John Wayne stormed off movie set in tantrum during Four Sons filming – My Blog
JOHN WAYNE had to start his career like everybody else – at the bottom. Long before he was Hollywood’s main leading man, he began his career in the silent era as an assistant on production teams. In one film, John Ford’s 1928 classic Four Sons, the future star had an “exasperated tantrum” on set – but it helped his film career.
John Ford may be best known for his talkies years later (including Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath and Fort Apache to name but a few) but his silent era was just as influential on the industry. Tragically, most of his silent films are now lost to time, but the ones that remain are held dear for their historic and cinematic importance. Having directed over 140 movies across his career, he and John Wayne paired together on 14 releases which saw the star get in front of the camera. Before that, they worked together in a very different capacity, as a young Wayne helped the production crews. On Four Sons, he had one particularly bad day putting him in a “tedious position.”
The film followed Mother Bernle (played by Margaret Mann), a Bavarian widow and mum to four children – Franz (Ralph Bushman), Johann (Charles Morton), Andreas (George Meeker) and Joseph (James Hall).
Three of her sons fight in Worlds War One on the side of Germany, while one fights for America, with the two sides eventually becoming enemies.
In the 1999 book Hourly History’s John Wayne: A Life From Beginning to End, the author went into detail about the unexpected fury Wayne flew into on set one day after being forced to carry out an infuriating task multiple times.
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John Wayne worked as a production hand on the 1928 film (Image: GETTY)
John Wayne went on to star in several John Ford classics (Image: GETTY)
The book explained Wayne was ordered to continuously “dump leaves, sweep them up, and then dump them again” between repeated takes.
The tome read: “Although innocuous in nature, this scene was very important for the production team and had to be done several times in order to get it just right.”
Eventually, the actor – who would go on to win an Academy Award for the 1969 film True Grit. – decided he had had enough.
The book went on: “Wayne was growing weary of the retakes, and somewhere along the way lost his order of operations and found himself sweeping up leaves when he should have been dumping them, completely messing up the shot. The crew was frustrated, but when Wayne realized what he had done, he was even more aggravated and threw his broom down, marching right off the set in what amounted to an exasperated tantrum.”
Luckily for Wayne, it all ended well for him.
John Ford’s Four Sons was later remade in 1940 (Image: GETTY)
The star’s actions didn’t put him in hot water, instead, it actually drew Ford’s attention to the young actor. The book notes: “Ford was apparently once again entertained by what he perceived to be John Wayne’s sense of comic relief in action.”
But for Wayne fans rushing to watch it to catch the star in an early role – they will have to keep their eyes peeled. The film has become famous for including one of the star’s earliest performances. On IMDb he is listed as “Officer (uncredited)”.
For film historians, the movie is a real gem for the mere fact it still exists. It came at a time before film preservation was considered essential. For most of the studios (including Fox which produced this), silent films were viewed as having little future and were intentionally destroyed. At the end of the silent era, many considered silent films worthless and studios made little effort to keep them (excruciatingly painful for many film lovers now).
Fox later remade Four Sons as a talkie in 1940 with Archie Mayo in the director’s chair. He is best known for 1930’s Vengeance, 1936’s The Petrified Forest, 1928’s The Crimson City and 1923’s All Over Twist.
The cast included Don Ameche as Chris, Mary Beth Hughes as Anna, Alan Curtis as Karl, George Ernest as Fritz, Robert Lowery as Joseph and Eugenie Leontovich as Frau Bern (her debut as an actress).
Secrets John Wayne Revealed to Ron Howard About Filmmaking . – My Blog
Although they were celebrities for different reasons, Ron Howard worked with John Wayne on one of The Duke’s late-period movies. Howard said Wayne gave him some interesting advice. In addition, Howard revealed what made Wayne a little different from other actors.
As an actor, Howard is most known for his appearing in the sitcoms The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days as well as George Lucas’ American Graffiti. However, he also appeared in Wayne’s final Western, The Shootist. The film also included James Stewart, Lauren Bacall, and John Carridine. With that cast, the film was almost like a roll call of Old Hollywood actors. Howard’s appearance in the film almost feels like a passing of the torch from one generation to the next.
In an interview with Men’s Journal, Sean Woods asked Howard if working with Wayne and Stewart taught him anything about manhood. “John Wayne used a phrase, which he later attributed to [film director] John Ford, for scenes that were going to be difficult: ‘This is a job of work,’ he’d say,” Howard recalled. “If there was a common thread with these folks – Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Glenn Ford – it was the work ethic. It was still driving them. To cheat the project was an insult. To cheat the audience was damnable.”
What Ron Howard said John Wayne, Bette Davis, and Jimmy Stewart had in common : In a separate interview with the HuffPost, Howard also praised Wayne’s work ethic. “I always admired him as a movie star, but I thought of him as a total naturalist,” Howard said. “Even those pauses were probably him forgetting his line and then remembering it again, because, man, he’s The Duke.
But he’s working on this scene and he’s like, ‘Let me try this again.’ And he put the little hitch in and he’d find the Wayne rhythm, and you’d realize that it changed the performance each and every time. I’ve worked with Bette Davis, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda. Here’s the thing they all have in common: They all, even in their 70s, worked a little harder than everyone else.”
