-unit director of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , the 1998 film starring Johnny Depp, directed by Terry Gilliam. Logan also worked on Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), Airplane! (1980), Batman Forever (1995) and what he described as his most stressful project, The Incredible Shrinking Woman , a 1981 comedy starring Lily Tomlin. Away from the studio he meditated, studied Western esoteric philosophy, raced cars and was a licensed pilot. Reasoning that there was no shortage of rampant and ruthless egos in Hollywood, he sought to be a reliable colleague, prioritising punctuality and planning tight schedules — atonement for habitually turning up late for work on 2001 , where, he said, nothing much happened until the afternoon.

Concordia Winter 2025 66