American Titan: Searching for John Wayne by Marc Eliot

Author:Marc Eliot [Eliot, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Actor, Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Film & Video, Movie Star, Retail
ISBN: 9780062269034
Google: oWmBAwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2014-11-04T05:00:00+00:00

WAYNE RECEIVED $250,000 (PAID AT a $1,000 weekly salary) to make The Conqueror, good money that he sorely needed. It was directed by Powell with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, not entirely Powell’s fault as he had Hughes hovering over him dictating every shot. Millard’s faux twelfth-century Far Eastern dialogue sounded as if Shakespeare had suffered a stroke just before writing it, with acting that made starch seem a softener (some actors’ dialects appeared to come and go without any reason), and throughout, Wayne sounded like someone reading aloud an instruction manual with some of its words missing.

The very idea of Mr. Americana as an Oriental warrior might be laughable if the film weren’t so pathetic. The Conqueror is not one of those films that turns out not just as bad as one might imagine, a good piece of camp, but worse, plainly dreadful, a bad tooth of a movie that keeps throbbing with pain from start to finish. Wayne knew he had a dog on his hands, and to get through filming he popped Dexedrine pills four times a day, to help keep him awake and to prevent his weight from ballooning beyond his already brawny forty-six-inch chest, thirty-seven-inch waist, and seventeen-inch biceps. For the five long months it took to make the film, from March to August 1954, he kept to a strict diet of hard-boiled eggs, spinach, green salad, cottage cheese, and one steak or lamb chop a day and washed it all down with as much high-test champagne as he could pump into himself.

The Conqueror became the last film Hughes ever produced. By 1953, RKO was hemorrhaging cash, and in late 1954, Hughes reluctantly sold out to General Teleradio for $25 million, a deal that included the rights to all of RKO’s negatives, not just the two dozen or so movies made during his tenure.

The sale also meant the end of Hughes’s soft commitment to Wayne to make The Alamo. Soon after General Teleradio took over the studio, all productions were shut down and the physical lots were sold to Desilu Productions (Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz) for $6.1 million. With that sale, RKO, one of the “Big Five” studios of Hollywood’s golden age, ceased to exist.110

One of the more interesting side stories to the making of The Conqueror that continues to haunt this cursed film is the large number of cancer deaths among the cast and crew. Of the 220 persons who worked on it, 91 had contracted cancer by the early 1980s and 46 died from it, including Wayne, who died from stomach cancer, not lung cancer as is popularly believed (he first contracted lung cancer in 1964, claimed to have beaten “the big C,” and lived another fifteen years); his costar Susan Hayward; popular character actress Agnes Moorhead; and Dick Powell. It has never been proven (and probably never will be), but many attribute the source of the outbreak of cancer among the participants of the production to radioactive fallout from U.S. atom bomb tests in nearby Nevada.

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