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Respuesta: MALDITO HOLLYWOOD: actualizado con LA PROFECÍA Y POLTERGEIST
Lo suyo sería que pujase el propio Cage.
Lo suyo sería que pujase el propio Cage.
MALDITO HOLLYWOOD: actualizado con LA PROFECÍA Y POLTERGEIST
- Autor Magnolia
- Fecha de inicio
Tres años después, MAGNOLIA SIGUE SIN CONTINUAR ESTE HILO, quiza uno de los mejores que ha dado Cinefilia 
Harry Block
Exiliado
Was The Movie The Conqueror Really Cursed? A Look At Radiation Paranoia
By Michael D. Shaw
Health News Digest
September 14, 2009
More Hollywood Myths: John Wayne and the Nevada Test Site
Brian Dunning
Skeptoid #238
December 28, 2010
By Michael D. Shaw
Health News Digest
September 14, 2009
Few environmental myths have stood the test of time better than the notion that a significant number of the cast and crew of The Conqueror (1956) were felled by cancer, contracted as a result of exposure to radioactive fallout.
Certainly, all the elements of a good story are there. Several above ground atomic tests were run at Yucca Flats in Nevada from 1951-1953, including 11 in 1953 under the name "Operation Upshot-Knothole." The movie was shot from May-August of 1954 in Snow Canyon State Park, located 11 miles (18 km) northwest of St. George, Utah. As luck would have it, Snow Canyon is 137 miles (220 km) downwind of Yucca Flats. To make matters worse, uncredited producer Howard Hughes shipped truckloads of dirt from the site back to the studio for reshoots.
The movie premiered on February 22, 1956 in Los Angeles, and less than seven years later, director Dick Powell died of cancer. After Powell, several of the leading actors succumbed to cancer, as well. There was Pedro Armendáriz, who killed himself in June of 1963, rather than live with his terminal diagnosis. Agnes Moorehead was the next star of the film to die of cancer, in April of 1974. She was followed by Susan Hayward (March, 1975) and John Wayne, who first contracted lung cancer in September of 1964 and finally died of stomach cancer on June 11, 1979.
Public interest was piqued by an article in the November 10, 1980 issue of People magazine, in which it was stated that "Of The Conqueror's 220 cast and crew members from Hollywood, an astonishing 91 have contracted cancer."
The article quoted Dr. Robert C. Pendleton, director of radiological health at the University of Utah: "With these numbers, this case could qualify as an epidemic. The connection between fallout radiation and cancer in individual cases has been practically impossible to prove conclusively. But in a group this size you'd expect only 30-some cancers to develop. With 91, I think the tie-in to their exposure on the set of The Conqueror would hold up even in a court of law."
This sounds impressive until you do some basic research. According to the National Cancer Institute, at the time the article was written, the overall incidence of being diagnosed with cancer in a person's lifetime (age-adjusted) was about 40%. As it happens, this number still holds today. Thus, in a cohort of 220 people, 88 would be diagnosed with cancer at some point.
I have no idea how Pendleton came up with his "30-some." If anything, given the heavy smoking habits of many in the movie business at the time, including Dick Powell, Agnes Moorehead, Pedro Armendáriz, Susan Hayward, and John Wayne at five packs a day, 91 is completely within the expected range. The only "astonishing" thing is that the People article did not mention the smoking habits of any of the deceased stars.
Bruce Church is a health physicist based in southern Utah, who had been involved with the testing program for years, and has done his level best to act as the voice of reason on the issue. Church told me about plaintiff's attorneys going door to door, trolling for clients in the St. George area in the late 1970s, paving the way for a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits, filed on behalf of the so-called "downwinders." He likes to remind those interested in these matters that since 1950, Utah has had one of the lowest cancer mortality rates in the country. Moreover, Washington County—supposedly ground zero for the fallout—has one of the lowest cancer mortality rates in the state.
Much was made of an article entitled "Childhood leukemias associated with fallout from nuclear testing," which appeared in the February 22, 1979 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The study spoke of a 2.44 times increase in mortality between the high-exposure and low-exposure cohorts, within the high fallout counties examined. Again, this sounds impressive as long as you ignore the fact that even with this increase, the mortality rate was just slightly above the rate for the entire United States.
As you might expect, this significant qualification is infamously not cited in the dozens of web-based references to the study. And, given that the research effort set out to examine "high fallout" counties to begin with, it is quite suspicious that this group had to be parsed into low and high cohorts, which would only serve to magnify the effects observed. Further studies would continue to bear out negative or de minimis findings.
