The actor John Carpenter says he would have given his “eyeteeth to work with”
For someone who made a career out of sci-fi and horror, John Carpenter started out with dreams of conquering an entirely different genre altogether when he first started breaking into Hollywood.
Beginning as he intended to carry on, his feature debut, Dark Star, displayed an instant grasp of heightened and fantastical stories that would serve him incredibly well as he began carving out a reputation as both the ‘Master of Horror’ and ‘Prince of Darkness’.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though, with the more overtly terrifying trappings of Halloween, The Fog, and The Thing countered by the tongue-in-cheek adventure of Big Trouble in Little China and They Live, while Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape from New York were dirty, grubby, and gritty action thrillers.
However, by Carpenter’s own admission to Time Out, “Westerns are why I got in the business”. The timing was less than fortunate as the genre was beginning to fade out in popularity just as the budding filmmaker got his foot in the industry door, with the director even revealing that he’d written a script with the intention of having John Wayne star in the 1970s.
It was the next generation’s Western icon that Carpenter “would have given my eyeteeth to work with”, though, with Clint Eastwood singled out as someone the accomplished composer and self-confessed video game aficionado always wanted to have starred in one of his projects, saying “you need a big hero” to convincingly anchor a story of white and black hats being pitted against each other.
Carpenter has acknowledged on countless occasions that Eastwood was his number one dream candidate to play the part of Snake Plissken in Escape from New York, but Kurt Russell channelling his work in the Dollars trilogy to craft his own unforgettable and unmistakably cool hero made for a more than acceptable substitute.
Big Trouble in Little China could have even scratched Carpenter’s itch for a Western had the original screenplay been enough to convince him to make it, with writer Gary Goldman telling Entertainment Weekly how “ours was about a cowboy in Chinatown in 1899”, which didn’t feature the endearingly buffoonish Jack Burton as a truck driver, but rather somebody who “worked providing meat to feed the Chinese workers who were building the railroad”.
When Carpenter did eventually get around to a Western of his own – albeit with a supernatural spin – it would be fair to say that 1998’s Vampires didn’t quite make it clear that its creator held a lifelong affinity for fables set against dusty backdrops. Had things gone another way, he could have had everything he wanted, and more were Wayne to star in his early screenplay and Eastwood to take on Escape from New York, but it wasn’t to be.
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