Howard Hughes, Melvin Dummar, and the American (Dollar) Dream

Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard is a small movie about small people, unless you count reclusive zillionaire Howard Hughes, whose massive shadow hangs over the whole enterprise. Dennis Bingham's Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre cites Melvin and Howard as the first film in the subgenre "biopic of someone undeserving.” The undeserving someone in this case is Melvin Dummar, the Utah man who, after Hughes’ death in 1976, popped up as a major beneficiary of Hughes’ vast estate by way of a mysterious handwritten will unearthed at the headquarters of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City. The so-called Mormon Will was eventually judged a blatant forgery. But through a number of court hearings Dummar continued to insist that he’d rescued Hughes in the Nevada desert in 1967, giving a needy old man a friendly lift to Las Vegas.

 Melvin and Howard is a fanciful riff on that slice of history, taking Dummar’s story at face value. (Hollywood veteran Bo Goldman won an original screenplay Oscar for his lively telling of the tale.) It begins with a scruffy and  maniacal Howard Hughes (played with his usual panache by Jason Robards) gleefully racing his chopper through the desert, before the fun ends with a spectacular crash. Hours later, garage mechanic Dummar happens along in his truck, stops to take a leak, and discovers the fallen tycoon. Throughout their ride, Hughes remains taciturn and cranky, until the chatty Dummar gets him to singing a favorite old song, “Bye Bye, Blackbird.” At journey’s end, after Hughes reveals his identity (and borrows some cash), they go their separate ways.

 The bulk of the film is a portrait of Dummar (well played by Paul Le Mat) as a perennial dreamer, someone who can’t hold down a job but is convinced that happy days are just around the corner. He loves wife Lynda (the adorably ditsy Mary Steenburgen in her Oscar-winning role), but can’t quite seem to provide a stable life. The centerpiece of the film is the on-again off-again marriage of these two: at one point she leaves him and their daughter to work in a topless bar. Their fortunes seem to turn when he gets Lynda onto a talent-and-game show in which (despite her tap-dancing ineptitude) she wins a large sum of money, all of which Melvin quickly squanders. The romantic allure of money, as seen in this segment,  is at this film’s very heart.  The show is called Easy Street, and its smarmy host alternates between sexual innuendo and a worshipful attitude toward big bucks. It seems all too apt that Lynda’s tap routine is performed to the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.”

 If you’re Melvin Dummar—a laid-back guy convinced that life on Easy Street awaits if only you believe hard enough—it’s perfectly likely that Howard Hughes would leave you a fortune. The question of the mysterious will continued to dog the real Dummar’s life, which ended in 2018. Melvin and Howard, though, concludes long before that, returning to the footage of two unlikely buddies, an old man and a young one, joyfully belting out an old musical-hall tune. 

 I worked briefly with Jonathan Demme in 1974, when he’d just returned from directing his first film, Caged Heat, for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. He moved on to some studio gigs, but Melvin and Howard was his true breakthrough, showing off his skill at capturing American life and moving him toward the big pictures, like 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs. (I’ll mention in passing his sharp ear for musical scoring.) Unfortunately he left us much too soon.  

 

Seduced by Howard Hughes

It’s natural -- especially when you come from a family of engineers -– to think of Howard Hughes mostly  in terms of aircraft. And of course there’s the latter-day Hughes, a crazy old man whose fortune couldn’t shield him from mental illness and a lonely death. But Hughes’ life (1905-1976) was intertwined with the history of the Hollywood movie industry. As a dashing young millionaire, he became determined to be a force in the world of entertainment. 

 Starting in 1926, Hughes put his considerable money behind films that were nominated for, and sometimes won, Academy Awards. Most notably, he sank about $3 million (and three years of his life) into a pet project, the World War I aerial drama, Hell’s Angels. The film, which was nominated for Best Cinematography, launched the career of Jean Harlow, whom Hughes chose to outfit in slinky gowns of his own devising. But despite a massive publicity campaign, Hell’s Angels could not recoup its then-outlandish expenses. There were human costs too. The spectacular aerial stunt work led to the deaths of three aviators and a mechanic. And Hughes himself, as a participant in some of the stunts, crashed his plane and suffered a fractured skull, the first of many dramatic injuries that doubtless contributed to his strange, twisted view of life.

