St. George, Utah: Hollywood's Deadliest Film Set

In the summer of 1954, producer Howard Hughes chose St. George, Utah as the filming location for his epic movie The Conqueror, starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan. The picturesque desert landscape seemed perfect for recreating the Mongolian steppes. What Hughes didn't fully understand was that St. George lay just 137 miles downwind of the Nevada Test Site, where the U.S. government had recently detonated eleven nuclear weapons as part of Operation Upshot-Knothole in 1953. The Atomic Energy Commission assured residents—and Hughes—that the area was completely safe. They were catastrophically wrong.

For thirteen weeks, 220 cast and crew members worked in radioactive fallout. Director Dick Powell directed scenes while contaminated dust swirled around the set. John Wayne, Susan Hayward, and Agnes Moorehead performed in temperatures reaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit, being hosed down at the end of each day to remove the radioactive dust from their bodies. Photographs exist of Wayne holding a Geiger counter that clicked so loudly he thought it was broken. In a decision that would compound the tragedy, Hughes shipped sixty tons of the contaminated soil back to Hollywood for reshoots, spreading the radioactive material to a second location.

Within a decade, the curse of The Conqueror became impossible to ignore. Director Dick Powell died of lymphoma in January 1963 at age 58. Actor Pedro Armendáriz was diagnosed with terminal kidney cancer and took his own life in June 1963 at age 51 while filming a James Bond movie. John Wayne developed lung cancer in 1964 and eventually died of stomach cancer in 1979. Susan Hayward died of brain cancer in 1975. Agnes Moorehead, who played Wayne's mother in the film, died of uterine cancer in 1974 at age 73. By 1981, ninety-one of the 220 cast and crew members—41 percent—had developed some form of cancer. Forty-six of them died from the disease. Dr. Robert Pendleton of the University of Utah called these numbers "an epidemic," noting that in a group this size, only about thirty cancer cases would be statistically expected.

The residents of St. George fared even worse. While the film crew was exposed for weeks, local families breathed radioactive air for twelve years as nuclear testing continued. Ranchers watched their sheep die by the thousands, with wool falling off in clumps and lambs born with grotesque deformities. Children at morning recess were outside when the Harry test on May 19, 1953 sent radiation clouds directly over their town. The government denied everything, blaming ranchers' negligence for livestock deaths and insisting there was no health danger.

It took decades for the truth to emerge and for victims to receive acknowledgment. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act into law, with Congress apologizing "on behalf of the nation" to those who were "involuntarily subjected to increased risk of injury and disease." The government initially expected only a few hundred claims. As of April 2018, 34,372 claims have been approved, totaling over $2.2 billion in compensation. The Conqueror remains a cautionary tale about government deception, corporate negligence, and the deadly price of placing profit over human safety.

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