0:06 [SPEAKER_00]: Some would say the 1956 movie, the conqueror, was cursed from the beginning. 0:13 [SPEAKER_00]: It had a terrible script, an unhappy crew and a producer in Howard Hughes, who would soon lose his mind to an obsessive compulsive disorder and any number of other unknown mental challenges. 0:26 [SPEAKER_00]: Within two years, he quit wearing clothes or cutting his nails and would eat 0:36 [SPEAKER_00]: huge quit bathing and bought every copy of the conqueror for the modern day equivalent of 120 million dollars. 0:45 [SPEAKER_00]: In order to punish himself for the commercial and critical flop, he set alone, watching it on repeat, naked and his chair, while peeing and mason jars. 0:58 [SPEAKER_00]: reviewers really hated this movie. 1:01 [SPEAKER_00]: An audience is hated it too. 1:03 [SPEAKER_00]: It barely broke even at the box office, and is almost universally considered one of the worst movies of all time. 1:11 [SPEAKER_00]: How would you feel if Jonah Hill were cast as Martin Luther King Jr.? 1:17 [SPEAKER_00]: That's pretty much what happened here. 1:19 [SPEAKER_00]: John Wayne played Genghis Khan, and it was as bad as you were imagining. 1:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Pretty much everyone who worked on this movie, left it feeling embarrassed. 1:30 [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody got rich, nobody was proud of it, or brilliant in it. 1:35 [SPEAKER_00]: And then a few years later, people started dying, director Dick Powell died in 1963 at age 59, caused our Pedro Armanderas died that same year, age 51. 1:51 [SPEAKER_00]: The following year, John Wayne himself developed the lung cancer that would recur to the end of his life before killing him in 1979. 2:00 [SPEAKER_00]: It was about this time that people began to realize the curse of the conqueror was real. 2:08 [SPEAKER_00]: The land that Hughes had chosen for the location of this film near the town of St. George Utah was the site of radioactive fallout. 2:17 [SPEAKER_00]: The U.S. government had been testing nuclear weapons about 150 miles northeast of St. George. 2:24 [SPEAKER_00]: And local wind patterns had covered this part of Utah in radioactive dust. 2:30 [SPEAKER_00]: According to Nevada historian, Richard Moreno, by 1981, 91 of the Conqueror's 220 member cast and crew, including all of the principles, had developed some form of cancer and more than half of those had died. 2:46 [SPEAKER_00]: In 1953 alone, the equivalent of 20-year-old Shima's had dropped in this testing area, and most of the fallout headed to St. George, an off-site radiation monitor for the atomic energy commission was assigned to measure radioactivity in the area. 3:04 [SPEAKER_00]: and then needle literally, left the dial. 3:07 [SPEAKER_00]: But when this test are reported these findings to authorities, he was instructed not to say anything, because the government didn't want to be liable for paying damages to ranchers or residents. 3:18 [SPEAKER_00]: According to Marino, in April and May of 1953, ranchers noticed burns on the skins, faces and lips of sheep that had been eating grass and later proved to be radioactive. 3:32 [SPEAKER_00]: Use Begin Miss Caring in large numbers. 3:35 [SPEAKER_00]: and will literally fell off the sheep and big clumps with visible blisters underneath. 3:41 [SPEAKER_00]: Some lands were still born and had what has been described as grotesque deformities, who were unable to nurse because they were so sickly, and estimated third of the 18,000 through 20,000 sheep in the region died, additionally within five years of the tests. 4:00 [SPEAKER_00]: There was a jump in the number of people diagnosed with leukemia and radiation-related cancers and the residents of Southern Utah, South Eastern Nevada and Northern Arizona. 4:12 [SPEAKER_00]: All downwind of the detonations, towns with little history of childhood leukemia suddenly had clusters of children suffering from the disease. 4:22 [SPEAKER_00]: The government denied everything. 4:24 [SPEAKER_00]: To huge credit, he had asked the Atomic Energy Commission if the area was safe for filming. 4:31 [SPEAKER_00]: They told him yes. 4:32 [SPEAKER_00]: I sat down with Richard Moreno to learn more about this overlooked and completely unnecessary tragedy. 