Support for the Radio West podcast comes from Harmon's Grocery, committed to excellent service and friendly smiles.

Your food is our passion.

William Nunez's documentary film begins with the erratic billionaire Howard Hughes ensconced in a hotel room watching the same movie over and over and over again.

It was an historical epic called The Conqueror from 1956. John Wayne played the Mongol warrior Gangas Khan.

Nunez told us it was one of the films Hughes made in his brief stint as a

mogul, and it was widely considered terrible. But no one really understood Hughes's fixation.

He was very nomadic towards the end of his life. He lived in Las Vegas primarily,

but he was also living in Alcapulco.

He was also living in the Bahamas.

And for a brief period, he lived in London, strangely enough.

He would just take over penthouse suites of hotels in each of these locations.

And at that time, his OCD was really starting to take hold in his phobias,

and he would sit there watching movies.

He would have headphones on that were created for him

because he had lost his hearing from all the testing he did with aviation back in the 1940s.

And he was also, you know, racked with a lot of medication because when he crashed in Beverly Hills,

I think that was kind of the tipping point in his kind of descent into this paranoid persona, you know, letting his hair grow fingernails, etc.

So there he is in London, just sitting there on a chair with a regular movie projector of the 1970s and one of those fold-out projector screens

and he would just watch this movie, The Conqueror, over and over again.

Rewinded

Play it

Would a Mongol dare touch Kuhnak's daughter?

...