John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [180]
I told Frankovich that I didn’t want to shoot anything while you were ill, but my agent and my lawyer looked at the contract and they told me I had to shoot anything they told me to shoot. I just wanted you to come back.’
“But he wasn’t happy. He just looked at me long and hard. It was like an older Ethan Edwards glaring at me. I didn’t like the situation at all and so I made the grand gesture and said, ‘Would you prefer another director?’
“He ignored my question and said, ‘Let’s get on with it.’
“So we did, and we were doing fine until he learned that Books shoots the McKinney character in the back. I said, ‘Duke, he tried to 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 338
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shoot you in the back,’ and Duke said, ‘I don’t care. I never shoot anyone in the back. It’s unthinkable for my image.’ We argued about it, and in the end I said, ‘I’ve never asked you for a favor but I am now. You direct McKinney any way you want.’
“He said, ‘No, goddamn it. You fix it!’
“I stormed out and went and told McKinney we were going to reshoot his scene. He couldn’t believe it. He said, ‘If I get shot in the gut and I’m struggling to get out of the saloon, my back’s going to be to Wayne. I am not going to turn to face Wayne just so he can shoot me in the gut, and I’ll tell him that.’
“I said, ‘Not a good idea, Bill.’ And then I told him my idea, which was he’d be shot in the belly and he’d clutch at the wound, staggering to the door. He’d stumble and that would make a natural half-turn and Duke could shoot him then. So Bill liked that idea.
“We still had about two more days to go, when suddenly Duke blew his top at Bruce [Surtees]. He yelled, ‘You don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground. I’ve never looked worse.’
“Bruce yelled back at him and I stopped Duke in his tracks by saying, ‘Stay right there. We’re ready to shoot.’ But in fact I went over to Bruce and said I was prepared to walk out and take the whole crew with me and leave Duke behind the bar on his own. Thank God Bruce talked me out of that, and we finished the picture two days later.
“By then all was peaceful again and Duke invited me to his trailer to toast each other with tequila. Somehow we made a good picture and ended up friends. But it was hard work. Duke was ill and he was frustrated by his illness. He took it out on others, but he never meant to.”
Richard Boone, an old friend of Wayne’s, said, “Duke was angry at everything because he couldn’t smoke, he couldn’t drink, he couldn’t have any fun. And poor Don Siegel took the brunt of it all.
But I think there was something about the film, and about his death scene, that put him in a bad frame of mind. He was suddenly faced with a moment in time when he must have been wondering, ‘Is this my last scene? Will I ever work again? Is this really my last ride?’
It was that damn cough he had. I am positive he thought the cancer 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 339
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had returned, and that colored his whole attitude. He could get mad on any film, but on The Shootist he was just a nightmare for Don.
Duke never admitted he felt that way, but I sensed it was in his head.”
The Shootist wrapped behind schedule, on 5 April 1976, and was rushed through postproduction so it could be released in American cinemas in August. It was almost as though Paramount had no faith in it. Maybe there was even a sense of foreboding about it.
When I reviewed The Shootist in Film Review, I wrote, “It’s as if the Duke is saying good-bye.” I had no idea how right I was.
Few other critics noticed that The Shootist appeared to be some form of a celluloid eulogy to Wayne—and, indeed, the Western—
although Don Siegel insisted that it was never intended to be such.
Arthur Knight wrote in the Hollywood Reporter, “Just when it seemed the Western was an endangered species, due for extinction because it had repeated itself too many times, Wayne and Siegel have managed to validate it once more. It’s a film to remember.”
Variety said, “The