4:41 [SPEAKER_01]: This is a interesting story, basically, in the late 1940s, Dick Powell, who was a fairly well-known Hollywood movie star actor, but also director. 4:53 [SPEAKER_01]: He had commissioned a script for a movie called Genghis Khan, and they had received a script and he was planning to do this movie. 5:03 [SPEAKER_01]: And when they wrote the script, they did it in kind of this quasi- 5:07 [SPEAKER_01]: Shakespearean tone, because they wrote it from Marlon Brando, thinking, but he was his hot young star that was coming up that he would be ideal for this. 5:17 [SPEAKER_01]: At the same time, Dick Powell takes a meeting with John Wayne, the biggest movie star in the world, westerns, cowboy, image, etc. 5:27 [SPEAKER_00]: For those of you who may not know, Marlon Brando is an actor's actor, a versatile thespion of the highest order, John Wayne basically plays the same character in every movie. 5:40 [SPEAKER_00]: He's a grizzled old American cowboy of one kind or another. 5:45 [SPEAKER_01]: John Wayne talks to Dick Powell, their friends, and he said that he was looking for something different. 5:50 [SPEAKER_01]: He didn't want to keep making the same movies over and over. 5:53 [SPEAKER_01]: And he saw this script for King's Khan on top of the desk, and so Wayne picked it up apparently. 6:00 [SPEAKER_01]: flip through Reddit and said, I want to do this. 6:03 [SPEAKER_01]: Well, it was not written for him. 6:05 [SPEAKER_01]: And anyone who's seen the movie that subsequently came out knows it's terrible. 6:10 [SPEAKER_01]: John Wayne trying to do quasi-shake-spirion dialect is just not going to work very well. 6:18 [SPEAKER_01]: But he was the biggest, it's I guess today Tom Cruise wants to make a movie. 6:22 [SPEAKER_01]: Tom Cruise gets to make a movie. 6:24 [SPEAKER_01]: Nobody said no to the Duke, and so they went forward, got the studio to buy into it. 6:30 [SPEAKER_01]: They hired Susan Hayward to be the leading lady, Agnes Morehead, to I think play her mother only because they both had red hair and a whole variety of other actors. 6:41 [SPEAKER_01]: And they decided the best place to film. 6:43 [SPEAKER_01]: this movie against Kong to make it look like and actually it was called the conquer the film to make it look like it was you know the the goby desert was to film it somewhere in the Utah or Nevada. 6:57 [SPEAKER_01]: And so they picked a place right near St. George Utah. 7:00 [SPEAKER_01]: where there were a lot of sand dunes and kind of resembled the steps, I guess, that you would find in Mongolia and they decided to film there. 7:09 [SPEAKER_01]: One of the things about filming there in the early 1950s, when they're doing this is that this is a period when Nevada is also doing a whole bunch of above-ground 7:25 [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, nobody really understood all of the dangers that were involved with doing those kind of testing to digress a bit, there are photos where the casinos and Las Vegas in the late 40s and early 50s would advertise, come stay in the room at the hotel because at Daybreak, they're going to blow up a nuclear bomb and you can go outside, put on, we'll put chairs out, 7:50 [SPEAKER_01]: and you can watch the mushroom cloud, and it was a tourist attraction at that time. 7:56 [SPEAKER_01]: And so there really was no perception that this was something that was bad or dangerous, or would have any potential health impacts. 8:05 [SPEAKER_01]: And certainly the people that lived in that area didn't realize that either. 8:09 [SPEAKER_01]: So they had apparently done some a series of nuclear above ground, like I've been as ferret tests prior to when they were going to film this movie. 8:20 [SPEAKER_01]: And that whole area had been blanketed with Fallout. 8:24 [SPEAKER_01]: And so, movie crew shows up, they're told it's safe. 8:27 [SPEAKER_01]: They start doing things. 