John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [148]
“And to those who say we shouldn’t have been there, I say, when it was too late, we realized we should have been in Europe to help the Jews. There was just as much need for us to help the Vietnamese.
“I felt so strongly about it, that I decided I had to direct The Green Berets myself. I thought that after The Alamo, no studio would back a film I was directing, but Warner Bros. realized that I had the backing of the government and the Defense Department, and they gave the go-ahead.
“We shot the film up in Georgia, at Fort Benning, in 1967.
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Michael [Wayne] was producing, and we had a good screenplay from James Lee Barrett. I’d lost my dear friend Jimmy Grant the year before, but James Barrett was a really fine writer and I used him on a number of my productions.”
When I mentioned that The Green Berets didn’t benefit from the kind of detailed characterizations that The Alamo had, Wayne said, “Let me tell you something. I’d have liked to have given a lot more screen time to developing the characters, but the studio made it clear they wanted a film that had more action than talk, and The Alamo was criticized for having more talk than action.
“James Barrett wrote a fine background story to the colonel I played. He had a wife played by Vera Miles, and we shot her scenes, but the studio cut all her scenes out. They just wanted a war picture.
And that’s what they got.
“I was trying to keep everyone happy and still keep my vision of what I wanted. But the studio wanted one thing, and the men from the Defense Department wanted something else. Let me tell ya; it was said I got all the hardware and the real soldiers who were in the picture for free. I paid for everything that belonged to the Defense Department. But I still could only hire the hardware and the soldiers if we changed things in the script. So a lot got changed.
“But I still believe we ended up with a picture that said what had to be said.”
Michael Wayne, as the film’s producer, told me what it was that the film tried to say: “JW didn’t support the war. He supported the fact that we should be there because the war was already going on before the United States government committed so many of our men there, and once that had been determined, then my father felt the soldiers fighting there should get support from the people. He felt that those men were the bravest and best soldiers our country ever put in the field, and he felt the people back home who were protesting were letting those boys down. But JW never supported the conduct of the war.
“So what we did in The Green Berets was to show those men as heroes, and obviously that was a terrible thing because the critics tore it apart. But they weren’t reviewing the film; they were reviewing my father’s politics.”
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The Green Berets, unfortunately, was not a particularly good film, whatever the reasons. It lacked characterization, and the heroes were of the cardboard type that had once thrilled audiences who flocked to see Second World War movies. The weakness, it would seem, lay in James Lee Barrett’s screenplay. Barrett told me,
“Duke Wayne took me on with Andy McLaglen’s recommendation after I wrote Shenandoah for him. I thought Andy would direct The Green Berets and maybe Andy thought so too, although he never complained if Wayne did overlook him in the end. I think it was such a personal project of Duke’s that he just couldn’t let anyone else direct. But we had problems. I had to submit the script to the Pentagon for approval, and they rejected the first draft. I believe Michael [Wayne] kept it a secret