Tombstone (Part 1)

Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one.

As always, I'm Chris Winterbauer, and I am joined by People's host, Lizzie Bassett.

How are you doing this evening, Lizzie?

I'm great.

I'm great.

We're staying in my dad's house in Maine right now.

So, if it sounds a little echoey and different,

I'm sorry about that.

Sometimes we take vacations.

It's just those Stephen King ghosts that haunt every home in Maine, as we've been taught to believe.

Lizzie, we have a really fun and crazy film to talk about today.

It is something else.

Can you tell the people what it is?

I sure can.

We are covering 1993's Tombstone, which I thought was a really good movie until I rewatched it.

I still think it's a very fun movie.

Okay, fair enough.

I thought the first half is kind of great,

and then it goes absolutely insane in the second half.

I am fully team Laudenum Lady, Wyatt Earp's wife, who just gets completely screwed.

Yep.

Yep.

It's a real mess in the back half of this.

So I'm interested to see what happened.

I will say Val Kilmer is in a totally different and much better movie than everyone else.

He's amazing in this.

Well, everything you've mentioned happened for very specific reasons.

And if ever there was a movie that was a miracle,

it really is Tombstone.

All right.

I can't wait, wait, Chris.

Skin that smoke wagon and see what happens.

Yes.

One of my favorite lines.

Turn your head into a canoe.

Yeah.

So many good ones.

Okay.

And also so many bad ones.

Ah, they're all good to me.

I loved Tombstone growing up.

I still love Tombstone.

I agree.

It is structurally a little disorienting.

It's jarring.

It feels like portions of the movie are missing.

That is all for very specific reasons that we will get to.

I assure you, every question you have will more or less be answered, at least as to the why of Tombstone.

Great.

We are headed back to 1993.

This film is a loose depiction of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday's exploits in Arizona back in the 1880s, including, of course, the now famous gunfight at the O.K.

Corral and the Earp Vendetta ride that bakes up most of the back half of the movie.

Yeah, Wyatt Earp, the serial killer, is the back half of this.

A prolific serial killer.

Wyatt Earp murder montage as he kills everyone lying in bed, getting their hair cut

throughout the back of the film.

Yes.

Okay, so as we've discussed, Lizzie, you had seen Tombstone before.

I feel like this was very much a staple of the

watching movies with our dads as young children.

Subjune 2020.

It was my mom who loved Tombstone.

Oh, interesting.

We actually re-watched it with my dad, and he was like, now I remember why I haven't watched this movie in 30 years.

Fair enough.

I'm glad to hear.

Also, Tombstone does feature an incredible array of kind of peak, attractive men.

It really does.

Between, obviously, Val Kilmer, even the lunger version of him is very attractive.

And then Sam Elliott was reportedly.

the individual on set who was most often accosted by fans and women of all of the actors.

Interesting.

I would have thought it would be Kurt Russell's mustache.

It was not.

It was Sam Elliott, according to John Farkas' book on the making of Tombstone.

We will get to that.

All right.

The making of this film, Lizzie, was less a gunfight and more a rock fight.

But before we get there, the details.

Tombstone is a 1993 Western film written by Kevin Jarr, directed by George P.

Cosmatos, produced by Synergy Pictures and Hollywood Pictures, and distributed under the Hollywood Pictures arm of Disney, which is through Buena Vista.

The film has an absolutely stacked cast, including but not limited to Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton, Powers Booth, Michael Bean, Charlton Heston, Stephen Lang, Thomas Hayden Church, Dana Delaney, Paula Malcolmson, Michael Rooker, Billy Bob Thornton, Terry Quinn, Billy Zane, John Corbett, Robert Mitchum, and many, many more that we will get to.

And Lizzie, as always, the IMDB log line for the film.

A successful lawman's plans to retire anonymously in Tombstone, Arizona are disrupted by the kind of outlaws he was famous for eliminating.

Honestly, more information than they give you in Tombstone, which is okay.

Yes.

They give you almost no background.

It's like you are supposed to know exactly who Wyatt Earp is, which I didn't really.

I knew he was a U.S.

Marshal.

That's basically all I knew.

Well, eventually he was U.S.

Marshal.

I don't believe he was U.S.

Marshal before he arrived in Tombstone.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

The history of Wyatt Earp himself is shrouded in lore, rife with fiction and rumor.

And so is the history of the making of Tombstone.

If you were to go merely by the film's Wikipedia, it's simply the story of an overwhelmed rookie director being replaced by a hard-nosed veteran, not unlike the island of Dr.

Moreau.

Listen to our episode.

Uh-oh, Val Kilmer.

Yep.

However, much like the way in which the complexities of Wyatt Earp and his exploits have been sanded down over time, the commonly accepted story of Tombstone is far from fact, and the villains and heroes we've come to know are not so nearly cut and dry.

If Tombstone, the town, is as we're told, the town too tough to die, Tombstone the film is cut from the same cloth.

Let's get into it, Lizzy.

Yes, I'm very excited.

While Tombstone ends with Kurt Russell dancing in the snow.

I hate the ending.

I'm sorry.

I just have to, all I have to say is the 19th century Manic Pixie dream girl in this is too much.

She's terrible.

Josephine Marcus, played by Dana Delaney, a real person, and we'll get to who's very interesting in real life and who was more interesting in the original version of the script.

She had a lot more to do, and we'll get to those changes as well.

Okay.

The film began with screenwriter and would-be director Kevin Jarr, a man who we've actually briefly discussed in our episode on The Mummy.

His name came up in passing.

His formidable career successes are matched and exceeded only by a series of breathtaking setbacks, only one of which I would say could be conceivably laid at his feet.

Kevin Jarr is the unfortunate victim of a strange series of echoing historical circumstances.

So, born in Detroit in 1954 to actress Laura Devon, Kevin Noel Clark's path to Hollywood was, as with so many, littered with false starts and left turns.

Of course, he came of age during the centennial celebrations at the end of the Civil War, and his childhood was filled with tin soldiers and recreations of historic battles.

He lived with his father in Wyoming for a time.

He learned to ride horses, developed an affection for the frontier life, and then he moved to LA,

where he took up acting, specifically Bit Parts and Flipper, the show that his mother's new husband, Brian Kelly, starred in.

Oh, wow.

So Laura, his mother, remarried again in the mid-1960s, this time to Academy Award-winning French composer Maurice Jarre.

Wow.

This is where he gets his last name.

He adopted Kevin.

Kevin took his last name, though.

Perhaps more importantly to our story, it was through Maurice that Kevin met acclaimed director David Lean.

Maurice had won three Oscars for his work with David Lean, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr.

Javago, and A Passage to India.

While Maurice scored 1970s Ryan's Daughter, which is a Madame Bovary adaptation, Kevin found himself spending time with David Lean, which led to the legendary director asking, what are your plans for the future?

Jarr admitted, I want to be an actor.

David Lean said, for the love of God, don't do that.

As Jarr later said, quote, he was not flattering on the subject of actors.

Lean told Jarr that he should write and direct, that he didn't need to go to film school.

He could learn everything he needed to know in six months on set.

I agree.

Probably true, yes.

Jarr took this advice to heart, returned to L.A., and began to scrape out an existence as a starving screenwriter.

Success trickled in.

He received a story credit for Stallone's Rambo First Blood Part 2.

Okay.

One of my favorite titles and uses of a colon and a title ever.

It's an incredible film in the oeuvre of over-the-top rock'em-sock'em 80s action movies.

Have you seen Rambo First Blood Part 2, Lizzie?

I have not.

Basically, Rambo gets called back to Southeast Asia to inflict more horror on that part of the subcontinent.

Yeah, I would expect no less.

It's absolutely over-the-top.

Of course, it was directed by George P.

Cosmatos, a name that will come up often in this podcast.

And it was a huge financial success, although it did win the Golden Raspberry Award for worst screenplay.

So Jarr didn't really want to be associated with this movie.

He maintained that nothing in his original pitch was used because the movie was actually written by James Cameron.

Oh.

Yep.

When is James Cameron not going to show up in one of our episodes?

I don't know.

He's everywhere.

He really is.

A TV movie followed, a Western actually, called The Tracker, starring Chris Christopherson, which he wrote.

But of course, it was 1989's Glory that put Jarr on the map.

Which is a great movie.

Glory is excellent.

I loved Glory.

The Edwards Wick Civil War film followed the 54th Massachusetts, one of the first black regiments in the Civil War.

It will have its own episode.

Kevin Jarr was inspired to write the film after being told by a historian friend that he bore a passing resemblance to a statue of regiment leader Robert Shaw.

