The role John Wayne died before he could play: “Wanted to be the poet”
Some things never get off the ground, no matter how promising they seem. If you think about it too long, it’s heartbreaking – all the unfinished, abandoned, or never-started projects that had real potential. One of them is a lost treasure that would have starred John Wayne.
There are so many of these stories that exist in Hollywood. Stanley Kubrick’s plans to make a Napoleon film, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s potential Dune adaptation, and the devastating abandonment of a Sofia Coppola adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar are only a few of the most vivid losses.
It’s simply that the movie-making world often can’t keep up. Director Guillermo del Toro talks about this a lot as his pile of drafts stacks up and up. “I wish I could have done double the movies I’ve done, but that’s the way it is,” he named as his biggest career regret, as mere admin issues and logistics kept several of his finished projects from being made.
Because it’s not just about the idea or the script, those things have to be backed and supported by a whole process of people from studios all the way down to the departments, to the basics of accounts or HR. At any step, it could get tripped up, caught on an admin snag and pushed back another month, another year, or even into eternity.
In this case, one movie was held back so much that the main star was lost in a literal physical sense, as John Wayne died while the team behind this movie were still trying to get the green light.
When writer Larry McMurtry began Lonesome Dove, it was intended first to be a film. As early as the first draft, the cast was locked in. “John Wayne was Woodrow Call, James Stewart was Gus, and Henry Fonda was the ill-fated weakling, Jake Spoon. And Cybill Shepherd, of course, was Lorena,” the writer said, and he even had Peter Bogdanovich queued up to direct it.
It likely would have been an epic bringing together a cast of absolute titans for a western story about old Texas Rangers driving a cattle herd from Texas to Montana. With big themes of death, friendship and love, it would likely have been a truly stunning production, especially as these big-name actors were all hitting their old age.
However, it hit roadblock after roadblock – and most of those roadblocks were Wayne himself. “It was quite a good script, I think, and the studio (Warner Bros) loved it. It didn’t work out because John Wayne, having made Liberty Valance and having seen James Stewart get to be the poet, wanted to be the poet instead of the hard-ass,” McMurtry said as it seemed that Wayne wanted to be playing a different role than the one he had.
“This block existed for years,” the author dismayed, and eventually, it was too late, concluding, “Henry Fonda came around, and James Stewart came around, and John Wayne did not come around. And then he died.”
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