Los Angeles ? He shot Hollywood’s first multimillion-dollar epic. He stretched boundaries on sex and violence. He launched the careers of Jean Harlow and Jane Russell, and his many Hollywood loves included Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner.

Before he became the circus-freak hermit with long hair and fingernails, Howard Hughes was one of the most colorful personalities in show business, among the first to challenge the supremacy of studio moguls and the industry’s restrictive moral codes.

Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator,” which opens Saturday in Lawrence, focuses on the billionaire’s pioneering movie and airplane achievements from the late 1920s through the late 1940s.

“He was one of the key figures, sort of the outlaw of Hollywood, in a way,” Scorsese said. “His major obsession, of course, was aviation, but films were a major part of his life.”

During that time, Hughes oversaw 1930’s $4 million war saga “Hell’s Angels,” 1932’s mob tale “Scarface” and 1943’s “The Outlaw,” best-remembered for its shots of Russell’s bosom.

That era also saw Hughes build his aviation empire, developing experimental planes, setting airspeed records, acquiring a controlling stake in TWA and piloting the massive Spruce Goose transport plane on its only flight.

His Hollywood career has become the forgotten chapter in Hughes’ life, overshadowed by his aviation accomplishments and his final years as a germ-phobic recluse before his death in 1976.

Orphaned as a young man, Hughes arrived in mid-1920s Los Angeles with an inheritance of nearly $1 million. Laying the family fortune on the line, Hughes hurled himself into filmmaking, and he became known as one of the town’s biggest playboys.

Early sequences in “The Aviator” capture Hughes’ perfectionist fanaticism over “Hell’s Angels,” mortgaging everything he owned to pay the bills and begging studio bosses for a couple of extra cameras when he already had dozens to shoot the battle scenes.

Howard Hughes stands in front of a Boeing Pursuit Plane. Hughes blended his loves of filmmaking and aviation in the silent film Hells Angels." He worked so long on the spectacular World War I aerial dogfights that by the time he was done talkies had become popular and "Hells

To the Hollywood establishment, Hughes was an arrogant upstart, the “sucker with the money,” said Robert Dalrymple, director of the documentary “Howard Hughes: His Women and His Movies.”

“It was that period when he kind of enraged one-half of Hollywood and dated the other half. That’s what made him so interesting,” Dalrymple said.

Hughes had infamous run-ins with overseers of the Hays Code, which set strict guidelines on big-screen sex and violence. The release of “Scarface” was delayed in a dispute over its gunplay and amorality. Hughes defied Hollywood’s censors by briefly releasing “The Outlaw” without the Hays Code seal of approval, the film’s marketing exploiting Russell’s buxom figure.

In 1948, Hughes bought controlling interest in RKO Studios and sold it five years later. After that, his main connection to Hollywood was his 13-year marriage to actress Jean Peters, which ended in divorce in the early 1970s.

Though his Hollywood connections have been largely forgotten, Hughes’ influence on movies was felt for decades.

“In his willingness to gamble on a large movie, he set the stage for people like David O. Selznick (“Gone With the Wind”) and Sam Spiegel (“Lawrence of Arabia”), people willing to take huge gambles on one movie,” said “The Aviator” screenwriter John Logan.