How critics and audiences responded to ‘The Shootist’ : Howard obviously admired Wayne’s methods as an actor. This raises an interesting question: Did the public embrace The Shootist? According to Box Office Mojo, the film earned over $8 million. That’s not a huge haul for a film from 1976. However, the film is widely regarded as a classic among 1970s Westerns.
How did Paul Koslo ever have a tense encounter with star John Wayne ? – My Blog
In 1975, the Canadian actor starring The Duke in Rooster Cogburn. At the time, Koslo was only 19 and still relatively green in the industry. So working with the Hollywood legend was a bit stressful.
During an installment of World on Westerns, Paul Koslo shared his experiences with John Wayne, including a time where he nearly stepped on Wayne’s lines.As the story goes, Wayne had a short 15 line monologue. And once he was finished, Koslo was supposed to respond. And as they were filming, Wayne said his part. But when it was Koslo’s turn, he froze.“The director said ‘Paul, why didn’t you say your lines?’” the actor remembered.
“And I said, ‘well, because I didn’t wanna cut him off because he hadn’t said all of his lines yet.’” Hearing the conversation, John Wayne jumped in saying, “who’s gonna? Nobody’s gonna cut me off. I can say whatever I want, you got it, kid?”Of course, the interaction made Koslo nervous, and the only response he could muster was, “okay, sir.”However, the actor admitted that the Western icon wasn’t as intimidating as the story made him sound.
Koslo shared that as long as his co-stars worked hard, Wayne was always their biggest supporter.“My impression of him was that if you did your stuff, and you were right on top of it, he was your best buddy. But if you were like a slacker, or you weren’t prepared, he could get on your case.”During the AWOW interview, Paul Koslo also shared some details behind the age-old feud between John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn.
“I mean, Kate and him, they were always like this,” said Koslo, while punching his fists together.According to Koslo, politics were behind the fight. Hepburn was a democrat and Wayne was a republican.“It seemed like… in a fun way. I don’t know if it was for real,” he admitted. “You know, she would be sitting on the hood of a truck going like a hundred feet down to the set where they were shooting, and how Wallis was having heart attacks. She was really a daredevil, and she was full of piss and vinegar.”
The actor also noted that he didn’t get to spend much time with the actress, so he couldn’t get a proper gauge on the so-called feud. Almost all his time was spent with The Duke.The only interaction Koslo had with Hepburn was while shooting an intense scene where they were “moving this nitroglycerin to another location because we were going to rob the U.S. Treasury with it, and [John Wayne’s] about to ambush us.”And that happened right before Paul Koslo nearly stepped on John Wayne’s lines.
What John Wayne said in his angry letter to Clint Eastwood and how Eastwood responded. – My Blog
John Wayne and Clint Eastwood are the two biggest icons of the Western movies, however, Wayne wasn’t always a fan of Eastwood’s work. In fact, Wayne hated one of Eastwood’s Westerns so much he sent him a letter decrying the film. Here’s how Eastwood reacted to the letter — and how the public reacted to this movie.
This Clint Eastwood movie was a lot darker than John Wayne’s films : First, a little background. The Western was a staple of American cinema from its early days. It often presented a glorified view of American expansionism. During and after the civil rights movement, Westerns began to evolve, often presenting a critical or at least cynical view of the Old West. Movies like that became especially popular during the 1970s, but by the 1980s the genre was no longer an American staple.
One of the more famous dark Westerns from the 1970s was High Plains Drifter. The film is about a mysterious criminal who comes into town, to get revenge for his brother who was murdered as many of the townsfolk watched by idly. No one in the film is very sympathetic — they’re all either evil or passive in the face of evil. It’s a far cry from the more uplifting films which made Wayne famous.
What John Wayne said in his letter to Clint Eastwood — and how Eastwood responded : It’s very easy to see High Plains Drifter as a critique of the American West. According to the book Ride, Boldly Ride: The Evolution of the American Western, that’s how Wayne saw the film. In addition, he saw it as incorrect.Eastwood told Kenneth Turan “John Wayne once wrote me a letter saying he didn’t like High Plains Drifter. He said it wasn’t really about the people who pioneered the West.
I realized that there’s two different generations, and he wouldn’t understand what I was doing. High Plains Drifter was meant to be a fable: it wasn’t meant to show the hours of pioneering drudgery. It wasn’t supposed to be anything about settling the West.” According to the book John Wayne: The Life and Legend, Eastwood did not write back. How the public reacted to ‘High Plains Drifter’ : Clearly, Wayne was upset by the film. This raises an interesting question: Did High Plains Drifter resonate with the public?
According to Box Office Mojo, High Plains Drifter earned over $15 million. Even by the standards of the 1970s, High Plains Drifter was not a tremendous hit. For comparison, Box Office Mojo reports a less dark 1970s Western starring Eastwood called The Outlaw Josey Wales earned over $31 million.Regardless, High Plains Drifter has a bit of a legacy. It was the first Western that Eastwood directed himself. Eastwood would go on to direct several other Westerns including the Oscar-winning Unforgiven. Wayne wasn’t much of a fan of High Plains Drifter — and neither was the public.