Trivia for
Hell's Angels (1930) More at IMDbPro »

• Howard Hughes had all the prints tinted and hand-colored before releasing them for general distribution.
  
  
• This film cost $3.8 million, so expensive that it made no profit on its first release.
  
  
• Howard Hughes hired WWI aces to fly the planes but also flew one himself; he crashed shortly after his first takeoff and broke several bones.
  
  
• Three pilots died during shooting.
  
  
• 249 feet of film were shot for every foot used in the final cut.
  
  
• Stunt pilots refused to perform an aerial sequence that director Howard Hughes wanted. Hughes, a noted aviator himself, did his own flying. He got the shot, but he also crashed the plane.
  
  
• An eight-minute two-strip Technicolor sequence remains the only surviving color footage of its star, Jean Harlow.
  
  
• Stunt pilot Clement K. Phillips was killed in a crash in Hayward, California, while delivering one of the airplanes to the Oakland location.
  
  
• Entire story had been filmed as a silent, minus a soundtrack, by Howard Hughes in 1928. Greta Nissen had the role played later by Jean Harlow. When sound equipment became available Hughes decided to re-shoot the whole film as a talkie.
  
  
• Was the most expensive movie ever made at the time of its release.
  
  
• All color prints of the movie were thought to be lost until a print was found in John Wayne's personal vault in 1989, ten years after the actor's death, by his son Michael Wayne. That explains why the younger Wayne's name appears on the credits of the restored version. It is possible that Wayne received the print from the film's producer/director, Howard Hughes. The actor starred in Jet Pilot (1957) for Hughes in 1949, but the film was not released until 1957 because Hughes continued to have the flying sequences re-shot, a situation not unlike this film.
  
  

Related Links