One of the most notoriously bad casting decisions in Hollywood history is tied to a real-world radioactive disaster. This episode digs into the troubled 1956 RKO epic The Conqueror, in which John Wayne played the Mongol leader Genghis Khan after Marlon Brando backed out. Director Dick Powell tried to talk Wayne out of it, took the job for the money, and later asked who he was to turn down John Wayne.

The conversation covers Wayne's crash diet and amphetamine use, Oscar Millard's awkward dialogue, the record six million dollar budget, and why the new CinemaScope format pushed the production into Utah's Escalante Desert, 137 miles downwind of the Nevada test site where eleven above-ground nuclear bombs had been detonated in 1953. It then follows Howard Hughes's decision to ship 60 tons of that dirt to Hollywood soundstages, the cancer statist ...