“Six-foot sonofabitch with no talent”: the director John Wayne shamed out of cinema
Placing an inexperienced director at the mercy of John Wayne always had the potential to backfire, with ‘The Duke’ never having any issues running roughshod over a filmmaker when he could get away with it.
He didn’t work with a lot of rookies, though, preferring to surround himself with people he knew and who understood what they were getting themselves into when they agreed to helm a John Wayne film, which usually involved the actor getting his own way and bending the picture to suit his whims.
In his defence, he did try, but after his recruitment attempts failed, the ‘Golden Age’ icon found himself collaborating with someone who did have some experience as a producer, but only had one feature under their belt. To add to the pressure, it was the follow-up to Wayne’s crowning achievement.
‘The Duke’ only made one sequel in his legendary career, dusting off the eye-patch and reprising his Academy Award-winning role from True Grit in the eponymous 1975 follow-up. He’d asked Henry Hathaway to return, but he didn’t like the script, while the leading man had also rejected producer Hal Wallis’ preferred candidate, Richard Fleischer.
As a result, Rooster Cogburn was helmed by Stuart Millar, whose only big-screen experience had come on 1972’s When the Legends Die. If he didn’t think he was out of his element dealing with Wayne, then the presence of Katharine Hepburn in the female lead didn’t make things any easier for the relative newcomer.
The two superstars would begin their day by telling him how their scenes would be shot instead of the other way around, and when he tried to call Wayne out on deviating from the script, he scoffed, “I haven’t said lines just as they were written in a scene since I worked for Mascot Productions!” Millar would call for a cut, and ‘The Duke’ would ignore him and carry on, with the camera crew typically siding with the actor over the director.
“Hey, Mr Director,” the actor sarcastically chimed in when the filmmaker was growing flustered before a take, “You’re supposed to say ‘action’, aren’t you?” Millar was clearly ill-equipped for the job, and Wayne evidently felt the same way, referring to the sophomore megaphone-wielder as “a six-foot sonofabitch with no talent.”
Even Hathaway, who had nothing to do with the picture, felt bad for him. “I think they all thought that Rooster Cogburn would establish Millar as a top director,” he suggested. “But he had a lousy script and a star who thought Millar was too inexperienced as a director. And maybe Duke was right. It didn’t do Stuart’s career any good, and after that, he went into TV.”
After being discovered out of his depth and suffering constant recriminations from Wayne because of it, the entire sum of Millar’s directorial career after Rooster Cogburn amounted to three made-for-TV movies and three episodes of television. Maybe he wasn’t cut out for the big screen, but it can’t be a coincidence that a shellacking at the hands of ‘The Duke’ marked the end of his association with feature-length Hollywood filmmaking.
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