Jarr's original script survived a very troubled development path, including a lot of criticism for his use of Shaw as the film's protagonist.

Yeah, I mean, I can see that.

Broderick's casting was also criticized.

Despite all of that, the movie thrived critically and commercially.

It was nominated for five Academy Awards.

Denzel Washington very deservingly won his first supporting actor, Oscar.

He was only the second black actor to win best supporting actor after Lewis Gossett Jr.

Just have to say also, Andre Brower underappreciated in that movie.

Maybe his best work, honestly.

He's amazing in that movie.

After Glory, Jarr was hired to do a rewrite for Navy Seals, starring Charlie Sheen and Michael Bean.

It's like a fun 1990 action movie.

All right.

It's my understanding that his version of the script was not used again.

So he did a rewrite on it, but they didn't go with it.

Producer Larry Gordon, Lawrence Gordon, who we discussed in our Water World episode, hired Jarr to write The Devil's Own, which would be made nearly a decade later with Harrison Ford.

And by early 1990, Jar was working on an adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula for Universal, which would be his directorial debut.

No, it wouldn't.

He wanted to bring the titular vampire to the screen with as much historical accuracy as possible.

Unfortunately, he would be beaten to the punch by who, Lizzie?

That would be Francis Ford Coppola and Keanu Reeves.

Yes, listen to our episode on Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula.

In a cruel twist of fate, I believe this is the order of events, but correct me if I'm wrong, Lizzie.

Winona Ryder let slip of a Dracula TV movie script that she'd be sent while meeting with Coppola.

Yes.

And despite Jarr finishing his script a full month ahead of Coppola's, Universal shelved his Dracula movie, not wanting to go head-to-head with the legendary filmmaker.

Yeah.

What Went Wrong alum and former TriStar chairman Mike Metavoy, listened to our episode on The Thin Red Line for more on him, said of these, quote, twin films or parallel productions these races are not always about quality it's about getting the first picture out the first film in the theaters does better at the box office regardless of quality according to peter shirako actor and armorer and longtime friend of kevin jar jar was on location actually scouting in romania and transylvania when he learned that the studio had canceled his film peter said of his friend quote kevin was destroyed he disappeared from us did not see us did not answer phone calls for six months, end quote.

The studio decided to try to do right by Jarr and offered him the chance to direct another project of his choosing.

Now, lucky for Kevin Jarr, a long-dead genre he'd grown up loving was showing signs of life.

Any guesses, Lizzie?

It's going to be Westerns.

No film genre has seen such highs and lows as the Western.

Birthed, perhaps, by an Edison Studios-era film titled Annie Oakley, which featured the titular sharpshooter and folk heroine shooting her Marlin 91.22-caliber rifle 25 times in 27 seconds.

You can see it online.

It's pretty cool.

The Western represented nearly a fifth of all films released by major studios during the silent era, became a pulp genre in the 30s, was revived in the 40s, jumped back up to 30% of studio output through 1950.

And then between 1950 and 1958, the Western was more popular than all other genres combined.

Interesting that it started with a female protagonist and then never again.

Yeah, well,

Calamity Jane shows up in Deadwood.

That's true.

And True Grit does have a female lead and is great.

That's true.

The Western, for the same reason that it had become popular to begin with, it was cheap to make, had been relegated to television in the 1960s and 70s.

The affordability of the genre made it ideal for the small screen.

By the 1980s, it was in complete decline despite the nearly lone efforts of one man.

Any guesses, Lizzie?

I don't think it's Kevin Costner yet who's still trying.

Nope, Clint Eastwood.

Okay, yeah.

He was kind of the only one slogging through it in the 1980s with some really, really nice, nice films.

However, everything changed in 1990 with an unusual trio of movies.

First, Robert Simekis's Back to the Future Part 3.

unexpectedly took audiences back to 1885.

Have you ever seen Back to the Future Part 3, Lizzie?

Not Part 3, no.

They go back to Western times.

They also went back to the 1950s in terms of box office.

It made $240 million worldwide, good enough to be the sixth highest-grossing film of the year.

Young Guns 2 dropped on August 1st, and despite negative reviews, made $60 million

and made money.

But of course, Lizzie, as you mentioned, it was Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves released on November 9th, 1990, that turned a flash in the pan into a bona fide trend.

The film was a crazy hit.

It's mind-boggling.

Made for roughly $20 million, it made over $400 million at the box office and dominated the Oscars.

It won seven of its 12 nominations.

It was only the second Western ever to win Best Picture after 1931's Cimarron.

60 years earlier.

Westerns were back,

and everybody wanted one.

In July of 1991, Kevin Jarr was invited to a quote Alamo gathering.

Jarr was an amateur historian.

Hosted by production illustrator and collector Joe Musso.

It was here that he first crossed paths with Wyatt Earp historian Jeff Maury, who will come up in our story quite a bit.

According to Morey, quote, someone told me they'd invited Kevin Jarr and I admired him.

I first noticed his name on the credits for The Tracker, that Chris Christopherson movie.

There was more historical understanding understanding there than usual with movies like that.

I had a photograph of a group of men standing in front of the old tombstone firehouse, and I believed one of the men was Wyatt Earp.

So I took a copy of it and Kevin came in.

He was only there for maybe 15 minutes.

I handed him the photo and that was that.

End quote.

Cool.

Kevin Jarr had his inspiration.

Lizzie, do you think Wyatt Earp was virgin territory in the early 90s?

I'm going to go with no.

I'm going to go with probably heavily covered.

First portrayed by Burt Lindley in 1923's Wild Bill Hickok, the real White Earp was still alive and serving as a technical advisor on the film.

The character of Earp hardly registers in the movie.

It was the 1931 biography, heavy quotes, of Earp called White Earp, Frontier Marshal by Stuart N.

Lake, that established Earp as a just and fearless lawman.

The book, which, despite being published two years after Earp's death, was heavily influenced by Earp and his third wife, Josephine Marcus, played by Dana Delaney in Tombstone.

Oh, so Laudenham Lady's number two.

That's right.

He had actually been married at least once before, and his first wife died shortly after childbirth, I believe.

He also lost an infant child in 1870.

Now, Josephine was not a manic pixie dream girl in real life.

She was a manic pixie legal nightmare, and she threatened to sue everyone if they said anything negative about her or Earp, including mentioning his Laudanum-addicted second wife, Maddie Earp or Sally.

It's unclear which one was her real name in the book.

That's fine.

I feel like they had a million names back then.

They were just like, my friends call me Jack.

My name's Bill.

The truth is, from what I've been able to piece together online, Maddie's real name was Celia.

But because she was a prostitute before she met Wyatt and while she was with Wyatt, she went by the alias Maddie.

Oh.

But when they would write down the name Celia on documents, it sounded like Sally phonetically.

So she was also known as Sally.

Wyrt, from what I've read,

he was arrested for being a pimp.

He definitely ran a brothel.

He stole horses.

He

defrauded small towns.

Well, that they show.

Yeah, no, he did this earlier too, before he ever made it.

He was definitely let go from a couple of police forces.

Basically, from what I've read, he committed far more crimes than any of the cowboys that he ended up going head to head with in this film.

Yeah.

But they leave that out of the movie.

All right.

Because

Wyatt Earp the legend is much more interesting than Wyatt Earp the fact.

In this book, Lake neglected to include a lot of the more salacious details of Earp's history.

Nobody cared.

It was the Great Depression, and everybody wanted a hero.

According to Michael Goodman's 2006 book on Earp, Wyatt Earp, it was Lake's description of the gunfight at the O.K.

Corral, an event that basically nobody had paid attention to for 50 years, that would propel the battle to near mythical status.

The gunfight was a microcosm of good versus evil, lawmen versus criminals, order versus chaos.

As Lake wrote, Earp had come out victorious, quote, whatever else might be said of Wyatt Earp, against or for him, and no matter what his motives, the greatest gunfighter that the old West knew, cleaned up Tombstone, the toughest camp in the world, end quote.

Not really true, but it became accepted lore.

So, Hollywood came knocking.

one year later with 1932's Law and Order starring Walter Houston, John Houston's father.

A lot of nepotism in this episode.

Just going to get that out of the way right now.

It was the first to present a fictionalized version of the gunfight at OK Corral.

Earp's name was replaced by Frame Johnson because everyone was afraid that Josephine was going to sue them.

So

not Wyatt Earp, but Frame Johnson.

They then released Frontier Marshall in 1934.

And they got away with Michael Earp instead of Wyatt because Josephine sued them again.

