About eleven seconds after I posted the previous item, Del Williams wrote…
What was the name of the movie Howard Hughes liked to watch over and over when he was living in Vegas? I remember there was one that was his favorite but I can't for the life of me recall what it was.
It was Ice Station Zebra, the 1968 movie that starred Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine and Patrick McGoohan. According to one report, Hughes would run it at least three times a week and would occasionally get on a kick of watching his 16mm print over and over, back to back, several times a day. He had a Graflex projector with an add-on sound system that allowed him to crank the volume up to almost deafening levels because of his poor hearing. He had a whole library of films that he ran over and over including The Sting and the James Bond films that starred Sean Connery. It is not known if he had any particular reaction to Diamonds Are Forever, which was set in Vegas and featured Jimmy Dean as a Hughes-like billionaire.
The story I love about Hughes' movie watching is that he got hooked on the late night movies being run on KLAS, which was the local CBS affiliate. Just as he'd ordered his staff to have Swanson change the contents of their TV dinners, he sometimes told them to call the station and have them run a particular movie he wanted to see. To make it easier for this to happen, he soon bought the station…and thereafter, he didn't need the 16mm projector much. He'd have his crew phone the station and tell them what movie Mr. Hughes wanted to see next…and that's what would be broadcast to all of Vegas without advance announcement or commercial interruption. Once in a while, he got bored with a movie and he'd have them stop a film in the middle and start a different one. This is very similar to what NBC recently did with Celebrity Cooking Showdown.
One of the technicians who worked at the station later told the story of getting a call late one night informing him that Mr. Hughes wanted to see an episode of Sugarfoot, the old western series starring Will Hutchins. The technician replied that he'd be glad to thread one up but the station didn't have any reels of Sugarfoot in its library. The voice on the other end of the line said, "We'll get you one." A few hours later, a print of Sugarfoot arrived. It had been flown in from Los Angeles by one of the airlines that Hughes owned, probably on an otherwise-empty plane since there were then no scheduled LAX-LAS flights after Midnight. Back before the VCR was popular, home video could be kind of expensive.