Hell's Angels

Having just watched my VHS of this and wondering if it was out on DVD yet, I came to the IMDB to check and saw a comment about how hackneyed and awful this movie was, with the worst traits of the silent movies...lol! For those who don't know, this WAS a silent movie, and Hughes took so long trying to perfect the aerial sequences that sound came along, so then he had to try to rework everything else into sound, delaying things even further. Hughes was a "bit" of a perfectionist, ala Chaplin with "City Lights" and for every wonderful thing that does, it creates dozens of others you have to deal with as well... My favorite story of the making of this movie (recalling across 30 years from a book by Donald Dwiggins called "The Stunt Pilots" involved Paul Mantz (one of the lead pilots, later to die making "Flight of the Phoenix" after being the king of the Hollywood pilots for over 30 years) and Jean Harlow waiting in an airport restaurant for Hughes to fly in from somewhere and Mantz placing a nickel Coca-Cola bottle under a table leg before Hughes arrived and telling Harlow to "watch this". Hughes arrives for the meeting and being the perfectionist but also a bit ?, he never says anything about the table, never looks under it, but spends the whole lunch trying to eat with one hand and hold the table level with the other....