8:28 [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, because they want this to look like the goby desert, they bring in massive industrial fans. 8:35 [SPEAKER_01]: So there's, I think to yourself, what's the worst thing you could possibly do if you've got fallout that's falling on everything is kick it up with fans. 8:45 [SPEAKER_01]: So they created best storms for the movie and all these actors in the crew and everybody's breathing this stuff in. 8:52 [SPEAKER_01]: They're getting it all filled with them. 8:54 [SPEAKER_01]: Other clothes and everything has got all the sand and dust in it. 8:58 [SPEAKER_01]: And they finish the film. 9:00 [SPEAKER_01]: Dick Powell decides they have to do some reshutes. 9:02 [SPEAKER_01]: So they actually truck a whole bunch of this sand in this California and use it for the reshutes for the movie. 9:11 [SPEAKER_01]: So the act of then kicking it up with bulldozers and bringing it and then dumping it somewhere. 9:18 [SPEAKER_01]: And so as a result, they call it the Conquerors curse because of the name of the film. 9:23 [SPEAKER_01]: And in order to number of people in later years came down in cancer, now most of them were pretty heavy smokers. 9:30 [SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, the direct line between, I made a movie in Utah and it gave me cancer is a little hard to prove because there were other factors. 9:44 [SPEAKER_01]: and being exposed to certain radioactive particulates is not a good combination for your health. 9:50 [SPEAKER_01]: And so if you look at the statistics, it's something like over 31% of the people who were involved in making that film died of cancer in later years. 10:00 [SPEAKER_01]: Now, not right away, but John Wayne, he had lung cancer. 10:04 [SPEAKER_01]: And he always, from what I could read, he never said it was the Conquerors curse. 10:12 [SPEAKER_01]: And even after he lost one loan, they removed it because it was cancerous. 10:16 [SPEAKER_01]: He continued to smoke and kind of the interesting side note. 10:20 [SPEAKER_01]: His last movie was also made in Nevada, which was the shootest in a film in Carson City, Nevada, where he was already dying. 10:29 [SPEAKER_01]: And it's a good movie, but kind of an interesting post script to all of that. 10:33 [SPEAKER_01]: Susan Haywood had brain cancer and died in her late 50s and Agnes Morhead died in her early 70s and she had cancer. 10:41 [SPEAKER_01]: She's one I found it quote, I think it was in people magazine where the interviewer about this and and she said, yeah, it was the damn movie. 10:49 [SPEAKER_01]: basically she blamed the film and said that's what gave her cancer. 10:53 [SPEAKER_01]: But there were just numbers of people, people work on the set, the sound people had said or who were all exposed to this. 11:00 [SPEAKER_01]: And again, there was a lawsuit that one of the extras I think filed and had never went anywhere. 11:06 [SPEAKER_01]: But we know that exposure 11:09 [SPEAKER_01]: particularly long-term exposure to those to the fallout is not healthy and they're actually the people who live in that state Georgia area did sue years and years later and they were able to get a congressional settlement where there was a pot of money set aside to pay for them. 11:29 [SPEAKER_01]: for their medical needs, etc. 11:31 [SPEAKER_01]: I actually know a guy who I think he's still alive. 11:35 [SPEAKER_01]: He worked not so much on that they call the people there in the Saint George area, the downwinders, because the fallout was all blown in their area. 11:43 [SPEAKER_01]: He actually worked on the Nevada test site, but it was in the sixties before again they knew and he's at his 80s now and he still gets tested every year. 11:52 [SPEAKER_01]: Somebody from the government, 11:54 [SPEAKER_01]: It says, uh, you got to come in for your regular test and they test him to see if he's got cancer or anything else. 12:00 [SPEAKER_01]: So I think it's because of these this congressional action in the 1980s that the government finally responded to this. 12:09 [SPEAKER_01]: But in the beginning, they denied everything and they said, no, there's nothing unhealthy. 12:14 [SPEAKER_01]: And you had with the downwinders, a lot of that, that's in Georgia, which is now a kind of a resort area. 12:20 [SPEAKER_01]: But that used to be a lot of sheep and cattle. 12:22 [SPEAKER_01]: And you had immediately in the years right after the fallout occurred, they had all kinds of problems with sheep with lots of their babies were being born dead. 12:32 [SPEAKER_01]: Some with deformities, some with the burns all over their body from the fallout. 