 In 2018, a new book on Hughes’ movie years made its appearance. Called Seduction:Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’ Hollywood, this heavily researched volume was written by Karina Longworth, the Angeleno behind You Must Remember This, a popular podcast that chronicles the secret history of the old studio system. Longworth does not neglect Hughes the industrialist, but her focus is on Hughes’ interaction with Hollywood, especially its women. There are lots of colorful details about his romances with Katharine Hepburn (who praised him as a lover), Ginger Rogers, Ava Gardner, and other celebrated lovelies. Much time is spent, needless to say, on his relationship with the very young, very well endowed Jane Russell: while guiding the production of The Outlaw, in which she plays a half-breed Mexican beauty sexually assaulted in a hayloft  by Billy the Kid, Hughes famously engineered a brassiere that would dramatically emphasize her two most prominent assets. Russell’s relationship with Hughes was to complicate her later marriage to a prominent football star. While moving in and out of a leadership role at RKO Pictures, Hughes kept Russell under personal contract for decades.

 I learned, in passing, about many remarkable Hollywood women. One was Ida Lupino, admired today as one of the few American females able to break into directing, but also apparently someone who fostered her own career success by secretly cooperating with the House Un-American Activities Committee during the dark days of the Blacklist. Another was Terry Moore, a blonde and perky devout Mormon  (now 92), who still seems convinced that she and Hughes contracted a secret marriage in 1949. (She has since had 5 other husbands.) Most disturbing, though, is Longworth’s recounting of the way the middle-aged Hughes courted pretty and very young women, scouting them out in their hometowns, enlisting the support of their starstruck mothers, and dangling before them the prospects of a movie career. Once they came to Hollywood, Hughes would ensconce them in hotel suites or bungalows, provide them with cars and drivers, enroll them in acting and dance classes, then occasionally drop by to sample their charms. No surprise: few ever appeared in movies at all. But Hughes did, as portrayed by Jason Robards, in 1980s sad and hilarious Melvin and Howard.

 

 

Howard Hughes: From Hell’s Angels to Hercules

Howard Hughes started out with three goals in life. He wanted to be the world’s greatest golfer, the world’s greatest aviator, and the world’s greatest movie producer. Though he made his longest-lasting mark in Southern California as the founder of a major aerospace firm (one that employed my husband for several decades), he had a significant impact on Hollywood both as  a movie producer and as the one-time owner of RKO Studios.

Hughes, born in Texas, first entered Hollywood in 1925, at the tender age of 20. Because of his father’s early death he had money, and he also had plenty of chutzpah. He soon produced two silent movies that were financial successes. One, 1928’s Two Arabian Knights, won the first Academy Award for best director of a comedy.  In 1930, he spent lavishly ($3.8 million) to shoot a war film that capitalized on his keen interest in aviation. This was Hell’s Angels, starring Jean Harlow along with Ben Lyon and James Hall, who played two brothers enlisting in Britain’s Royal Flying Corps. Hell’s Angels  started out as a silent picture but was later converted into a talkie. In the course of a difficult production period, Hughes himself staged the film’s dramatic aerial dogfights. Hell’s Angels marked the first time a motion picture camera shot footage from inside an airplane cockpit. As a director, Hughes was also notorious for waiting for perfect clouds to form. (The film received an Oscar nomination for its striking cinematography.)

Other films produced by Hughes include Scarface (1932), with Paul Muni starring as an Al Capone-type gangster. Because of its level of violence, this film ran afoul of the Hollywood censors, as did the later The Outlaw (1943). The latter gained notoriety when Hughes designed a special metal brassiere for voluptuous star Jane Russell. 

Another Hughes exploit had nothing to do with movies. During World War II, the U.S. military had high hopes for the creation of a “flying boat,” an aircraft made out of wood rather than metal, with a large enough capacity to transport troops and equipment across the Atlantic. After much trial and error, Hughes produced what critics nicknamed “The Spruce Goose.” This massive plane—at one time the longest and heaviest aircraft ever built—was not ready until 1947, long after the war was over. It flew only once, and only briefly, with Hughes himself at the controls.

The construction of the Spruce Goose (which Hughes preferred calling the Hercules) required a cavernous hangar on the site of the Hughes industrial complex. The Culver City, California property has sat idle for many years, growing increasingly decrepit. Now, however, the hangar is the centerpiece of an evolving business park known as the Hercules Campus at Playa Vista. Its cavernous interior was used in the filming of Independence Day and Titanic. Recently it was leased by Google, and creative plans are afoot. The surrounding buildings also house high-tech tenants, like the video game firm Konami. The new headquarters of YouTube is also onsite: it boasts a huge outdoor screening facility as well as spectacular video-making equipment. If your YouTube channel has 10,000 subscribers, you too can come to Culver City, dress up in a crazy costume, and make a movie.

Somehow, I think Howard Hughes would be pleased.  (I wonder if he’d also be pleased to know that he himself was the star character in two major Hollywood films. In  The Aviator he was young, virile, and played by Di Caprio. In Melvin and Howard, he was impersonated by a scruffy Jason Robards as a crazy old coot in the desert. )