MOVIE WEB: John Wayne's Disastrous & Deadly Movie Is Explored in New Doc The Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout
May 16, 2024
The notorious production of The Conqueror, which gave half its cast and crew cancer, is the subject of the new documentary.
A horrible film, an American tragedy, a worldwide nightmare. That's the logline of the upcoming documentary The Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout from Blue Fox Entertainment, which goes behind the scenes of an infamous John Wayne movie that was filmed near an atomic bomb test site, and one in which he wore 'yellowface' to play Genghis Khan. Written and directed by William Nunez (The Laureate), Hollywood Fallout exists in the long tradition of documentaries about disastrous productions, such as Burden of Dreams and Hearts of Darkness.
Hollywood Fallout will include archival footage on the set of The Conqueror alongside an exploration of the atomic bomb testing at the time, and interviews with Sophie Okonedo (Narrator), Patrick Wayne, Michael Medved, Barrie Chase, John William Law, Mary Dickson, James D’Arc, and more. The film will be released in theaters after some special early theatrical engagements and a filmmaker Q&A tour earlier that week.
The atomic bomb has certainly been on people's minds for the past year, arguably more than it has since the end of the Cold War, thanks to the massive success of Oppenheimer. Christopher Nolan's film about the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the development of the first nuclear weapons swept the 96th Academy Awards and made nearly $1 billion at the box office.
While the use of those weapons was obviously the catalyst for catastrophic tragedy overseas, there has certainly been countless deaths in America from radioactive poisoning. It's "countless" because it's very difficult to tell. However, Keith Meyers at the University of Arizona, in his research study "In the Shadow of the Mushroom Cloud: Nuclear Testing, Radioactive Fallout, and Damage to U.S. Agriculture, 1945 to 1970" for The Journal of Economic History, 79(1), estimates that between 340,000 and 690,000 Americans have died from it. Largely from drinking poisoned milk frow cows in the proximity of nuclear test sites.
The tragic crux of Hollywood Fallout is the radioactive fallout that the cast and crew were exposed to on set, leading to many deaths. But it's also a fascinating study of a very different time, and a very, very bad movie. See it in theaters June 28 after its special engagements and filmmaker Q&As.