12:37 [SPEAKER_01]: So it really did have a serious impact on the folks who live in that area in St. George, which is right on the Nevada border, 12:47 [SPEAKER_00]: Do you know if people will start realizing it in those communities in terms of noticing that the cancer and stuff was higher or did people notice that the movie stars and the people who are acting and being on set. 13:03 [SPEAKER_00]: we're being impacted first. 13:05 [SPEAKER_01]: Do you know what you know I don't think so I think the people that live there started noticing I read there were cancer clusters children being born with cancer and so yeah I believe there were kind of independent I think the movie came out later as far as like the connection I'm not sure people thought about they filmed that movie in St. George Utah. 13:26 [SPEAKER_01]: But the people who lived there had to live with it every day. 13:28 [SPEAKER_01]: And they started seeing these higher incidents of cancer, clusters of cancer. 13:34 [SPEAKER_01]: And so that was all part of what they did try to sue at one point. 13:38 [SPEAKER_01]: And the government won said to prove that, of course, this is in the 60s, that there was no damage to them. 13:46 [SPEAKER_01]: But it was years and years later that the congressional delegation responded to the reality, 13:54 [SPEAKER_01]: And so there was actually congressional action to set up a fund to pay for the needs of these folks. 14:02 [SPEAKER_01]: And I think to make them as whole as they could. 14:05 [SPEAKER_01]: And I believe the fund for you to be over a billion dollars to one point. 14:10 [SPEAKER_00]: One of the saddest things about this tragedy is that we will never know the full scope of the Conqueror's curse. 14:17 [SPEAKER_00]: As those 60 tons of radioactive dirt were taken back to Hollywood, an undoubtedly remain there after decades of exposing yet another population of people. 14:28 [SPEAKER_00]: The lives of people of St. George, the so-called downwinders, are of course no less valuable or important than the cast of the conqueror, but without this movie, their story might never be told. 14:42 [SPEAKER_00]: In 1990, President George H.W. 14:46 [SPEAKER_00]: Bush signed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act into law, offering compensation for people affected by nuclear testing. 14:55 [SPEAKER_00]: According to the Atomic Heritage Foundation, the government initially only expected several hundred applicants. 15:02 [SPEAKER_00]: This turned out to be a massive underestimate. 15:05 [SPEAKER_00]: As of April 20th, 2018, 34,372 claims have been approved, for a total of $2 billion, $243 million, $25,000, and $380. 15:18 [SPEAKER_00]: Nevada site downwinders have fair better than some other downwinders communities in this respect. 15:28 [SPEAKER_00]: Some of whom are still seeking compensation and recognition. 15:33 [SPEAKER_00]: Like the radioactive fallout itself, the legal, financial, and medical trauma of this reckless use of nuclear power will last for generations. 15:44 [SPEAKER_00]: As this article points out, noting that the time that elapsed between the test and financial compensation, often meant that downwinders died before they received their benefits. 15:55 [SPEAKER_00]: Furthermore, 15:57 [SPEAKER_00]: The children and grandchildren of many Nevada site downwinders continue to claim that they too have major health complications due to the radiation, they, or their older relatives experienced. 16:11 [SPEAKER_00]: These include mental and physical disabilities at birth, as well as pre-existing conditions that show symptoms earlier in childhood than normal. 16:21 [SPEAKER_00]: Litigation concerning these cases is ongoing. 16:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Underground testing at the Nevada testing site lasted all the way to 1992. 16:31 [SPEAKER_00]: And as a result, these remain some of the most radioactive land areas in the world. 16:38 [SPEAKER_00]: And while second and third generation victims of fallout have filed many claims for compensation, not one of them has won their appeal. 16:47 [SPEAKER_00]: They continue to fight on.
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