However, as regular readers of this column are aware, all the science in the world cannot trump emotionalism and politics. Thus, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA)—passed in 1990—provides for money (typically $50,000) to be paid to victims of certain cancers, who simply have to prove that they lived in a list of counties during a particular time period.
RECA has paid out over $1 billion so far, and has produced bountiful results for many Utah-based politicians. Following the old adage that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing, this bounty paid on cancer has simply reinvigorated all the mythology: If victims are being compensated, the story must be true!
Yet, science has garnered some victories. Bruce Church was one of the prime movers in setting up the Community Environmental Monitoring Program (CEMP) started in 1981, and now boasting 29 stations that ring the test site area. Data is made available to any interested party, and the monitoring stations are often managed by local high school science teachers.
One such station manager, Jack Heppler, was successful in convincing at least two movie production companies that there was no danger whatever in filming in the St. George area. Heppler also worked his magic on calming the locals as well as easing the minds of families interested in moving to the region.
Church recommends the Smithsonian affiliated Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, as well as the online Atomic Archive as excellent resources. I would add Church's site to this list.
As to The Conquerer, the only real curse was its script and the miscasting of John Wayne in the lead.
Certainly, all the elements of a good story are there. Several above ground atomic tests were run at Yucca Flats in Nevada from 1951-1953, including 11 in 1953 under the name "Operation Upshot-Knothole." The movie was shot from May-August of 1954 in Snow Canyon State Park, located 11 miles (18 km) northwest of St. George, Utah. As luck would have it, Snow Canyon is 137 miles (220 km) downwind of Yucca Flats. To make matters worse, uncredited producer Howard Hughes shipped truckloads of dirt from the site back to the studio for reshoots.
The movie premiered on February 22, 1956 in Los Angeles, and less than seven years later, director Dick Powell died of cancer. After Powell, several of the leading actors succumbed to cancer, as well. There was Pedro Armendáriz, who killed himself in June of 1963, rather than live with his terminal diagnosis. Agnes Moorehead was the next star of the film to die of cancer, in April of 1974. She was followed by Susan Hayward (March, 1975) and John Wayne, who first contracted lung cancer in September of 1964 and finally died of stomach cancer on June 11, 1979.
Public interest was piqued by an article in the November 10, 1980 issue of People magazine, in which it was stated that "Of The Conqueror's 220 cast and crew members from Hollywood, an astonishing 91 have contracted cancer."
The article quoted Dr. Robert C. Pendleton, director of radiological health at the University of Utah: "With these numbers, this case could qualify as an epidemic. The connection between fallout radiation and cancer in individual cases has been practically impossible to prove conclusively. But in a group this size you'd expect only 30-some cancers to develop. With 91, I think the tie-in to their exposure on the set of The Conqueror would hold up even in a court of law."
This sounds impressive until you do some basic research. According to the National Cancer Institute, at the time the article was written, the overall incidence of being diagnosed with cancer in a person's lifetime (age-adjusted) was about 40%. As it happens, this number still holds today. Thus, in a cohort of 220 people, 88 would be diagnosed with cancer at some point.
I have no idea how Pendleton came up with his "30-some." If anything, given the heavy smoking habits of many in the movie business at the time, including Dick Powell, Agnes Moorehead, Pedro Armendáriz, Susan Hayward, and John Wayne at five packs a day, 91 is completely within the expected range. The only "astonishing" thing is that the People article did not mention the smoking habits of any of the deceased stars.
Bruce Church is a health physicist based in southern Utah, who had been involved with the testing program for years, and has done his level best to act as the voice of reason on the issue. Church told me about plaintiff's attorneys going door to door, trolling for clients in the St. George area in the late 1970s, paving the way for a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits, filed on behalf of the so-called "downwinders." He likes to remind those interested in these matters that since 1950, Utah has had one of the lowest cancer mortality rates in the country. Moreover, Washington County—supposedly ground zero for the fallout—has one of the lowest cancer mortality rates in the state.
Much was made of an article entitled "Childhood leukemias associated with fallout from nuclear testing," which appeared in the February 22, 1979 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The study spoke of a 2.44 times increase in mortality between the high-exposure and low-exposure cohorts, within the high fallout counties examined. Again, this sounds impressive as long as you ignore the fact that even with this increase, the mortality rate was just slightly above the rate for the entire United States.
