8 Insanely Dangerous Film Shoots That Nearly Killed Their Stars
2. Over Half The Crew Develop Cancer From Nuclear Fallout - The Conqueror
Casting John Wayne as Genghis Khan has to be one of the most epic miscastings in the history of cinema. Seeing Wayne - the embodiment of all American machismo - dressed as a Mongolian warlord is a sight too bizarre for words. Thats the first of many bizarre things about 1956 epic The Conqueror, whose production become infamous for more reason than one. The films exterior scenes were shot in Utah, at a location near a US military nuclear testing site. Just a few years earlier a number of nuclear weapons had been tested there, and the film was shot downwind from this spot. So while filming there the cast and crew spent weeks breathing in radioactive dust. On top of that Howard Hughes - who financed The Conqueror - shipped tons of dirt from the area back to Hollywood where the rest of it was shot so it would match Utah. In the years following a large number of the cast and crew developed cancer. Of the 91 people who worked on the film who developed the disease, over half of them died from it. This includes Wayne, his co-star Susan Hayward and director Dick Powell. It could be argued in Waynes case that he was a heavy smoker and that might have been the cause. But the eerie amount of people struck with the illness afterwards leads many to believe it was his time near the test site that ended up killing him. Maybe the saddest part is that all that effort was for a film thats considered one of the worst ever made and Wayne himself was quoted as hating it. Howard Hughes apparently felt so guilty that he withdrew the film from circulation for over 20 years, and spent his last years as a reclusive hermit screening the film night after night.
