John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [43]
DeMille smiled and told Wayne that he had considered Errol Flynn, George Brent, and Fred MacMurray to play Jack, but had decided that he, Wayne, was the better casting, and he asked Duke to trust him.
As outlined by DeMille, it was a complex story with a complex character, which appealed to Wayne. But when he got the script, he was not so impressed, and dictated a letter to his agent to send to DeMille, telling him he was “disappointed in the lack of color and character in Jack Martin.” However, he said that he recalled the 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 78
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picture of Martin that DeMille had painted in his office, “so I disregard the play of the character as painted by the writers.” He wrote that when Steve enters the story, Jack becomes negative in all the scenes that involve the three principal characters, so Wayne suggested that Jack should be made “an individualist played boldly and impulsively instead of being played as a plodding dullard.” This, he said, would develop Jack into a great character without distracting from Steve or Loxi.
He went on to describe Steve’s character as “the suave, eloquent, mental type,” and that Jack should be “brusque and sure of himself in all physical situations because of the station of life that he has reached at a youthful age.” He added that Jack, while not a mental giant and a little short on logic, must have a definite sense of humor to “see him through two or three melodramatic situations that arise.”
Jesse Lasky Jr., one of the film’s writers, recalled DeMille reading the letter to him and to fellow writers Alan LeMay and Charles Bennett, when I interviewed him at his Mayfair home in 1978. “ We all thought, ‘Oh, oh! This is going to make DeMille explode, being told by a B cowboy star what to do with a script DeMille had already approved.’ But instead he blew up at us, saying, ‘If an actor can see what’s wrong and work it out, why couldn’t you?’
“What I came to realize about John Wayne when I met him was that he wasn’t the dullard we had imagined him to be. He had read enough screenplays to know what was right and wrong with them.
He was, of course, concerned with his image, but he showed great intelligence in his perception, and he also knew he was playing second fiddle to Ray Milland. Even at his studio, Republic, he had gained enough star muscle to put some weight behind some of the awful scripts they were giving him. Mr. DeMille came to admire Wayne very much.”
Reap the Wild Wind, at a budget of $2 million, was the biggest film Wayne had ever made, and he was paid $25,000 for the eleven weeks it would take to shoot all his scenes. There were many scenes he was not needed for, and the entire production took four months to complete.
“Toward the end of filming,” said Jesse Lasky Jr., “someone came up with the idea of having Wayne and Milland attacked by a giant 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 79
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squid. It would attack Milland and Wayne would die saving him.
DeMille loved the idea and so he got his special effects team to create this giant squid.”
In 1972, on the set of The House in Nightmare Park, Ray Milland recalled, “Wayne and I spent hours in Paramount’s large water tank fighting this giant squid. The creature was an amazing piece of work.
It was made of bright red sponge rubber and was operated by electric motors so it could lash out with its thirty-foot-long tentacles. While we were underwater, DeMille directed us through telephone wires attached to our diving helmets. It was a difficult scene to do because the squid wouldn’t always do what DeMille wanted it to do, but somehow it all worked out and looked marvelous on the screen.”
Although Wayne had worked for Ford and Hathaway, two directors with a tendency to chew their actors out, he found DeMille’s handling of some of the