And then there was a 1939 version called Frontier Marshall Again that was able to include the name Wyatt Earp because they paid Josephine $50,000 to shut up about it.

So they were able to put in Wyatt Earp.

How old is this lady?

She's quite old.

She doesn't die until 1944, I believe.

Penniless.

It was pretty tragic.

It was John Ford's My Darling Clementine, 1946, starring Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp, that kind of legitimized the Earp character in Hollywood.

John Ford had, in fact, known Wyatt Earp back in the 1920s when Earp had advised the young silent film director on some of his early films.

These versions, of course, all played fast and loose with the truth.

Even Ford's film, which, despite his personal connection to Earp and his assertion that in My Darling Clementine, we did it exactly the way it had been, end quote, he took massive liberties, including Doc Holiday dies at the OK Corral in Ford's version of the movie, which is definitely not something that happened.

This trend would continue continue through Burt Lancaster's Crack at the Roll, alongside Kirk Douglas's Doc Holiday in 1957's Gunfight at the O.K.

Corral, and 10 years later, James Garner played White Earp in Hour of the Gun.

In all, Earp had been portrayed at least 10 times in various films and television series by some of film's biggest stars, including Randolph Scott, Richard Dix, Joel McCree, Hugh O'Brien, and even Jimmy Stewart.

The Lawman had inspired countless other characters and even influenced John Wayne's performance style.

So, Lizzie, what could Kevin Jarr possibly offer audiences that hadn't been provided before?

Kurt Russell's mustache.

Indeed, but also accuracy.

Yes, there we go.

Historical accuracy.

Kevin Jarr followed up with Jeff Maury, the Wyatt Earp historian, and he spent the better part of two hours drilling him on the details of Wyatt Earp and his battles with the Cowboys.

Apparently, this actually all took place at the office of writer and director John Millius, who wrote Apocalypse Now!

The next day, he offered Maury a job, historical consultant for the film that he was going to write about Wyatt Earp.

According to Maury, the two shared a perspective on Earp, quote, that Wyatt's problem in Tombstone actually was that he was very naive and unaware of the evil around him, end quote, which I think comes through in the finished film.

He's more naive than his brothers.

Totally.

Jarr and Maury got to work.

They visited Tombstone.

They brought in historian Jim Dunham.

And according to John Farkas, whose book, The Making of Tombstone, I did read for this episode, pitched Jar on the fact that, quote, there are also five good women's roles in the story, and no one has ever really fleshed out their roles, end quote.

And no one will in this movie.

But Jarr did intend to, and he did in the original script.

Josephine Marcus plays a very central role in the real story.

She came to town, common law married to Sheriff B.

Ann or Behan.

Oh.

She had, from what I read, actually lived as a prostitute since she was 14 years old.

She had been Biann's preferred prostitute, living under a different name, Sadie.

She then came to Tombstone with him, and it was only after he refused to legitimize their marriage that she and Earp began to potentially see each other.

And it's that love triangle that actually drove a lot of the animosity between Behan, who was affiliated with the cowboys, and the Earps.

So she was really a central character.

I also read that she and Maddie Earp, who was Laudenham addicted at that point, as they depict in the film, also a former prostitute who may or may not have run a brothel.

It's disputed, but they were also having it out in the street a little bit from a couple of the accounts that I read as well.

That would have been more interesting interesting by a lot.

I honestly, the worst part of this, the end result of this movie is the women.

They are so underwritten and like, and the dialogue is very poorly written, particularly between Josephine and Wyatt Earp.

And then by the time you get to the end, I was just like, what am I looking at here?

They barely show up.

Josephine makes no sense.

at all.

So it's interesting to hear that she had a lot more to do in real life.

She did.

And she had a lot more to do in the early versions of the script.

And we'll get to some interpretations of what happened in a few minutes.

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Now, Jar would mail his pages to both Jeff Moray and Dunham for feedback and clarification.

Although, again, he was at the end of the day making a movie.

So he decided to take some liberties.

For example, Ike Clanton, who's played by Stephen Lang in the film, was a bigger character in the original history, but made a smaller character in the film because they didn't want the bad guy to get away at the end.

So Curly Bill and Johnny Ringo, Powers Booths, and Michael Bean's characters, were kind of elevated more to a higher position.

And other nuances were lost.

For example, when Marshall Fred White was killed by Curly Bill, that's when Powers Booth is on opium.

That actually was very murky at the time of the death, whether or not it was an accident.

So Curly Bill quickly asserted, he grabbed my gun and the gun went off.

I did not mean to kill him.

And actually, apparently, Fred White said it was an accident with his dying breath.

So

it seems like it was much less an out-and-out murder and

more an accident.

I will say it looks slightly ambiguous in the movie, which I thought was interesting.

It doesn't look like he did it on purpose.

Sure.

However, Jarr was adamant that, quote, I can't make Curly Bill a sympathetic figure and then have Wyatt later kill him at Iron Springs.

He must stay evil throughout, end quote.

Further events were manipulated to make some of the motivations of the story work.

According to Dunham, quote, the gunfight is in October.

There's a hearing, a Judge Spicer hearing, hearing, it's not in the movie, takes place in November.

Virgil gets shot in December, and that's Sam Elliott.

And then Morgan is killed just before Wyatt's birthday in March of 82, not on the same night as Virgil being shot.

And that's Bill Paxton, the other person.

That's Bill Paxton.

Exactly.

So things were condensed, but more or less, he was presenting a much more accurate version of the events than had been presented in Hollywood before.

It should also be noted that perhaps the most famous line of the film should be attributed to Jeff Maury, and that is, of course, I'm your Huckleberry.

As he told Kevin Jarr during the writing process, quote, I don't know if you are going to cover the confrontation between Doc Holiday and Johnny Ringo, but if you do, be sure to use the line from Walter Noble Burns' book, Tombstone, quote, I'm your Huckleberry, that's just my game, end quote.

And we'll get to the meaning of that line later, Lizzie, because it's also something that's hotly debated on the interwebs, but has been debunked.

Okay, according to actor-historian armorer Peter Shirako, Jarr was extremely paranoid following the dissolution of his Dracula film.

He swore everyone he was working with to secrecy.

Earp was in the public domain, of course, and he didn't want somebody else getting the same idea.

His team grew to include Gary Gang, a wrangler who owned the ranch where Jar kept his horse, Frank Trejani, who would research saddles, and Peter Shirako, of course, would be in charge of guns and eventually most of the film's extras, as we'll get to.

Jarr pulled dialogue from contemporaneous contemporaneous letters and newspapers.

The film, as you mentioned, Lizzie, Skin That Smoke Wagon, has some really fun, period-appropriate language.

He finished his first draft on January 22nd, 1992.

And even though he knew the script needed work, he already had somebody in mind to play Wide Earp.

Lizzie, who makes the most sense to play White Earp?

Kevin Costner.

Kevin...

Costner.

Oh boy, am I so glad he's not in this movie.

Well, he's in a different White Earp movie movie that releases six months later, and we're about to dive in.

So by 1992, Kevin Costner was arguably the biggest movie star in the world.

The California native's long-simmering career had exploded in 1987 with his portrayal of Elliott Ness in Oliver Stone's The Untouchables.

Bull Durham and A Field of Dreams proved a trend, but of course, Lizzie, as we discussed, it was 1990s Dances with Wolves that cemented his A-list status.

He won best picture and best director.

And perhaps more importantly, the film Minted Money, a trend that would continue with Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, 1991, $390 million, JFK, $205 million, The Bodyguard, $411 million.

Oh, yeah.

In a three-year span, Costner had grossed well over a billion dollars at the box office.

That's wild.

Absolutely remarkable.

According to multiple sources, including Jon Farkas and contemporaneous articles in Entertainment Weekly and the Hollywood Reporter, it was in July of 1992 that Kevin Jarr, alongside producers Sean Daniel and Jim Jacks, who I believe were his Dracula producers at Universal originally, I could not confirm that, they all decided to send Kevin Costner the script for his consideration.

According to a 1993 article in Entertainment Weekly, Jarr sent the script to Costner through a mutual friend, Robin Hood director, Kevin Reynolds.

Again, Kevin to Kevin to Kevin.

Just really a popular name at this point in in time.

Now, unbeknownst to Jar, in seeking an ally, he would tip off a truly formidable enemy.

According to that same Entertainment Weekly article, as well as interviews with Costner and writer Dan Gordon, Kevin Costner was already interested in Wyatt Earp's story.

In fact, he'd been planning on making the man's life into a six-hour mini-series for pay-per-view cable.

Oh, he's got to stop with these.

