Logan's Run

When BBC1 screened Logan's Run for the first time in 1982 it touched a chord in me like millions of other teenagers.
Released in 1976, this sci-fi epic was the last major studio sci-fi film before Star Wars changed the genre forever.
Having missed it on the big screen and video so much in its infancy that a screening was impossible, I had to wait until the Beeb screened it before I could witness that bizarre world for myself.

I had seen every episode of the TV version which aired in the late 1970s, but this was a different beast. More exotic, risque and colourful, not the sanitised version seen in the TV show.

Michael York and Jenny Agutter lent the movie a degree of much needed gravitas.
So, when I got the chance to talk Logan's Run with Jenny in the spring of 2012, it was something of a dream come true.


"Logan’s Run was great," she recalls. "Michael Anderson was directing it and he had great fun doing it. I remember talking to him and he said it was like being a child in a toy shop, and this is the man who did The Dambusters and all sorts of things. Very English. And also Peter Ustinov was in it. He was a riot. Very funny. Full of anecdotes and stories. He just wouldn’t stop. He was a raconteur and just charming. And Michael York was also lovely to work with."

"I was terribly excited because it was MGM Studios. I think it really was the last of the big studio movies at that time because people went about film making in a different way. If you think it’s just before Star Wars and how different that is, and we were all blue screens and big lights and big lots, and people would be working on the set who had been working on there for years and would tell all these stories about old MGM stars."


She adds: "You drive yourself into work in America; It’s quite different to England actually. So I’d drive onto the lot in the morning and the guy at the gate would say: “I just don’t get it. You drive in here with no make up and in the old says the stars would be fully made up and looking glamorous”. 
He wasn’t having a go at me but I thought. 'Oooh. You’d get made up and then have to go into make up again'. But what he was referring to was a very glamorous time where part of your contract was to always look glam."