As you might expect, this significant qualification is infamously not cited in the dozens of web-based references to the study. And, given that the research effort set out to examine "high fallout" counties to begin with, it is quite suspicious that this group had to be parsed into low and high cohorts, which would only serve to magnify the effects observed. Further studies would continue to bear out negative or de minimis findings.
However, as regular readers of this column are aware, all the science in the world cannot trump emotionalism and politics. Thus, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA)—passed in 1990—provides for money (typically $50,000) to be paid to victims of certain cancers, who simply have to prove that they lived in a list of counties during a particular time period.
RECA has paid out over $1 billion so far, and has produced bountiful results for many Utah-based politicians. Following the old adage that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing, this bounty paid on cancer has simply reinvigorated all the mythology: If victims are being compensated, the story must be true!
Yet, science has garnered some victories. Bruce Church was one of the prime movers in setting up the Community Environmental Monitoring Program (CEMP) started in 1981, and now boasting 29 stations that ring the test site area. Data is made available to any interested party, and the monitoring stations are often managed by local high school science teachers.
One such station manager, Jack Heppler, was successful in convincing at least two movie production companies that there was no danger whatever in filming in the St. George area. Heppler also worked his magic on calming the locals as well as easing the minds of families interested in moving to the region.
Church recommends the Smithsonian affiliated Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, as well as the online Atomic Archive as excellent resources. I would add Church's site to this list.
As to The Conquerer, the only real curse was its script and the miscasting of John Wayne in the lead.
More Hollywood Myths: John Wayne and the Nevada Test Site
Brian Dunning
Skeptoid #238
December 28, 2010
So now we come to the big one, the myth that dozens of people asked me about since the first Hollywood Myths episode came out. Supposedly, John Wayne's death from cancer was caused by his work in the Utah desert in 1954 on the 1956 Howard Hughes film The Conqueror, a movie widely regarded as Wayne's worst. The location near St. George, Utah, is notorious for being downwind from the Nevada Test Site, where a large number of atomic weapons had been detonated in prior years, and thus was the recipient of much radioactive fallout. Wayne's co-stars Susan Hayward and Agnes Moorehead also died of cancer; in fact, by the time People magazine checked up on all 220 cast and crew for a 1980 article, 91 of them had contracted some form of cancer, and 46 had died of cancer.
People's inspiration was apparently a 1979 article in the tabloid The Star by Peter Brennan who merely speculated about the coincidence without doing any real research. It was repeated by such newspapers as the New York Post (August 6, 1979) and the Los Angeles Times (August 6, 1979). People went a step further, talking to a few experts and managing to track down the history of the cast and crew. This article was what really started the story; in fact, virtually anything you might find about this story takes its quotes directly from People. One of the most often borrowed was from an enthusiastic fallout activist, Dr. Robert Pendleton at the University of Utah, who said:
And what science has found, contrary to what's reported in virtually every article published on the subject, is that any link between the film crew's cancers and the atomic tests is far from confirmed. First of all, the numbers reported by People are right in the range of what we might expect to find in a random sample. According to the National Cancer Institute, in 1980 the chances of being diagnosed with a cancer sometime in your lifetime was about 41%, with mortality at 21.7%. And, right on the button, People's survey of The Conqueror's crew found a 41.4% incidence with 20.7% mortality. (These numbers make an assumption of an age group of 20-55 at the time of filming.)
A 1979 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found no consistent pattern of correlation between childhood cancers and fallout exposure in the Utah counties, with the exception of leukemia. For reasons unknown, leukemia rates were about half that of the United States at large, but after the fallout period, this increased to just slightly above the normal rate. The authors were unable to correlate either leukemia or other cancers to fallout. Considering that the film crew spent only a few weeks there, instead of their whole lives like the people who were studied, it seems highly unlikely that they were affected.
But we can't make that declaration for certain. The data we have for the film crew is totally inadequate. Most crucial factors are unknown, like age, age of incidence, types of cancer, heredity, dose-response, and other risk factors each may have had — like John Wayne's smoking of five packs a day. And, of course, "cancer" is not one disease; it is hundreds of different diseases. Plus there's an obvious alternate explanation: The cast and crew simply got old in those intervening decades.
What about Dr. Pendleton's gloomy remarks? In an email to researcher Dylan Jim Esson, a colleague of Pendleton's, Lynn Anspaugh, said that Pendleton's reported comments were uncharacteristic and she thought they were more likely the result of media sensationalism. According to her analysis of the fallout readings from the time and place of The Conqueror's filming, she calculated that the crew received no more than 1 to 4 millirems of radiation, which was less than normal background levels. Pendleton himself had recorded high levels of radiation only when a fallout cloud was directly overhead the day following a test, and normal at other times. The most recent tests had been more than a year prior to the filming, so Anspaugh's calculations are not surprising.