In the vein of something like Lonesome Dove, which had been very successful a couple years earlier.

According to the LA Times, Costner had been working with screenwriter Dan Gordon for nearly three years on a version of the story that would be, as Gordon put it, quote, a Western godfather.

Further, Earp historian Jeff Maury had actually been in contact with both Dan Gordon and Kevin Costner about their Earp miniseries as early as the fall of 1990.

So before he spoke with Kevin Jarr.

He'd even met with Gordon and Costner in person to discuss the project.

So either he just didn't mention this to Kevin Jarr when he was hired as the consultant, which is entirely bot, like he didn't say, Kevin Costner is also doing this.

Or it also seems possible he did say, Kevin Costner is also doing this, at which point Jar said, I should send this to Kevin Costner and see if he wants to do my version of it.

Right.

It was not meant to be.

According to Jarr, quote, after he read the script, meaning Costner, he called and respectfully declined.

He said he had a mini-series he was developing for pay-per-view on the whole life of Earp, and we left it at that.

End quote.

Costner was not nearly as polite, stating in 1994 that, quote, I had worked on my own version of the story for four years.

I didn't want to even look at Jar's script.

I said, look, I don't want to.

I have my own.

I had it before yours.

Mine's good.

Yours is okay.

End quote.

Wow.

The only thing I'll give Kevin Costner, I do think that this story would potentially be better suited to a mini-series than it is to a movie.

We'll get there.

Also, I do think it's funny that Costner says, I don't even want to look at yours.

But yours is bad.

But yours is not good.

Yeah.

Despite Costner and Jar's assertions that Costner quickly passed on the project, I've read multiple claims online that Costner was initially attached to Jar's tombstone.

I couldn't find a single primary source confirming this fact except one off-the-cuff remark from Kurt Russell in an interview where he states that he believed Costner was originally, quote, going to do the movie.

Okay.

So who knows?

I also read that Costner's desire was to tell the story specifically of Wyatt Earp, whereas Jar wanted to tell the story of Tombstone.

He wanted an ensemble.

However, of course, this may also be revisionist history, ascribing intent based on the result because screenwriter Dan Gordon specifically said that while he was working with Costner on the material, he was mandated to make all of the roles so enticing that Costner would have a hard time choosing which role to play.

Which is also stupid because, of course, he's going to play Wyatt Irv.

Yeah.

Come on.

In the end, the two agreed to disagree, and Jar, convinced that the two projects were sufficiently different in both subject matter and release format, returned to refining his script, disappointed but unworried.

He finished the second draft in November of 1992, ready to share it with the world.

Bob Mazjarski, who would eventually produce the film, called it a work of art that leapt off the page.

Unfortunately, Jar wasn't the only one with something to share.

Uh-oh.

So, Lizzy, when it comes to duels in Hollywood, the hard and fast rule seems to be, make sure you shoot first.

On December 7th, 1992, a month after Jarr finished his second draft, Kevin Costner announced, alongside writer-director Lawrence Kasden, that he would be starring in Back-to-Back Westerns for Warner Brothers about Wyatt Earth.

Wow.

As writer Dan Gordon explained, quote, it was to be two movies, in fact, centering on three families, the Earps and two organized crime families.

Mike Gray, a bizarro mirror image of Earp, managed to get Tombstone, the richest town west of the Mississippi, deeded to his private company.

It was a land grab worth $10 million to $20 million in $1880,

and the only thing between him and that money was Wyatt Earp.

That's what our story was about.

End quote.

It actually sounds not dissimilar in tone from Hatfield's and McCoy's, which

Costner would make almost 20 years later.

Now, the reasons for Costner's shift from miniseries to feature film, they're difficult to pin down.

Are they?

Well,

it's been reported that Lawrence Kasden actually approached Costner, offering to cut down the 500-page script to a two-film story that he could direct.

Kasden had directed Costner in 1985's Silverado, a Western that if you haven't seen is really fun.

Costner, for his part, said it was a matter of artistic freedom.

Quote, I soon realized that the anger and violence associated with the story couldn't be told in an effective way on TV because of the ridiculous codes of what you can't do on TV versus what you can do, end quote.

That seems entirely fair.

True.

Others have suggested that it didn't occur to Costner that it was possible to condense Earp's life into a single film until he'd seen how Jar had done it in his script.

Also possible.

Regardless, the news jarred Jar.

That's the last time I'll use that.

And Costner reportedly called him to assure him that, quote, I hope you don't think we're trying to squeeze you out.

There is room for both movies, end quote.

Kev,

of course, you're trying to squeeze out.

Just don't even bother at that point.

Well, let's get to some of the squeezing.

Warner Brothers, on December 16th, announced that their ERP film would begin shooting in May of 1993.

Keep in mind, they still didn't have a finished script.

They were determined, though, to beat Jarr and Universal to theaters in an attempt to get Universal to pull the plug on their project.

Universal countered that the competing film would, quote, have absolutely no impact on our project.

They haven't written theirs and we have a script, end quote.

Jar knew he had to beat Costner to production, which gave him, if the Warner Brothers timeline was to be believed, less than six months to get the movie up and running.

He trimmed the script as tight as he could, eliminating scenes and speaking roles, but it was no use.

Universal had to choose between competing with Costner and being in the business with Costner, and they chose the latter.

The studio shelved Jar's tombstone and, from what I've been able to piece together, shortly thereafter, picked up a Costner property that would prove to be an unwise decision.

Lizzie, any ideas what that film is?

I sure know what it is.

It's Water World, you losers.

That was a mistake.

Water World.

Listen to our episode.

Yeah.

So the Universal version of Tombstone, which I did read, may have featured Liam Neeson as Wyatt Earp.

That would have been good.

And David Bowie as Doc Holiday.

Whoa.

Take that with a very, very large grain of salt.

They were apparently neither of them were attached, but they were Jar's top choices for the roles.

The movie was dead.

It was Dracula all over again.

Literally the exact same thing.

Some sources claim Costner personally called Universal and asked them to kill the project.

I could find no primary source confirming that fact.

What seems clear is that Universal did not believe they could compete with Costner at the box office, specifically in a genre he had just come to dominate.

Yeah, I mean, it makes sense.

I don't think it's unreasonable.

No.

Politics aside, one of the biggest hurdles facing Tombstone was not Kevin Costner, but screenwriter Kevin Jarr.

Everyone seemed to agree that his writing was brilliant, but Jarr wanted to make the leap into directing, and he'd never directed before.

So his first feature was going to be a prestige ensemble western.

featuring action, horses, water, heat.

That's a lot.

It was a lot of risk for a studio to put behind the young writer-director.

In contrast, Costner's Wyatt Earp, as it eventually would become known, had Lawrence Kasden and Kevin Costner, each of whom had already directed respective Westerns of their own, 1985 Silverado, and, of course, Dances with Wolves, Jarr's biggest supporter, and aside from the quality of his writing, the biggest reason it seems he was in the position to direct it all was producer Jim Jacks, who it sounds like really, really was his guardian angel of sorts.

But there wasn't a lot else in his corner.

So initially, Universal seems to have been content to just put the project on ice.

However, Jar and Jax, through whatever means necessary, were able to get them to put the project into turnaround in early 1993.

Lizzie, would you like to explain turnaround for anybody who doesn't know briefly?

Turnaround is when a studio that owns a property essentially puts it up for grabs because they're saying, we're done with this.

You know, if anybody else wants this, you have the option to pick it up and essentially buy us out of this property.

That's exactly right.

So, the more money a project has against it, the harder it is to sell and turn around because the upfront price is higher.

Now, Jarr and his team needed strong lead actors to secure interest and financing because they didn't have the name recognition of a Kevin Costner.

And again, Costner and his team seem to have thrown up roadblocks.

According to a 1993 Entertainment Weekly article on the competing productions, Brad Pitt had been highly interested in playing ERP.

That makes sense.

With Johnny Depp as Doc Holiday, according to John Farkas.

A quick note on John Farkas' book, which I did enjoy reading.

I will always call out if I am quoting his book because I did find some errors in the book, and a lot of the information seems to have come not from the primary players on the movie, like Kurt Russell and Kevin Jarr, but rather supporting actors or some of the lower-level crew members.

So, again, I'll just call it out when I'm offering it because some of it seems a bit speculative or based on hearsay.

What is known is that Brad Pitt, like Kevin Costner, was a client at CAA, Creative Artist Agency.

And according to producer Jim Jacks, CAA was, quote, telling people our movie won't happen, end quote.

And that is a quote he gave directly to Entertainment Weekly at the time.

