The 1972 movie Clint Eastwood was cast in, quit, and wanted to remake after: “Let’s do it again”
Remakes might have evolved into the scourge of modern cinema, but they’ve been around forever, and Clint Eastwood owes his enduring stardom to one of them.
He could see it coming, too, with the actor watching Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo for the first time and thinking it would make for a hell of a western, only for Sergio Leone to offer him that very opportunity in A Fistful of Dollars, which ended in a lawsuit that didn’t give the picture much of a leg to stand on.
Pale Rider is basically Shane, but beyond those two, Eastwood hasn’t been too keen to dig into the past and slap a fresh coat of paint on something that’s already been shot. He definitely thought about it, though, which is interesting, since he was originally cast in the leading role before abandoning ship.
In early 1970, screenwriter John Milius was hired to write a film about the legendary mountain man, Jeremiah Johnson. It was eventually co-credited to the eventual Conan the Barbarian director and Edward Anhalt, but Milius always felt that his initial take on the story was superior to what ended up onscreen.
After Lee Marvin passed on the title role, Eastwood boarded the production, which had Sam Peckinpah attached to direct. That was somewhat ironic, since the future four-time Academy Award-winning actor and filmmaker was no fan of The Wild Bunch, but he didn’t stick around for too long anyway.
The maverick director had a habit of pissing off a lot of people in his orbit, and Eastwood was one of them. The star and Peckinpah didn’t get along, which saw him ditch Jeremiah Johnson in favour of making Dirty Harry with Don Siegel instead, a decision that cemented him as a Hollywood icon.
In need of a leading man once again, Warner Bros recruited Robert Redford to headline the film, and he brought Sydney Pollack on board to direct. It turned out to be a nightmarish experience for both, but for Milius, he was left with the lingering feeling that his first draft had more potential than the finished article.
“I eventually became happy with Jeremiah Johnson,” he reflected. “At the time it was made, I wasn’t at all pleased with it. But I was wrong. Sydney Pollack made a good film. It was just a different film than the one I would have made. I’ve talked with Clint Eastwood about it. He’s seen the original script, and said, ‘Let’s do it again.'”
It would be an incredibly pointless endeavour, since Jeremiah Johnson is fine as it is, but for a fleeting moment, Eastwood and Milius considered joining forces to shoot his original script. These days, the movie is best known among the younger generations for the nodding Robert Redford meme, but had the duo followed through on their plan, Eastwood could have had one of his own.
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