John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [87]
He needed a name for his company and for a while he called it the Fifth Corporation. Michael Wayne came up with a better suggestion.
He told me, “I suggested ‘Batjak,’ spelled B – a – t – j – a – k, which was the name of the shipping company in Wake of the Red Witch. JW
[Michael always called his father JW] liked the name, but one of the legal secretaries who was examining the documents thought that there was a typo in the word ‘Batjak.’ She wondered if it should be 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 163
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‘Batjack,’ so she called Robert Fellows and said, ‘Is there a “c”
missing from the company title?’ And he said, ‘No “c.” ’ But she thought he meant, ‘No, “c.” ’ So she typed it ‘Batjac.’ When the document was prepared, the mistake was noticed, but JW said, ‘I liked it better with a “k” but leave it as it is. It’s no big deal.’ ”
While most big stars were still under exclusive contracts to major studios, Wayne was among a small number of stars who were not tied to any single studio. Although this gave him considerable freedom, it also caused complications and frustrations. Wayne said,
“It was, overall, a damn fine way for an actor to work because you were not tied down to any one studio. But just after I finished The High and the Mighty, I was caught between two studios. On the one hand, there was RKO where Howard Hughes didn’t have his next picture ready for me, which should have been in January [1954] and they were now saying it would be February. And on the other, I had Warner Bros. who were waiting for me to make another picture for them but I couldn’t until I’d made the RKO picture—whatever that was. Howard hadn’t told me what it was.
“I liked Howard a lot, but his delay was really getting me into deep fucking water. I wrote a frank letter to Howard, telling him how at the other studios and for my own company, I didn’t work on a picture for more than eight to sometimes ten weeks overall and I got paid top terms for this. At RKO, I was giving up six months of my time for a fraction of the money the other studios paid me. That didn’t have much impact on Howard, who was not going to be rushed—and I still didn’t know what this project was he had in mind for me.
“Then I started getting letters from an attorney at Warner Bros.
telling me that I was in breach of contract and how they’d bent over backward to accommodate me in my obligations to RKO. I was fucking mad, and I wrote to Howard and told him that it was his studio’s responsibility to have scripts ready for me on the dates he had promised.
“I still don’t know to this day what Howard had in mind for me, but I had a meeting at RKO at an office in which Dick Powell was ensconced and I saw a treatment lying around for something called The Conqueror. I took a cursory look at it and thought, ‘This might 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 164
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be interesting.’ I kind of liked it. Thought it would be something different, playing Genghis Khan. It was just like a Western only with different costumes. Turned out Dick Powell was going to direct it, so I told him that I’d like to do The Conqueror. I kind of took him by surprise and he said, ‘Are you serious?’ I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ So he said, ‘Okay,’ and we shook hands on it.
“What I didn’t know was that the full screenplay had been written [by Oscar Millard] for Marlon Brando, and it had a certain kind of style to it which would have been fine for Brando, but for me? I thought, ‘Oh, shit!’ Turned out that Fox wouldn’t let Brando do it. So I guess Dick Powell thought that John Wayne might just pull in the crowds. My big mistake was, I didn’t actually read the script until we got to our location in Utah. I’d got used to getting interested in pictures from listening to the directors tell the story; Hawks could do that, so could Ford and