The Aviator is a lesson in US venture capital

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It’s moment of truth for Star Plus

Feb 24: Almost 30 years after Howard Hughes’s death, the movie version of his life is the odds-on favorite to win the most Oscars. But the most striking thing about “The Aviator” is that it ignores the reason everyone was interested in Hughes in the first place: his ability to make money. The movie industry has been preoccupied with Hughes for a very long time. The studio executive who hired me to write my first film script handed me — as a sample of screen writing excellence — a script he had commissioned, but never made, about Hughes.

The first big movie star I ever ate lunch with told me that he had been obsessing for years about a film he hoped to make, and star in, about Hughes’s life. And yet now we have an almost three-hour epic on the man with scarcely a hint of where his money came from, or the aspects of his character that made him so good at making it.

All the audience is allowed to see is this quixotic fellow wasting millions of dollars recklessly pursuing his various crackpot schemes. As bizarre and colorful as Hughes may have been, he wouldn’t have been of the slightest interest to anyone had he not also been a billionaire.

If you didn’t already know the Hughes story, if all you had was the movie, you would assume the poor man died a pauper. And if you did know something of the Hughes story, you might come away thinking that the main qualification for dying as the world’s richest man is to be certifiably insane. There’s a dramatic reason for this, of course.

People in the entertainment industry assume that money-making is inherently repellent, that if you show a character doing it you risk turning the audience against him. It’s next to impossible to sell a studio on the idea that a character for whom money-making is a central purpose can charm or interest an audience. This is why, for instance, so little attempt has been made to do for Wall Street what television’s “The West Wing” has done for politics. It’s also why, when Wall Street people turn up in movies, they are the bad guys.