Howard hughes biography reviews on windows 10
Howard Hughes: The Great Aviator - His Life, Loves & Films - A Documentary
Description
As a young man, Howard Hughes was unstoppable. His wealth, power and ambition attracted business associates. His achievements as a movie producer propelled him into Hollywood’s inner circle. His dark good looks, Texan charm and vulnerability seduced countless actresses and socialites, marking him as a playboy with a decidedly possessive streak. Hughes was a passionate and prolific filmmaker who pushed boundaries, enraged censors, and did whatever it took to get his films made his way. Whether performing a death-defying stunt in “Hell’s Angels”, designing a special bra for Jane Russell in “The Outlaw”, or facing the wrath of mobster Al Capone and the United States government to ensure the release of “Scarface”, Hughes was a force to be reckoned with. As an aviation pioneer, Hughes broke numerous flight records to become a national hero. His contributions to aeronautic design gained him multi-million dollar government contracts. In later years, he expanded his empire to Las Vegas with the purchase of several hotels and mining interests, becoming America’s first billionaire. And his greatest dream, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute flourishes today. But a dark undercurrent of eccentricities and germ phobia eventually drove Hughes into a self-imposed exile for the last 20 years of his life. He died at age 70, a shell of his former self, surrounded by an army of aides and doctors. The legacy of Howard Hughes is both inspirational and tragic. Gain insight into the motivations of this complex man through a rare interview with Dr. Raymond D. Fowler, the psychologist who performed the psychological autopsy for the Hughes Estate in 1986. Explore the public and private life of one of the 20th Century’s most important Americans.
Additional information
1. Hughes was a millionaire at 18.
The 1901 discovery of oil at Spindletop, near Beaumont, Texas, marked the birth of the modern petroleum industry, and drew Hughes’ father, Howard Sr., a Harvard dropout, to East Texas to try his luck as a wildcatter. After becoming frustrated by the difficulty of drilling into hard-rock formations with the “fishtail” drill bit that was standard at the time, he devised a superior two-cone bit, which made drilling easier and revolutionized the oil industry.
Hughes patented the technology in 1909 and, with partner Walter Sharp, formed the Houston-based Sharp-Hughes Tool Company to manufacture the bit. After Sharp died in 1912, Hughes bought his interest in the company. When he in turn passed away in 1924, Howard Jr., an only child whose mother had died two years earlier, inherited the thriving company and became a millionaire. The 18-year-old Hughes dropped out of Rice University, let others manage the oil-tool business and set out for Hollywood in 1925.
2. His directorial debut, “Hell’s Angels,” was one of the most expensive movies of its time.
Hughes started his movie career as a producer on the 1926 film “Swell Hogan,” which turned out to be so terrible it never made it into theaters. However, he soon had box-office success with 1927’s “Two Arabian Knights,” which earned an Academy Award for best comedy direction. Hughes went on to direct his first film, “Hell’s Angels,” when the initial two directors on the project quit after clashing with the young Texas millionaire. In his quest to make the aerial scenes in “Hell’s Angels,” an action-adventure about World War I pilots, as realistic as possible, Hughes amassed a huge fleet of vintage planes and hired scores of pilots and mechanics.
Three pilots died during production, and Hughes himself crashed a plane. “Hell’s Angels” initially was shot as a silent film, but following the fall 1927 release of “The Jazz Singer,” the first feature-length movie with synchronized dialogue,
Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness
Hughes was not a self-made man. He inherited, at the young age of 18, his father's immensely successful business Hughes Tool Company. Both of Hughes' parents died suddenly when he was a teenager, and this had a profound effect on his life. Not only because he came into vast wealth so quickly, but because he was very much a mother's boy, being coddled and pampered over by her. Unfortunately, she was smothering and instilled in Hughes many phobias that would later plague him so profusely as an adult. Hughes was an extreme germaphobe, with the seed being planted by his mother.
A master of public relations, Hughes was actually a really poor businessman. About the best thing he did was to leave the Tool Company to basically run itself and keep pouring money into his pockets. He used the profits to spend the next half century embarking on one failed business venture after another. He bought RKO Studios and ran it into the ground. He bought TWA and almost destroyed it, finally being forced out of it by the government. He bought up a series of old mines all across Nevada, with almost none of them paying out at all. He was a defense contractor for the military but did a mostly poor job - completely botching an Army helicopter contract in the 60s, trying and failing to produce photo reconnaissance planes in WWI
Author Climbs Inside Strange World of Howard Hughes
SAN FRANCISCO — For the last decade, Richard Hack has published at least a book a year, sometimes more, but he insists that his new book on Howard Hughes is no quickie bio. In fact, Hack circled his subject for years before he started researching the life of the man who went from dashing Hollywood producer, man-about-town and test pilot to become the world’s first billionaire, who spent almost no money, saw almost no one and wanted to do little but watch bad movies and write pages of memos detailing to his staff the precise way to remove tissue paper from a Kleenex box.
Hack first chanced upon Hughes in 1978, when he was a columnist for the Hollywood Reporter and jumped at an opportunity to interview Hughes’ lawyer, Noah Dietrich. Years later, Hack wound up ghostwriting the biography of Hughes’ longtime lieutenant, Robert Maheu. “I was fascinated by the people,” Hack says. “Hughes kept coming back to me--kept jumping back into my life.”
Eventually, Hack was fascinated enough to spend the better part of a decade (amid other projects) working on “Howard Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters,” which was recently published to rave reviews and debuts today on The Times’ nonfiction bestseller list at No. 12.
“Hughes’ story has been told before, of course, but never with the overview, insight and, most important, extraordinarily diligent research applied by Hack in this riveting biography ... ,” opined Publishers Weekly. “What Hack has uncovered is an astonishing tale of rampant ambition, obsession and madness. ... Readers will be nailed to these pages in the most exciting bio of the year.”
Hack only yielded to the idea of actually writing the biography in the early 1990s, when the magnate’s probate records were opened to the public at the state archives in Austin, Texas. Hughes died without a will, and people claiming to be wives or children suddenly appeared in double digits, starting a flood