In the history of world cinema, there is one film that has caused the greatest damage to actors: "The Conqueror".
In 1954, an American billionaire and film tycoon Howard Hughes decided to bring a generation of overlords Genghis Khan to the screen on a whim, with a total investment of up to $8 million, which was definitely the number one in Tianzi at the time.
This so-called "epic" Hollywood movie is full of superstars, with the most famous American Western star John Wayne playing Genghis Khan, and the popular actress Susan Hayward playing the heroine, a Mongolian princess, and Richard Powell as the director.
The plot of the film is very "American": the young Genghis Khan fell in love with the princess of the Mongol leader, stole her and provoked war. He was captured in the war, but with the help of a princess, eventually defeated the enemy and became the new overlord of Mongolia.
There were no accidents when the film was shot, and the problem was in the chosen location.
Because the historical war scene took place in the Mongolian Gobi, Hughes chose the location in St. George County, in the Utah desert, but it was only 137 miles from the nuclear test site in Nevada, and it was in the downwind position at the time of the nuclear explosion test. A year ago, the U.S. military had just tested 11 atomic bombs, and frequent nuclear explosion tests produced a large amount of radioactive atomic dust, which just drifted along the wind and landed on the filming site.
The Conqueror poster
John Wayne on set
American soldiers leisurely watch the nuclear explosion
People in the 1950s were indifferent to the concept of nuclear radiation, and there were even nearby residents sitting on benches admiring mushroom clouds from afar. The crew of "Conqueror" was also unsuspecting, shooting a full 13 weeks of location in such a "desert of death", and worse, in order to highlight the effect of ten thousand horses galloping and yellow sand, the director ordered the staff to use countless electric fans to blow into the sand, and all the cast members sucked a lot of nuclear dust.
War scenes from the movie
After the location shooting, Hughes also had 60 tons of sand transported to Hollywood to continue shooting some of the remaining scenes. As a result, none of the 220 cast members of the crew were spared.
Over the next 25 years, 91 of the 220 crew members developed cancer, and 46 of them lost their lives to cancer, including director Powell, male protagonist John Wayne, female protagonist Susan Hayward and Pedro, Agnes, John Hoyt and other famous movie stars. Several relatives of Wayne and Hayward, who visited the set, also suffered from cancer, noting that the statistics did not include Indians who acted as extras.
Two of the most popular Hollywood stars died of cancer
From the mid-1950s to the early 1980s, the incidence of cancer in st. George County exploded, with multiple cancers of leukemia, lymphoma, thyroid, breast, bone, brain, and gastrointestinal cancers, and the public realized what had happened to the Conqueror crew.
Producer Hughes was so guilty that he had chosen the wrong location for filming that he spent $12 million to recycle all copies of The Conqueror, making the film disappear from the market for 17 years.
By the way, although the film is full of superstars, it has a pompous and absurd acting and has been rated as one of the worst movies in history.