Is 'The Aviator' the only story?

ALMOST 30 years after Howard Hughes's death, the most striking thing about "The Aviator" is that it ignores the reason everyone was interested in Hughes in the first place: his ability to make money.

The movie industry has been preoccupied with Hughes for a very long time. The studio executive who hired me to write my first film script handed me--as a sample of screenwriting excellence--a script he had commissioned about Hughes. The first big movie star I ever ate lunch with told me that he had been obsessing about a film he hoped to make, and star in, about Hughes's life.

And yet now we have an almost three-hour epic on the man with scarcely a hint of where his money came from, or the aspects of his character that made him so good at making it. All the audience is allowed to see is this quixotic fellow wasting millions of dollars recklessly pursuing his various crackpot schemes.

If you didn't know something of the Hughes story, you might come away thinking that the main qualification for dying as the world's richest man is to be certifiably insane.

There's a dramatic reason for this, of course. People in the entertainment industry assume that if you show a character making money you risk turning the audience against him. This is why, for instance, so little attempt has been made to do for Wall Street what television's "The West Wing" has done for politics. It's also why, when Wall Street people turn up in movies, they are the bad guys.

In the movies, it's admirable to have money. It can even be admirable to steal money; the movies are good at creating appealing bank robbers and jewel thieves. What is not admirable is to make money the way people do in real life.

There are two things to say about this. The first, and less interesting, is the hypocrisy of it. The Oscars are as much about money-making as anything else. The pictures that get overpraised, and overprized, are the ones that make vast sums at the box office and enrich the moviemakers.

In their naked pursuit of dollars, the people who work in Los Angeles have nothing to learn from the people who work on Wall Street. And yet the activity at the core of their existence is the one they don't dare to present to audiences as a thing to be admired, or at least forgiven.

The other thing to say is that their instincts might be right. But if they are, what does that say about the rest of us?

Why is it that the shrewd people who manufactured "The Aviator" are happy to explore Howard Hughes's many vices and neuroses, happy to show him procuring teenage gifts, crashing airplanes and peeing into about 300 different milk bottles and leaving them on the floor, without caps, but aren't willing to offer even the slightest glimpse of his greatest talent?

When presented to us as "real," as they are in non-fiction books and reality television, the most disgusting tycoons can persuade a general audience to take their side, or at least listen to them. Ordinary people long to know what makes really rich people tick--and what makes them rich.

But they don't want to take that final step. And so if you want to make a movie hero of a rich person, for whom money-making was at the very core of his being, you must skip over what made him rich. It may have taken 30 years for Hollywood to make the movie about Howard Hughes because it took that long for people to forget why they were so interested in him in the first place.

Michael Lewis, author of "Liar's Poker" and "MoneyBall," is a columnist for Bloomberg News.