The producer who tried to trick John Wayne with two scripts: “He was furious and grabbed me”
If there were a Mount Rushmore of movie tough guys, then John Wayne would be front and centre.
This is good news for any potential sculptors, as his face would be really easy to carve into the side of a mountain. With his distinctive drawl, no-nonsense attitude, and a jaw the size of Mississippi, Wayne cut an imposing figure every time he set foot on screen, sending bad guys running for the hills with his ultra-butch interpretation of the American male.
Sometimes, this hyper-aggressive aura got him in trouble in the real world. In 1966, Wayne starred in the historical epic Cast a Giant Shadow. Kirk Douglas plays David ‘Mickey’ Marcus, an American soldier who would help form the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). Not a subject that Hollywood will likely be revisiting any time soon. The rest of the cast was made up of Frank Sinatra, Angie Dickinson, Yul Brynner, and the ‘Duke’, who appeared as a US Army General.
The film was helmed by Melville Shavelson, perhaps best known for his Neapolitan gem It Started in Naples. He was not only the director of the project, but had also worked on its script. Unfortunately, Wayne didn’t like this version of the story and demanded that his frequent collaborator, James Grant, have a look at it instead. So, Shavelson was forced to devise a cunning workaround.
As explained in Michael Munn’s book John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth, the filmmaker used two different scripts while shooting: one for Wayne’s scenes that he had personally overseen, and his original screenplay that would be used for everything else.
Wayne would do his scenes believing that the entire picture had been rewritten to his specifications, none the wiser that his cast mates were working from something entirely different. The plan was going swimmingly… until it wasn’t.
“One day he turned up when he wasn’t supposed to and found we were using the original script,” Shavelson recalled. “He was furious and grabbed me, and to be grabbed by a guy who stands over six feet and is running the goddamn picture was pretty terrifying. After that we used Grant’s script. But for a long time after that Wayne and I never spoke.”
This was far from the only time the True Grit star fell out with his on-set boss. Even John Ford, the man who had given Wayne his big break and was referred to by the icon as ‘Pappy’, wasn’t immune from his ire. Several of his most famous co-stars didn’t care for the man either. He was an outspoken conservative in an incredibly liberal line of work, who had a fiery temper and almost zero regard for social graces. Honestly, it’s impressive that anybody liked him at all.
This would be the final time Shavelson and Wayne crossed paths on a professional level. Both men did perfectly fine for themselves without the other, and, crucially, the former wasn’t savagely beaten to death by the latter. Sometimes that’s all you can hope for.
