Why John Carpenter’s love of John Wayne infuriated his friends
You couldn’t ask for two more diametrically opposed individuals than John Carpenter and John Wayne. Aside from sharing a first name, the two have very little in common. One made his name in horror movies, creating some of the most frightening and panic-inducing films to ever grace your nightmares. The other is the quintessential movie cowboy with a jaw like an anvil, America on two legs, and a generation’s ideal of a ‘real man’.
Carpenter and Wayne never worked together, although that would have been spectacular. While it’s hard to imagine ‘The Duke’ sitting down over an evening and watching Halloween, there is empirical evidence that Carpenter was a big fan of his opposite number—he used to have a John Wayne bumper sticker on his car.
The revelation came about when Carpenter was speaking to The Guardian in 2017. “I had it to irritate my friends,” the acclaimed filmmaker and musician said of the sticker. “I really loved John Wayne as an actor; his politics were not mine, but as an actor, I grew up with him. He was our symbol of masculinity. I love irritating my friends. It’s a bad thing to do.”
That line about politics is interesting, as the man behind The Thing has often talked about how inconsistent his own leanings are. He is, broadly speaking, left-wing, however, and has often criticised right-wing figures such as Donald Trump and America’s reliance on capitalism. As for Wayne, he was a staunch Republican his entire life, apart from a brief period where he voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was friends with Ronald Reagan before he became President and flirted with the idea of running for office on a Republican ticket.
Even Carpenter’s relationship with Wayne’s movies has, at times, been divisive. In a conversation with Rotten Tomatoes, he named Rio Bravo as one of his favourite films. “I was at the theatre in 1959, buying my ticket to Rio Bravo,” he said. “They held it over two weeks in our town, because everybody was going. And I went back again. I was in the theatre, buying popcorn, as a little kid. Oh, I’ve watched it too many times.” Then there’s the John Ford movie The Quiet Man, which Carpenter used to be a fan of, but then changed his mind. “Revisiting that just makes me want to tear it up. God, it’s so sentimental… Ford was sentimentalising the West and women, especially mothers, behind the scenes of course it was not like that but that’s what showed up.”
That being said, the legendary actor definitely impacted Carpenter’s work. Assault on Precinct 13 is basically Rio Bravo but in a different setting, and Kurt Russell’s performance in Big Trouble in Little China is blatantly inspired by Wayne’s work. Carpenter even penned his own Western, Blood River, and wanted Wayne to star in it. The script was optioned, but Wayne’s poor health got in the way. He died in 1979 from stomach cancer.
Despite their differing personalities and opinions, both Johns have forged their places in the great history of American cinema. Without either of them, the landscape of the film world would look completely different, and audiences would have been beret of some of the greatest characters, stories, and performances of all time.
