The Man, the Myth, the Millions — and Marty

Mar

tin Scorsese is as much a movie fan as he is a moviemaker. He poured his love for classic American and Italian films into two four-hour documentaries that are their own kind of classics. Now he is making a big Hollywood picture about Howard Hughes, a giant figure in business, aviation and movies. And he has signed Leonardo DiCaprio, star of the biggest hit in Hollywood history, to bring the legend to screen life.

Hughes is remembered today as the billionaire bohemian who built that Edsel of airplanes, the Spruce Goose, and spent the late 1960s as the reclusive, emaciated owner of a slew of Las Vegas hotels and casinos. His death in 1976, as a reader wrote to TIME, "disproved the saying that 'you can never be too rich or too thin.'"

But Hughes was also a flamboyant and gifted Hollywood figure. At 21 he produced a movie (Two Arabian Knights) that won an Oscar at the first Academy Awards ceremony. Before he was 25, he had directed and supervised the thrilling dogfights in the World War I fly-boy spectacle Hell's Angels, the flick that made Jean Harlow a star. Two years later, Hughes produced the best and most brutal of the early gangster dramas, Scarface. After a decade-long vacation from films, he made The Outlaw, a notorious Western whose main point of interest was Jane Russell's bosom. By the mid-1950s, he had run a major movie studio, RKO, into the ground. Then he vanished into eccentricity.

The brilliance and waywardness of Hughes' hectic, high-flying movie career were surely part of what fascinated Scorsese and screenwriter John Logan (who scripted RKO 281, about the making of Citizen Kane). But if Hughes had been a homebody, they would have far less to tell. So The Aviator will detail this rich and randy bachelor's dalliances with Katharine Hepburn (played by Cate Blanchett ), Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale) and Harlow (Gwen Stefani of the band No Doubt). The film teems with other Hollywood potentates, from MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer to supercensor Joseph Breen, and promises to be a loving, caustic tribute to a town whose glittering streets can be every bit as mean as those in Scorsese's Little Italy. And unlike the director's Gangs of New York, it won't take 32 years to finish. We can hope to see it late next year.