Wow.

This was virtually confirmed by Costner's producing partner, Jim Wilson, who said in that same article, quote, there's no race, but because of the asinine mentality in this town, they won't let two pictures about Earp go forward.

If I were a gambling man, I'd bet Tombstone doesn't go ahead, end quote.

To be clear, it was in CAA's best interest to package Costner's film and do whatever they could to ensure its success.

He was arguably their biggest client at the time.

So it's entirely possible that they blocked Jarr's script from getting into the hands of their clients without a word from Costner.

We can't know.

According to Entertainment Weekly, Jar and his producers tried to get around this by targeting actors outside of CAA.

Names I read included Nick Nolte and Lizzie Patrick Swayze.

That tracks for me, to be honest.

Hoping that Universal would greenlight the film off of one of them prior to Costner's Wyatt Earp getting started.

The trouble was, most of the actors that could get the movie greenlit were likely at CAA at the time.

CAA was kind of at the height of its powers.

It had been formed in 1975 by a defection of William Morris agents.

It was run by the increasingly powerful Michael Ovitz, and they had redefined the business through their packaging method of putting together writers, directors, and actors, all of whom were clients, to get films made.

And they just so happened to represent somebody truly perfect for the part.

Kurt Russell, the man with the amazing mustache, was a CAA client.

The athletic child actor-turned heartthrob, come off-beat action hero who had rounded out a somewhat rocky start to the 1980s, including future cult classics The Thing, listen to our episode, and Big Trouble in Little China, listen to our episode, on a bit of a skid, with Overboard, Captain Ron, and Tequila Sunrise.

These films failed to impress critics, although Sunrise was a box office success.

And Tango and Cash, of course, which we watched recently, Lizzie, was a so bad it's good disaster, deserving of its own episode.

The one bright spot in this stretch was 1991's Backdraft, which I stand by as a great film.

In true what-if fashion, Russell nearly landed one of Costner's most iconic roles.

Lawrence Crash Davis, the lead of Ron Shelton's Bowl Durham.

Oh.

Russell, with his minor league baseball background, had been Shelton's.

I was going to say.

Yeah, he was his first choice for the role.

But Shelton explains in his book, The Church of Baseball: when I initially contacted his agent, meeting Kurt Russells, I was told he was not available.

I'm not sure if that was true, but it was clear his reps didn't want a meeting with a first-time director with a minor league baseball tale.

End quote.

The part landed in the hands of the then-less tested Kevin Costner.

Kurt Russell, with his squared-off good looks and proven ability to generate copious facial hair, see John Carpenter's The Thing.

Yeah, one of the finest beards ever.

One of the finest beards you'll ever see.

Grew it all on his own.

He was a natural fit for the role of Wyatt Earp.

Not only that, but Russell's father, the actor and AAA ball club owner Bing Russell, had made his living for many years acting in television westerns, including two episodes of Hugh O'Brien's series, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp.

He'd also had a small role in 1957's gunfight at the O.K.

Corral.

It seems only fitting that Kurt would take up his father's mantle, so to speak.

Unfortunately, as a CAA client, there was little chance his agents would be sharing tombstone with him.

Now, fate, or more accurately, commerce intervened.

As I mentioned, William Morris at this point was the home of writer-director Kevin Jarr, and it's also where Russell had been prior to CIA.

So in early 1993, Russell received a tip from an old friend.

As he later told True West magazine, quote, my old agent at William Morris called me up one day saying, There's a script that I'm aware of that you should do, but there's a lot of politics involved here.

So he sent Russell the script and Russell loved it.

As he later said, quote, Jar's screenplay was really the first time anyone has tried to present Wyatt Earp in his entirety.

I mean, all of him, his relationships with his brothers, with his first wife, how he took up with Josephine Marcus, the traveling actress that he ended up spending nearly half a century with.

You could see the dark side of the man.

There's stuff in that original script that if you were ever to read, you'd go, oh, ho, ho, end quote.

I love Kurt Russell so much.

Kurt Russell's on board.

And things moved quickly.

It's unclear exactly when he joined the project.

It must have been at the earliest, late 1993, at the latest, pretty early, excuse me, late 1992, at the latest, early 1993.

What is clear is Kurt Russell was really the only reason the movie got financed.

He joins the project.

Synergy Productions signs on to finance Tombstone with a roughly $25 million budget commitment.

This is a deal entirely facilitated by way of Kurt Russell.

Again, as he later said, quote, I'd gone and got $25 million from Andy Vajna, the head of Synergy, to make the movie.

Andy and I had been on a bicycle trip.

That's where the relationship came from.

A bicycle trip we did a couple years earlier.

He said, if you ever have a project, I said, fine.

End quote.

Now, we need to do a brief background on Andy Vajna because it'll come full circle.

Andy Vajna was the founder of Carol Co-Films.

They produced The Rambo trilogy and Total Recall, amongst many, many other movies, largely revenge-themed movies.

Important to remember that.

He'd sold his stake in that company.

He founded Synergy in the late 1980s, and they partnered with Disney to distribute through their Buena Vista, Hollywood, and Touchstone subsidiaries, which did Disney's live-action work.

Now, this is where things get a little bit murky.

There are multiple conflicting recollections from various people involved with the film as to what specifically happened next in terms of distribution.

So take all of this with a grain of salt, but I've done my best to parse through this information.

I've based this mostly on interviews with Kurt Russell as opposed to John Farkas' book.

I think I'll trust Russell's direct recollection more.

Okay.

It seems like both Kurt Russell and Kevin Jarr specifically wanted Willem Dafoe to play Doc Holiday.

Interesting.

He's a lot slighter than Val Kilmer.

That kind of makes sense, I guess.

Yeah, it doesn't seem like he was ever formally on the project, but Russell specifically did later say, quote, Willem Dafoe was going to do the movie Doc Holiday, end quote.

Disney, home of synergy, did not want to make the movie with Dafoe, insisting instead that they cast Val Kilmer.

This was corroborated by Farkas in his book, and he actually went so far as to say that Disney specifically rejected Dafoe because of his lead turn in Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ.

Yep.

It's not a quote in Farkas' book, so I don't know where he got that information.

It seems entirely possible.

Yeah, I think it's very possible.

That was an extremely controversial film that pissed a lot of people off.

Absolutely.

Kurt Russell revealed in a later interview that he received a phone call in the weeks ahead of production.

He doesn't remember from who, stating that Kevin Costner had blocked all other avenues of distribution other than Buena Vista and Disney.

Here's the quote.

I got a phone call and it was just before Val was going to come on.

We had to have a release.

I believe he means for Val to join the production.

They had to have a distributor on the project.

Costner had shut down all avenues of release for the picture except for Disney, except for Buena Vista.

He was able to.

He was powerful enough at the time, which I always respected.

I thought it was good hardball.

And that was the story.

And some part of it was true because the only place we were going to release that picture was through Buena Vista.

That much I knew.

I was told that by Kevin Jar.

Jar said, We're dead in the water, any place but Buena Vista.

End quote.

So it seems like maybe the missing piece to all of this is that Jar and Russell were considering shopping the project to other distributors in order to keep Dafoe on the project or for other reasons.

Again, I'm speculating.

Costner, it seems, had in the meantime managed to orphan the project at Disney by throwing his weight around at the other studios, which again, doesn't seem unreasonable given Costner's status and the relationships he had around town.

Specifically, he was doing Wyatt Earp with Warner Bros., so Warner's is out.

He was going to do Water World with Universal, so Universal's out.

Dances with Wolves and No Way Out had been at Orion, a mini-major, so Orion's out.

He did The Untouchables with Paramount, so maybe Paramount was out.

And of course, Kasden had done the Big Chill and Empire Strikes Back with 20th Century Fox, so maybe 20th Century was out, which would leave MGM, Columbia, a couple others, but it's entirely possible that he called around and was like, look, you want my next movie?

You can't do this movie.

Whether it was at Costner's bidding or simply due to the fact that they were attempting to resurrect what was largely considered a dead genre, Russell and Jarr quickly realized that there was only one home for Tombstone, Buena Vista.

They pushed for Dafoe, but as Russell later said, quote, they came back, told Kevin Jarr, nope, you can go with Val Kilmer, but not Dafoe.

So we said, we love Val Kilmer.

One of those things.

End quote.

Yeah, I will say, from a box office perspective, I understand pushing for Valkilmer.

This is the hottest Valkilmer ever was.

And he is super hot, as you said, even as he is pasty and sweaty and dying from tuberculosis.

And I think

if you want the ladies to also show up to this movie, you do stack it with a bunch of attractive 90s men.

