How’s this for a Howard Hughes triple bill at the American Cinematheque somewhere down the road? Open with Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, follow up with Edward Dmytryk’s The Carpetbaggers (1964), featuring the always-icy George Peppard as a cold, misogynistic movie mogul-slash-industrialist, a character based on Hughes, and conclude the evening with Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard (1980), mostly about a middle-class American schlub (Paul LeMat) but featuring an inspired Jason Robards cameo perf as a rickety, weather-beaten, half-looney Hughes.
