John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [109]
Getting The Alamo off the ground had been a long, hard process. Wayne told me, “I went to every studio in town, tried calling in favors, reminded the studio heads how much money I’d made for them, but they all turned me down unless I got John Ford to direct. But this was my dream. I didn’t want anyone else to direct it—not even my dear friend Jack Ford. United Artists only agreed to put up part of the money if I played a part, so I said I’d play Sam Houston, which was really a cameo kind of role. But they said I had to play a major role and said if I didn’t play Davy Crockett, they wouldn’t be interested. So, reluctantly, I played Crockett.”
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United Artists was only prepared to put up some of the $7.5
million needed if Wayne raised the rest. A million dollars alone went on constructing the Alamo mission on a piece of land at Bracketville in Texas, owned by millionaire rancher James T.
“Happy” Shahan.
“There were no studio sets,” Michael Wayne told me. “The Alamo was constructed in its entirety so we could film anywhere in it. All the rooms were designed so you could be outside, go through the door, and you were in a room designed so filming could take place. It was actually cheaper than renting space at a studio.”
Duke elaborated: “I couldn’t have done it all without the help of my son Michael, who was credited as assistant producer, but he did a helluva lot an actual producer would have done. I have so many people to thank for that picture, you’ll just have to look down the cast and credits, and every one of them made a priceless contribution.”
The Alamo told the story of how, in 1836, 185 Texans and volunteers from Kentucky under the leadership of Davy Crockett tried to defend a broken-down mission-turned-fortress against 5,000
Mexican troops led by the Mexican general Santa Anna.
Commanding the makeshift garrison was Colonel Travis, whose sole mission was to halt the enemy long enough for General Sam Houston to raise an army to fight Santa Anna and bring about independence for Texas from Mexico. Second in command at the Alamo was Colonel James Bowie.
There were plenty of small roles for many of Duke’s friends, such as Hank Warden, Olive Carey, and Wayne’s regular stuntman Chuck Roberson. But getting the right actors for the principal roles didn’t always prove easy, and Wayne was not always initially satisfied with what he got.
A good many actors in Hollywood received copies of the script by James Edward Grant, including Charlton Heston. “There seemed good reasons to me not to do the film,” he told me. I wondered if one of them might be because it was being directed by John Wayne. He simply replied, “It might be.”
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have played Travis. Either part. But he didn’t want to do it. United Artists insisted on Richard Widmark. I thought he was wrong for the part. I was wrong. He was magnificent. We didn’t always see eye to eye, but he was just great as Bowie.
“I could have cast a lot of American actors as Travis. There are two reasons why I chose Laurence Harvey. One is, a lot of American actors didn’t want to be directed by John Wayne. The other reason is that Harvey is a hell of an actor. We were bringing a touch of British class to the picture. This was an actor of the British stage, and I admire those kind of actors. I was kind of jealous of Kirk [Douglas]
when he announced he’d got Laurence Olivier and Peter Ustinov and Charles Laughton for Spartacus. Olivier could have played Travis with his eyes closed. Laughton would have been a little too large.
But those are class actors, as you well know. And they gave the best performances in Kirk’s film. So when I couldn’t get