And they do do that in a big way.

It's also entirely possible that Russell and Jarr paired up.

called around before they had the deal with Synergy, wanting Dafoe on the movie.

Synergy said no, Dafoe, because of Disney.

And then, when they realized they were blocked everywhere else, they signed the deal with Synergy.

You know what I mean?

So we don't know the order of operations.

Kilmer, for his part, later wrote that he had only read half the script when he decided to accept the role.

It was that good.

Something that only happened two other times in his career.

Can you guess which two movies, Lizzie, he put at the same level?

Oh man, I don't know.

One's a superhero movie.

Batman.

And the other one is later in his career and stars

another superhero actor.

I have no idea.

Kiss, kiss, bang, bang.

Oh, yeah, that movie's great.

It's really fun.

Regardless, shots had been fired, and it was obvious that Costner was going to give them everything he had to keep their movie from getting made.

Kurt Russell was going to fight back.

Now, as winter turned into spring, a battle for talent waged across Hollywood between the dueling Earp Productions.

Both of these movies had huge casts of, you know, just a ton of people.

80-plus speaking roles.

If there was ever a time to be a young male actor in Hollywood, white male actor in Hollywood, this was the time.

It's not dissimilar from when we discussed the thin red line and saving private Ryan.

Everybody's getting picked up.

Costner had his name, pedigree, and the backing of Warner Brothers, and a budget that would nearly triple tombstones.

But Russell and Jar had $25 million, which was a number based on, well, nothing.

I was going to say, it feels a little low.

Yeah.

So when Russell locked the deal with Synergy, he called his ex-brother-in-law, producer Larry Franco, not Goldie Hahn's brother, his first wife's brother, anyway, for some advice on whether or not the round hole he'd just locked in for his square peg would be sufficient.

Quote, and I went to my brother-in-law, Larry Franco, who produced a thousand movies, and I asked Larry, can I do this for $25 million?

And he looked at it, went through it, semi-budgeted it, and said, she,

just,

just,

end quote.

Lucky for Jarr and the team, their advantage was a script so good that it attracted talent at discounted rates.

According to Powers Booth, quote, it was such a great script that, as I understand it, everyone pretty much cut their money to do it.

All of the better folks in Hollywood were tripping over themselves trying to get in the film.

Kevin Jarr, at that period of time, was certainly one of the best writers around.

The research he did, every character, right down to the color of the horse you rode, your wardrobe, and all that stuff was just perfect.

End quote.

It does look great.

And it wasn't just actors who felt this way, Lizzie.

Earp historians have been equally generous in their praise.

According to Casey T, the author of Wyatt Earp, The Life Behind the Legend, quote, Kevin Jarr's original script is stunning and haunting, end quote.

They also had the advantage that Kevin Jarr was not a DGA director, which meant that the movie was going to be at a lower pay scale than Kevin Costner's Wyatt Earth, which would also save them money when they went into production.

Now, Jarr had his pick of the litter, and he was savvy enough to pump the production full of veteran Western talent.

Sam Elliott came on to play Virgil, Wyatt's older brother.

Bill Paxton joined as Morgan, the youngest.

Powers Booth as Curly Bill.

Michael Bean loved the script and angled for the role of Doc Holiday only to learn that Kilmer had already snagged it.

And I do think Bean would have also made a really good Doc Holiday.

I love Michael Bean as an actor.

He's great.

He's really good as the bad guy in this, though.

He is.

And he'd played both a great hero and antagonist, obviously.

In Terminator, he's great as Kyle Reese.

And then in The Abyss, he plays the crazed military antagonist.

So he chose Doc Holiday's enemy, the quick-drawing and quicker-tempered Johnny Ringo.

Jar originally angled to get his girlfriend, Lisa Zane, sister of Billy Zane, in the film as Josephine Marcus.

In fact, according to Michael Bean, during their first meeting to discuss the role of Johnny Ringo, Jarr admitted that Zane had been his, quote, muse and inspiration for writing the film.

The role of Josephine Marcus was built for her.

as he knew Josie had been pivotal to the history of Tombstone.

Again, more evidence that there was a much bigger part here originally.

However, the studio outmuscled Jar, and the role went to more experienced actress Dana Delaney, who apparently narrowly beat out Jennifer Connolly in a last-minute screen test.

I love Jennifer Connolly.

She was my first crush.

Yeah.

First Hollywood crush.

Me too.

Yeah.

There's something very twee about Dana Delaney in this, and I understand that, like, obviously, a lot was cut.

A lot of this is not her fault.

She's, she is the weakest part of this movie to me.

Well, Zane was disappointed, but stayed in the picture as both the choreographer and the role of Holiday's partner in crime, Big Nose Kate Hironi.

Now, if you're listening, you'll probably know that it's not Lisa Zane in the end who plays Big Nose Kate.

It's Joanna Pakula.

We'll get to that later.

Now, Andy Vojna and Synergy didn't always get their way.

According to Kurt Russell, just before they started production, he got a phone call to go see Andy Vojna, Vajna, who sat him down and said, Look, I want you to think about something.

Would you think about playing Doc Holiday?

I said, Oh, that's interesting.

I thought about that when I read the movie, but I think we're going to go with it the way we are.

And then Andy says, Because I was kind of thinking, what would happen if you played Doc Holiday and Richard Gere played Wyatt Earp?

Nothing good.

And I said, Nah, I think we should just go with what we got.

Make the movie.

End quote.

Yeah.

Don't know why they wanted to mix that up billy zane joined the production he was friends with jar through his sister lisa he got the role of thespian fabian i actually really like billy zane in this movie it's a small role but he's great and his floppy floppy wig is very floppy doing a lot of work it is heartthrob jason priestley of beverly hills 90210 landed the somewhat unexpected but originally much bigger role of Billy Breckenridge, who's kind of like, it's unexpected because he's effectively an openly, almost openly gay character in this movie.

Yeah, it is interesting.

Up and comers, including Thomas Hayden Church, John Corbett, Michael Rooker, Rounded Out the Cowboys, along with stage veteran and future James Cameron collaborator Stephen Lang, as Ike Clanton, all of which Lizzie has nothing to say of the historic Western pedigree that surrounded the younger actors.

Charlton Heston makes an appearance as Rancher Henry Hooker.

And according to historical consultant Jeff Morey, Burt Lancaster was Jar's first choice to play Marshall Fred White.

Lancaster had played Earp in 1957's Gunfight at the O.K.

Corral.

That didn't pan out, but the role still went to an Earp-connected performer.

Harry Carey Jr.

plays Fred White.

He's the son of Harry Carey Sr., who had played Doc Holiday in 1932's Law and Order.

The character wasn't called Doc Holiday, but it was Doc Holiday.

And he had known the real Wyatt Earp.

Not only that, but Harry's mother, Olive, portrayed Billy Blanton's mother in Gunfight at the OK Corral.

Olive Carey also played Mrs.

Jorgensen in one of my favorite Westerns, The searchers which is great great movie and in what seems to have been meant as a true passing of the torch moment hugh o'brien who had played earp for six years on the life and legend of wyat earp a show that bing russell had been on was to play a station wagon master who consults briefly with russell's earp before he and the posse go off on their vendetta ride The iconic Robert Mitchum, Lizzie, narrates the opening and closing of the film.

Originally, he was actually going to play a character who doesn't show up in the movie.

That is old man Clanton, Ike Clanton's father, who is like a big character in real life.

We'll get to why he's not in it.

And there were rumors flying around town about who else was going to be in the movie.

David Strathorn was going to play Sheriff B.N.

Billy Baldwin was going to be in the movie in some capacity.

Didn't happen.

Of course, Costner's Wyatt Earp wasn't hurting for talent either.

They had Gene Hackman, Dennis Quaid as Doc Holiday, Michael Madsen, Mark Harmon, Bill Pullman, Tom Sizemore, Catherine O'Hara, Isabella Rossellini, and Jim Caviziel in one of his first film roles.

That is a lot.

You got a Paxton versus Pullman face-off here, which is that's the toughest of the bills.

They're both so good.

The talent behind the camera of Tombstone was as formidable as that in front.

I'm sure you recognized her name in the credits, Lizzie.

Catherine Hardwick

came on as production designer.

We'll speak more about her in our second episode.

And cinematographer William Fraker lent the film his experienced eye.

The five-time Oscar-nominated DP of Rosemary's Baby, Bullet, and War Games likely provided some comfort to the film's executives who were understandably quite nervous about handing the reins of something the size to a first-time director.

