‘Tombstone’: the best Kurt Russell movie that nobody’s ever seen
Kurt Russell has been a part of several stone-cold classics in his career. People will always be desperate to talk to him about how much they love The Thing, Escape From New York, Overboard, Big Trouble in Little China, or The Hateful Eight. However, Russell has also made several hidden gems, such as the thriller Breakdown, the moody cop drama Dark Blue, and the family superhero comedy Sky High. These movies didn’t receive anywhere near the attention they arguably deserved, but there is another Russell joint that he believes is his best that nobody’s ever seen. This isn’t hyperbole, by the way – the public has genuinely never seen the picture in all its glory.
On Christmas Day 1993, one of Russell’s most beloved movies was released. It was an action-packed western that featured Russell playing the legendary Wyatt Earp and Val Kilmer as the hard-drinking, tuberculosis-afflicted former dentist Doc Holliday. The film’s supporting cast was stacked with the likes of Bill Paxton, Sam Elliott, Michael Rooker, Dana Delaney, Charlton Heston, and the legendary Robert Mitchum as the narrator. The movie was, of course, Tombstone, and it’s still considered one of Russell’s best to this day. Ironically, though, it’s also the best Russell movie you’ve never seen. Allow me to explain.
It’s well-known that Tombstone was a troubled production, yet one of those rare troubled productions that actually turned out better than anyone could have expected. For years, it was heavily rumoured that Russell was secretly the movie’s director, puppeteering George P Cosmatos’ every move from the shadows after original director Kevin Jarre got the sack. Russell denied this for more than a decade – but when Cosmatos passed away in 2005, he opened up the following year about what really happened. In essence, it was all true.
“We brought in a guy to be a ghost director,” Russell admitted to True West, referring to Cosmatos. “They wanted me to take over the movie. I said, ‘I’ll do it, but I don’t want to put my name on it. I don’t want to be the guy.'”
Russell then set about shepherding Tombstone to the finish line as best he could while not letting most of the cast and crew know he was actually the guy calling the shots. In the end, the movie that was produced was “pretty damn good,” in his opinion, but he freely admitted it wasn’t a patch on what he’d imagined the film could have been when he signed up. “I didn’t get a chance to edit the movie,” Russell grumbled, “which I thought was unfortunate because it could have been one of the greatest westerns ever, ever, ever made.”
Unfortunately for Russell, he realised in the middle of production that much of what he loved about Jarre’s original script had to be jettisoned to make a coherent film in such difficult circumstances. This meant cutting down Earp’s part considerably and making him an “aura” character. “We needed to lose 20 pages,” Russell explained. “Kevin would never lose the 20 pages.”
After Jarre was fired, though, Russell felt the only way to gain the trust of his fellow actors was to “cut myself out of this goddamn movie and make some changes.” He was adamant that he knew what he needed from his own character to make the movie work, but it wasn’t fun to, as he put it, “cut out eight of the reasons you wanted to do the movie.”
In the end, Russell was left with a Frankenstein’s Monster film, hastily reshaped and cobbled together on the fly when the original plan went out the window. He was happy that he managed to pull off such a watchable, acclaimed movie in that kind of tough situation, but he’d be lying if he didn’t sometimes wistfully ponder what could have been if Jarre’s original script had been shot as intended.
“The shame about Tombstone that you can’t possibly appreciate,” Russell mused, is that the initial script was “The Godfather. A western Godfather. That’s how different that movie is from the one you saw.”
However, there is hope for die-hard Tombstone fans who would love to see Russell’s Director’s Cut, which would theoretically be closer to the original vision. He revealed that producer Andrew Vajna gave him all the film reels that were shot and that he has all that material in his garage to this day, should he ever want to “reconstruct the movie.” When asked why he hadn’t already done that, though, he grinned, “Because I got a life. Someday, I may do it. But I’d need to go back to the script, back to all my notes.”
