John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [176]
Rooster Cogburn (or Rooster Cogburn and the Lady, as it was later retitled) was shot in Oregon from September to November 1974. Hal Wallis felt he had a surefire hit on his hands and he decided there would be a second sequel, which Wayne agreed to.
When Rooster Cogburn was released in 1975, it received bad reviews and did less well than True Grit, but it did manage to take a modestly respectable $8 million in domestic sales. “It was one of the highest-grossing Westerns of all time,” said Richard Jordan,
“but everything about it was compared either to True Grit in its quality and its box office, or to The African Queen. I heard that the second sequel got canceled because Rooster Cogburn didn’t do well, but I think there wasn’t a third Rooster Cogburn film simply because Wayne’s health began to fail quickly and he would have been too ill to do it.”
But Rooster Cogburn was not enough of a success to compete with other releases of that year, such as Jaws and Airport 1975. Of the few Westerns released in 1975, Rooster Cogburn was the most successful, 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 331
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but, for the first time since 1959, John Wayne was not listed in the top ten box-office stars. He had been in the top ten since 1949, except for 1958, and had been number one in 1950, 1951, 1954, and 1969, and had been number two in 1956, 1957, and 1963. It was a crisis, one which would have caused lesser stars to opt for character parts or retirement. But neither was an option for John Wayne.
There suddenly loomed a solution to Wayne’s dilemma. He was offered The Shootist, a film which took Wayne out of the old West and placed him in a new time, opening, as it does, in 1901 with Wayne as J. B. Books, an aging gunfighter, riding into town to see a doctor, played by James Stewart. The doctor diagnoses Books with terminal cancer. The story would follow Books’s final days, living in a boardinghouse run by Lauren Bacall whose son, played by Ron Howard, idolizes the legendary Books.
The town becomes a magnet for several men who have scores to settle with Books; the film moves toward its inevitable tragic climax when Books takes them all on in one final gunfight in which he prefers to go down fighting rather than wait for the cancer to end his days in misery and pain.
Richard Boone, who played one of Books’s old enemies, told me,
“Duke never said as much, but I think he knew in his heart of hearts this would be his final film. He always talked of future plans, but he knew. The film is peppered with actors like me from his old films. I don’t know if he insisted on us, or if it was a compromise with Don Siegel [who directed] or if Siegel decided we would all get parts, but there was Betty Bacall [ Blood River], John Carradine [ Stagecoach and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance], Harry Morgan [ How the West Was Won], Jimmy Stewart [ The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance], and me [ The Alamo and Big Jake]. I think Bill McKinney, Hugh O’Brian, and Ronnie Howard were the only ones who never worked with Duke before.”
On the set of Rough Cut in 1979, Don Siegel gave me the story of his difficult time making The Shootist. He said, “I’d met Wayne back in the late 1940s. For some reason he’d apologized to me, and I didn’t know why, and it turned out someone had told him I was a Communist and he’d found out it was a lie, so he’d said, ‘Kid, I owe you an apology.’
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“When I went to discuss The Shootist with him at his house in Newport, he remembered the incident, so I thought that this boded well—I mean, to be remembered by John Wayne after all those years means I’d made some impression.
“I’d gone there with the film’s producer Mike Frankovich; we didn’t have a finished script then, just a treatment based on the book by Glendon Swarthout. Duke was insisting that all the bad language in the book be kept out of the screenplay,