From all the data we have, it was perfectly safe for the film crew, and their reported cancer histories show no unusual ill effects.
So there we have it, another line of evidence that Hollywood myths are all just a part of the show. Please let it continue, for as the early writer Wilson Mizner once said, "In Hollywood they almost made a great picture, but they caught it in time."
People's inspiration was apparently a 1979 article in the tabloid The Star by Peter Brennan who merely speculated about the coincidence without doing any real research. It was repeated by such newspapers as the New York Post (August 6, 1979) and the Los Angeles Times (August 6, 1979). People went a step further, talking to a few experts and managing to track down the history of the cast and crew. This article was what really started the story; in fact, virtually anything you might find about this story takes its quotes directly from People. One of the most often borrowed was from an enthusiastic fallout activist, Dr. Robert Pendleton at the University of Utah, who said:
With these numbers, this case could qualify as an epidemic. The connection between fallout radiation and cancer in individual cases has been practically impossible to prove conclusively. But in a group this size you'd expect only 30-some cancers to develop. With 91, I think the tie-in to their exposure on the set of The Conqueror would hold up even in a court of law.
But it didn't, at least not for residents of St. George, Utah, often referred to as the "downwinders", when attorneys went door-to-door in the 1970's. The Times of London reported that some 700 such lawsuits were unsuccessful. However, ten years after the People magazine article, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was passed and has since paid out over $1.5 billion, including many payments to people who had only to prove that they lived in certain counties during a certain time period, and had one of a list of approved diseases. Although this makes it sound like the link must have been proven, science doesn't depend on what politicians were able to convince bureaucrats to do.
And what science has found, contrary to what's reported in virtually every article published on the subject, is that any link between the film crew's cancers and the atomic tests is far from confirmed. First of all, the numbers reported by People are right in the range of what we might expect to find in a random sample. According to the National Cancer Institute, in 1980 the chances of being diagnosed with a cancer sometime in your lifetime was about 41%, with mortality at 21.7%. And, right on the button, People's survey of The Conqueror's crew found a 41.4% incidence with 20.7% mortality. (These numbers make an assumption of an age group of 20-55 at the time of filming.)
A 1979 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found no consistent pattern of correlation between childhood cancers and fallout exposure in the Utah counties, with the exception of leukemia. For reasons unknown, leukemia rates were about half that of the United States at large, but after the fallout period, this increased to just slightly above the normal rate. The authors were unable to correlate either leukemia or other cancers to fallout. Considering that the film crew spent only a few weeks there, instead of their whole lives like the people who were studied, it seems highly unlikely that they were affected.
But we can't make that declaration for certain. The data we have for the film crew is totally inadequate. Most crucial factors are unknown, like age, age of incidence, types of cancer, heredity, dose-response, and other risk factors each may have had — like John Wayne's smoking of five packs a day. And, of course, "cancer" is not one disease; it is hundreds of different diseases. Plus there's an obvious alternate explanation: The cast and crew simply got old in those intervening decades.
What about Dr. Pendleton's gloomy remarks? In an email to researcher Dylan Jim Esson, a colleague of Pendleton's, Lynn Anspaugh, said that Pendleton's reported comments were uncharacteristic and she thought they were more likely the result of media sensationalism. According to her analysis of the fallout readings from the time and place of The Conqueror's filming, she calculated that the crew received no more than 1 to 4 millirems of radiation, which was less than normal background levels. Pendleton himself had recorded high levels of radiation only when a fallout cloud was directly overhead the day following a test, and normal at other times. The most recent tests had been more than a year prior to the filming, so Anspaugh's calculations are not surprising.
From all the data we have, it was perfectly safe for the film crew, and their reported cancer histories show no unusual ill effects.
So there we have it, another line of evidence that Hollywood myths are all just a part of the show. Please let it continue, for as the early writer Wilson Mizner once said, "In Hollywood they almost made a great picture, but they caught it in time."
Coño, ¿y para que te crees que he reflotado el hilo, cachoperro? 
Que lo retornes, o te echo una maldición de esas que viene Spielberg a dirigir tu película y tú te dedicas a hacer bazofias como Combustión Espontanea por el resto de tu vida.
Que lo retornes, o te echo una maldición de esas que viene Spielberg a dirigir tu película y tú te dedicas a hacer bazofias como Combustión Espontanea por el resto de tu vida.