Further, legendary stunt coordinator, stuntman, and second unit director Terry Leonard, perhaps best known for doubling Harrison Ford and Indiana Jones during the truck sequence, was brought on to helm the second unit and action work.

So it's really a remarkable team that they've put together.

As Jarr continued to push for a truly authentic look and feel for the film, he received an unlikely assist from Kevin Costner and his rival production when Costner basically booked all of Hollywood's available Western costumes.

Beyond Wyatt Earp, Walter Hill's Geronimo, an American legend, and a TV movie of Geronimo was also getting made, and basically every Western outfit in Hollywood had been rented.

But the advantage of that, as Kurt Russell said, was quote, it forced us to go to Europe, which in fact is where the nouveau riche of Tombstone bought their clothes in the first place.

Interesting.

End quote.

Jarr rejected a number of costume designers because all they presented him were the same palettes of brown, beige, and earth tones that he had been used to and seen in films.

And Catherine Hardwick said, quote, if you look at clothes left from that period, if you look at the wallpaper samples and paint samples in books, people have very wild use of color.

They use lime green and purples and very jarring color schemes.

And this director really wanted to see that because a lot of Westerns, they go for that sepia tone brown, amber, gold.

Yeah.

Enter Joseph Poro.

The costume designer had plenty of experience, the blob, death warrant, universal soldier, but none on a Western.

He'd kind of done a Western with Catherine Bigelow's Near Dark.

But when he showed up in vintage Western clothing with a ton of research, Jar hired him on the spot.

That's awesome.

Yeah, no, he sounds amazing.

So he, he went to the major costume houses, and apparently one of them was run by a costume designer who Jar had passed on and was like, who the fuck is this guy passing on me?

And he's like, hey, do you have any Western costumes?

I'm doing this Kevin Jarr movie.

And the guy just chewed him out and was like, get the hell out of my costume house.

So

Jar could not go within Hollywood, which meant he had to go.

outside of Hollywood.

Lucky for him, Peter Sharako, Jar's friend and one of his early collaborators, ran a company called Caravan West Productions, a company built around a loose society of period-authentic reenactors that called themselves the Buckaroos.

This is all the cowboys, all the background players, so many of them in this movie are Shirako's Buckaroos.

They

had their own costumes, guns, saddles, and in some cases, horses.

So, Poro said, quote, since this was a non-union film, I had most of the stuff manufactured in downtown L.A.

I had a Filipino shirt maker who worked out of her house, and she made all the shirts.

Preparation was nasty.

I think I had four weeks at the most, and we were making costumes through the whole shoot.

Long six-day weeks, 16 to 18 hours a day.

Everything was being manufactured at all these different places.

Nothing was made in a costume house.

I think I may have rented altogether a single rack of clothing.

End quote.

That's amazing.

Everything was made for the film.

Shirako also had a library of 5,000 Western books to reference.

As he later said, quote, Jarr wanted to capture the Victorian look of the cosmopolitan boomtown of 1881-1882.

He wanted a very clean, colorful, affluent look around tombstone, as was the fashion of the day.

Joe would send people to my house.

I said, Joe, come out, go through my books, go through my stuff, look at that.

And then he designed everything.

He designed all the outfits, but I had the people make stuff for him.

He would buy the material and they would make it.

End quote.

Basically, everybody agrees Kevin Jarr had an amazing attention to detail and desire to present this period accurately, which is

new.

It was the new West.

It wasn't the old West.

Tombstone at the time, it was believed was going to be the next San Francisco.

Right, they say it in the movie.

So, unfortunately, Kevin Jarr's eye for historical accuracy didn't translate to an eye for cinematic language and compositions.

The shoot headed towards production.

Most of it would take place not in the actual town of Tombstone, which had turned into a tourist attraction, but in Mezcal, Arizona, where Catherine Hardwick spent six months building the set.

The hub of production was a holiday inn in Tucson, 70 miles from Tombstone, where 150 rooms were rented, more than half of the hotel's capacity.

Most of the buckaroos apparently camped outside for most of the shoot.

If you'd like more detail on pre-production, check out John Farkas' The Making of Tombstone.

I will say it's a bit tedious, but it does provide an exhaustive accounting and features hundreds of interviews.

Production began on May 17th with Disney committing publicly to a release date the following spring of 1994, determined to get out ahead of Kevin Costner's Wyatt Earth.

Tombstone was the first of the two films to enter production.

So they were, by all intents and purposes, winning when they began production in May of 1993.

Yeah, you said 1994 release.

That's interesting.

We'll get there.

The schedule was set, 62 shooting days, six-day work weeks.

It was an aggressively tight schedule for a script as long and as involved as JARS.

This has been confirmed by multiple actors and producers on the project.

Basically, a 12-week schedule was viewed as challenging by some and impossible by others.

Add-in weather, the lightning storms in the film are largely real that you see.

Wow.

Animals, water, flooding, and 110-degree heat with actors in wool costumes, period accurate.

The film would be a monumental undertaking for any director, let alone a first-timer.

John Farkas, in his book, says that the plan was to start with scenes outside of Tombstone, including Henry Hooker's Ranch, the Vendetta ride on the plains, the death of Curly Bill, and more, and then to relocate to the old Tucson studios for soundstage work, which included the Birdcage Theater, if you remember, Lizzie.

And then go to Miss Call, where Catherine Hardwick was painstakingly recreating Tombstone to shoot the vast bulk of the movie that takes place in town.

Okay, this is where it gets really, really, really depressing.

Are you ready?

I'm ready.

Unfortunately, it was, according to many involved in the production, apparent from the very first day of shooting that Kevin Jarr, while a brilliant writer, was completely out of his depth behind the camera.

Yeah.

As Sam Elliott said, quote, a week into the fucking thing, a day if you were really watching, you knew this kid couldn't direct.

It was shocking and at the same time, it was heartbreaking because he was a real nice-looking guy and a soft-spoken kid, and you just wanted him to fucking fucking succeed because of the thing that he had put together.

End quote.

Val Kilmer, as he later wrote in his memoir, said the realization came to Kurt Russell even earlier.

He says that on the first day after Jarr had set up a nonsensical shot, quote, Kurt looked me straight in the eye and said, Val, we're in trouble.

End quote.

Oh no.

The root of the problem seems to have been Jarr's desire to create a John Ford Western.

Something stately and composed with lots of wide shots and long shots that moved at a somewhat leisurely pace by modern standards.

The problem is, Synergy expected an action film.

Right.

As a result, Kevin Jarr seemed to only want to shoot master shots.

Master shots, as we've discussed in other episodes, are designed to try to incorporate as much or all of the action contained in a specific scene.

They can be used as establishing or closing shots, connective tissue for coverage.

In the most basic sense, they create a foundation upon which the scene is built, both while it's being filmed, through the blocking of the scene, and in the edit.

You have to be so incredibly skilled to do that, to just use masters, because it's extremely unforgiving.

If you don't know what you're doing and you're not shooting additional coverage and relying on close-ups and giving yourselves more options, you're completely screwed.

That's right.

So without coverage, which allows the editors to manipulate the flow of time and emotion in the editing room, you would have to stick with just the masters.

And Jar was doing that for a specific reason.

According to one of the producers, Jar told him that, quote, if I shoot coverage, then the studio can cut my vision.

To which the producer replied, kid, you can't keep directing this movie if you only shoot master shots, end quote.

Yeah, oh no.

The issue wasn't simply a variety in shot selection.

As you mentioned, Lizzie, the masters weren't very good.

As producer Bob Morowski later told True West magazine, quote, Kevin lined up a shot with Wyatt and Josephine when they meet Cute just before their challenging horse race through the woods and down a steep drop.

The way it was staged, Josephine towered a full foot and a half over Wyatt's head.

In no one's book is this a proper composition that would show two equally strong personalities meeting privately for the first time.

In his telling, Bob went to the cinematographer William Fraker and expressed his concerns.

Fraker agreed and shared the feeling with Kevin.

Kevin said he wouldn't change the shot.

Bob then went to the stunt coordinator and second unit director Terry Leonard and asked him to weigh in, maybe thinking another director could help him see the light.

Kevin again refused to change the shot.

Finally, Bob went to to Kurt Russell, who he thought might have been a bit miffed looking up at Josephine in this scene.

Kurt spoke with Kevin as well and again was rebuffed.

Finally, Bob approached Kevin himself only to be told, quote, that he intended to do such novel compositions throughout the film and that his style would not be MTV music video, but John Ford, end quote.

To make matters worse, Lizzie, When Jar did shoot coverage, he reportedly insisted on shooting it before the establishing shots, which goes against conventional wisdom and apparently drove cinematographer William Fraker absolutely insane.

