He shot Hollywood’s first multimillion-dollar epic. He stretched boundaries on sex and violence. He launched the careers of Jean Harlow and Jane Russell, and his many Hollywood loves included Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner.
Before he became the circus-freak hermit with long hair and fingernails, Howard Hughes was one of the most colorful personalities ever in show business, a maverick who was among the first to challenge the supremacy of studio moguls and the industry’s restrictive moral codes.
Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes, Cate Blanchett as Hepburn and Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardner, focuses on the billionaire’s pioneering movie and airplane achievements from the late 1920s through the late 1940s.
“He was one of the key figures, sort of the outlaw of Hollywood, in a way,” Scorsese told The Associated Press. “His major obsession, of course, was aviation, but films were a major part of his life.”
Forgotten Hollywood careerDuring that time, Hughes oversaw 1930’s $4 million war saga “Hell’s Angels,” 1932’s mob tale “Scarface” and 1943’s “The Outlaw,” best-remembered for its shots of Russell’s bosom.
That era also saw Hughes build his aviation empire, developing experimental planes, setting airspeed records, acquiring a controlling stake in TWA and piloting the massive Spruce Goose transport plane on its only flight.
His Hollywood career has become the forgotten chapter in Hughes’ life, overshadowed by his aviation accomplishments and his final years as a germ-phobic recluse before his death in 1976.
Orphaned as a young man, Hughes arrived to Los Angeles in the mid-1920s with an inheritance of nearly $1 million from his father’s drill-bit business in Texas. Laying the family fortune on the line, Hughes hurled himself into filmmaking, and he became known as one of the town’s biggest playboys.
“It’s one of those weird concoctions of saying, ‘Look, I have all the money in the world, I have no moral high ground to speak to. I have no parents around to tell me whether I’m doing right or wrong, so why not have 20 girls waiting for me at the Bel Air Hotel? Why not risk my fortune on one film?”’ DiCaprio told the AP.
The trials of ‘Hell's Angels’Hughes originally shot “Hell’s Angels” as a silent film, laboring for years on its spectacular World War I aerial dogfights. By the time the movie was done, talkies had taken hold, so Hughes reshot the entire film for sound.
Early sequences in “The Aviator” capture Hughes’ perfectionist fanaticism over “Hell’s Angels,” mortgaging everything he owned to pay the bills and begging studio bosses for a couple of extra cameras when he already had dozens to shoot the battle scenes.
To the Hollywood establishment, Hughes was an arrogant upstart, the “sucker with the money,” said Robert Dalrymple, director of the documentary “Howard Hughes: His Women and His Movies,” airing on Turner Classic Movies as part of a three-night Hughes retrospective starting Wednesday.
“It was that period when he kind of enraged one-half of Hollywood and dated the other half. That’s what made him so interesting,” Dalrymple said.
Yet Hughes proved his detractors wrong. When “Hell’s Angels” finally premiered, it was a huge commercial success and made Harlow a star.
Along with “Hell’s Angels,” “The Outlaw” and “The Front Page,” TCM’s retrospective includes restored prints of Hughes’ silent films “Two Arabian Knights,” “The Racket” and “The Mating Call,” which have not been seen publicly since their 1920s releases.
Defying the censorsHughes had infamous run-ins with overseers of the Hays Code, which set strict guidelines on big-screen sex and violence. The release of “Scarface” was delayed in a dispute over its gunplay and amorality. Hughes defied Hollywood’s censors by briefly releasing “The Outlaw” without the Hays Code seal of approval, the film’s marketing exploiting Russell’s buxom figure.
In 1948, Hughes bought controlling interest in RKO Studios and sold it five years later. After that, his main connection to Hollywood was his 13-year marriage to actress Jean Peters, which ended in divorce in the early 1970s.
Hughes maintained private obsessions over movies, the most notable being his fixation for the 1968 Cold War tale “Ice Station Zebra,” which he watched again and again in his late-life seclusion.
Hollywood itself has had the occasional fixation over Hughes with such projects as “The Amazing Howard Hughes,” a TV biography starring Tommy Lee Jones, and Jonathan Demme’s offbeat “Melvin and Howard,” about a luckless man who claims he gave hitchhiker Hughes (Jason Robards) a lift and subsequently was left a fortune by the recluse. Dean Stockwell made a memorably creepy cameo as Hughes in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Tucker: The Man and His Dream.”
Though his Hollywood connections have been largely forgotten, Hughes’ influence on movies was felt for decades.
“In his willingness to gamble on a large movie, he set the stage for people like David O. Selznick (“Gone With the Wind”) and Sam Spiegel (“Lawrence of Arabia”), people willing to take huge gambles on one movie,” said “The Aviator” screenwriter John Logan. “In a way, he maybe set the stage for Peter Jackson, who had the impossible idea that ‘Lord of the Rings’ could be made into a trilogy and that people would come and see it.”
And, of course, Hughes left behind a handful of certified classics.
“I think he was an outstanding filmmaker. Look at ‘Hell’s Angels. It’s pretty incredible, especially imagining when it was made,” said Charlie Tabesh, senior vice president of programming for TCM. “Or ‘Scarface,’ which really set the standard for gangster films that are even coming out today.”