My Favorite Howard Hughes Story
Given the recent fascination with the upcoming Howard Hughes biopic, as well as any number of other articles on his life (this article covers some of the more eccentric parts left out of the movie) I remembered my favorite Hughes story.
Howard Hughes loved watching movies at night. Now, this won't seem too odd to most of us, since many people, myself included, have spent a few late nights watching an old movie on cable or on the DVD player. However, Hughes had a problem. He liked to watch movies of his choosing in his own room on top of the Desert Inn in Las Vegas before anyone had dreamed up HBO or the VCR.
Hughes was not daunted by this small problem. This is the man that bought the Desert Inn when they threatened to evict him. So, Hughes bought a local TV station. Each week, the TV station would publish its weekly schedule, including the movies it planned to show each evening; however, it seldom followed this schedule, because each evening Howard Hughes would call his station and tell them what movie he wanted to see, and that would be what they broadcast. So, in a sense, Howard Hughes invented pay per view TV, though his version was kind of expensive. Also, the TV station apparently got a lot of complaints for never showing the movie listed in the TV guide.