It also resulted on having to unnecessarily consistently move base camp, which is where everybody is staged while you're shooting, because it kept ending up in the line of shooting direction.

So he would be flipping shooting direction constantly to shoot the coverage as opposed to shooting one direction out first and then moving base camp once in the middle of the day and shooting the other direction.

You're also going to have a ton of weird continuity stuff.

Yeah.

The producers apparently hoped that this would improve as Jar found his sea legs.

They also thought that maybe William Fraker, the Oscar-nominated cinematographer, would rub off on him.

But things didn't change.

Jar reportedly refused to listen to his DP, his producers, or candidly, his extremely accomplished cast.

Between them, they had nearly six decades in front of the camera, and many of them have directed too.

In fact, he had fallen into a bad habit of over-directing his actors.

As Peter Shirako later said, Jar did this to everyone, including Kurt Russell.

Michael Bean, according to Shiriko, told Jarr, quote, I cannot do a line reading for you.

Let me act.

Let me do what I have to do.

Do not tell me how to move and how to talk and how to do every little nuance, end quote.

Now, line readings, Lizzie,

are an extremely burdensome thing to give an actor.

Can you explain briefly what a line reading is?

Yeah, I can tell you as an actor,

they suck.

So, a line reading is when you want a very specific version of the line from the actor down to the intonation and, you know, sort of you basically, it's a director giving an actor exactly the way that they would like the line to be performed.

It's something that generally does not go over very well with actors because it is taking the agency completely out of their hands and basically asking them, to a certain extent, to be a puppet.

I'm not saying it's always bad.

There's times when I'm sure it's necessary to get what you need for a certain shot or a certain line, but to do it constantly would be absolutely awful.

Apparently Jar was doing it constantly.

Line readings, directions on where to put your hands, how to stand, hold cards, hold guns, etc.

The life that had been found in the script was utterly choked out from the dailies.

The actors were automatons, puppets, like you said, moving through unmoving shots.

As Alan Barra, author of Inventing Wyatt Earp, later wrote, quote, I saw rushes, meaning dailies, for Tombstone before Jar had been fired.

Although some of Jarr's scenes plug gaping holes that exist in the final film, he did not have much of a a film sense as a director.

At the pace he was going, he would have ended up with a four to six hours long mini-series rather than a feature film.

End quote.

Lizzie, you mentioned a mini-series, and the lethal combination at play was quickly obvious to everyone on set.

Jar's script was too long, and his style of filming would only make it longer.

His insistence on locked-off wide shots meant there would be insufficient coverage, meaning the variety of shots needed to cut from character to character, break up, condense, or expand a scene in the edit, to change the flow of the story in post-production.

As Mark Boardman, the features editor for True West magazine and editor of the Tombstone Epitaph, later put it, quote, the jar treatment was not producible, not within the confines of a two-hour movie, not within a somewhat reasonable studio budget.

That's the hard reality.

End quote.

It's so interesting that he even admitted that he was, like, sure, it sounds like there was a creative reason for doing all masters, but he also was doing it to try and retain more control over the edit which

it sounds like he's was just traumatized from previous productions and losing control whether it was on dracula or on this so i understand the impulse but it's just a huge that's a huge mistake i also could not find anything on this but i do wonder

if

the influence of David Lean, who was very good at this type of cinematography and storytelling,

played an undue part in giving him the impression that to maintain his integrity, this was the only way that a story could be told.

It could be, but yeah, to your point, the problem there is David Lean was an extraordinarily talented director who understood how to use.

those mediums and also made four-hour long movies.

Lawrence of Arabia is the longest thing I've ever seen.

Well, exactly.

That's also what I mean.

Jar in his head may have thought a three-hour movie was acceptable.

Synergy did not.

By the end of the second week, Jar was behind schedule, although I've heard conflicting reports about how far behind schedule.

Michael Rooker, for example, said, we weren't very far behind.

It didn't seem like they were unusually behind for a production.

Sure, but two weeks in, that's not great.

No.

According to producer Jim Jacks, Synergy head Andy Vajna, quote, had no real confidence in Kevin, end quote.

To make matters worse, first assistant director John Cameron was working on the project off-card, meaning he was a DGA member working on a non-union film.

Once the DGA found out about this, he was fired so that the movie would not flip to union, leading to the hiring of 27-year-old Adam Taylor, son of actor Buck Taylor, who was on the movie.

Adam Taylor's biggest credit at that point was being first AD on 1992's Leprechaun.

featuring amongst others jennifer aniston a horror film with a reported budget of one million dollars And everything I've read, Adam Taylor

worked himself to the bone on this movie.

But the point is, the first-time director now has a first assistant director who's almost, if not as green, as he is.

Kevin Jarr, however, was undeterred.

According to John Farkas and other sources, the studio even went so far as to contact Jarr's mentor, writer-director John Milius, asking if he'd come to set and assist Jarr.

Milius says that Jar rejected the offer, but according to author Michael Blake, Jim Jax told him that Milius declined the studio's request, insisting that Jar would be fine without him.

It's also possible that both are true.

It's possible that Milius called Jarr, Jar said, don't accept, and then he said no, you know, so who knows?

Andy Vajna did not agree that Jar would be fine.

By Tombstone's third week of shooting, and possibly earlier, Andy Vajna and Synergy reached out to diehard director John McTiernan to see if he would take over the production.

This is while Jarr is still directing.

McTiernan said he'd need a two-week shutdown to make the transition work, which would have cost the producers more than they could swallow.

Jarr was, it seems, not unaware of how poorly things were going.

He'd reportedly lost a good amount of weight and was smoking constantly, but it seems that no one...

could shake him of his determination to make the film his way.

According to Michael Bean, he attempted to impress upon the young director that film is a collaborative medium.

Yeah.

Quote, Kurt's been doing this since he was three years old.

He knows what he's doing.

Listen to him or listen to Frank.

It's the editor.

Listen to Val.

These guys, they're smart.

They're filmmakers.

They know what they're doing.

Listen to them.

Don't just turn your back on them like their suggestions don't mean anything.

End quote.

Kurt Russell was even more direct.

He later said that he told Jarr, quote, it's not working and they're going to come in here and can you, end quote.

After four weeks of filming, Andy Vajna fired Kevin Jarr.

That's a lot.

It was up to producer Jim Jacks to deliver the news to Jar personally.

Jim Jacks, who had fought to get Kevin the job, Jim Jax, who had fought to keep him on the film, Jim Jacks, who had pushed the studio to try to save Kevin's version.

As Jax later said, quote, I knew Kevin best.

The conversation wasn't pleasant, end quote.

Jax later said he regretted not pressing Jarr to direct something smaller prior to doing Tombstone.

Yeah.

Michael Bean, for his part, said that he saw Kevin Jarr checking out of the hotel and making sure to pay his bill before he left for Los Angeles.

And

it's something that stayed with him to this day.

Kurt Russell summed it up bluntly, quote, I had backed Jarr as the director.

The biggest surprise was he was as lost as a director as he was found as a writer.

He was a brilliant writer, but it's a different job.

Bringing it to life is a different job.

Four weeks into filming, Tombstone was dead in the water.

Disney was ready to pull the plug and cede victory to Costner's Wyatt Earp.

Why resuscitate something that would be beat at the box office anyway?

Because Kurt Russell said, No!

And that concludes part one of our coverage of Tombstone.

Don't worry, it only gets more exciting from here.

Great.

Well, should we hold our what went rights until part two?

I think we should hold our what went rights until part two, for sure.

Okay, I'm excited.

I get to keep hearing the story.

You all don't.

We will be back with part two of Tombstone, but of course, no episode would be complete without a shout out to our amazing patrons.

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All right, Lizzy, I'm getting tired of your gas.

Now jerk that pistol and go to work.

Ramon Villanueva Jr.

Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conklin, Jake Killen, Kang,

Andrew McFagel Bagel, Matthew Jacobson, Grace Potter,

Ellen Singleton,

Julie Shri Samon,

Scott Gerwin, Sadie,

just Sadie, Ryan Donahue,

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Kathleen Olson, Leah Bowman, Steve Winterbauer, Don Scheibel,

George, Rosemary Southward, Tom Kristen, Soman Chinani, and Michael McGrath.

You guys are our Huckleberries.

I don't know what that means yet.

I don't know if it's potentially offensive, but it's not.

We will find out in part two.

We will see you guys for part two.

Thanks so much for listening.

Talk to you then.

Yo!

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What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Editing music by David Bowman.