John Wayne made over 170 movies across his incredible motion picture career, spanning from the silent era into the New Hollywood of the 1970s.
Yet did you know that after filming his final movie The Shootist in 1976, Duke was set to star in another Western?
The film in question was a comedy called The Frisco Kid, starring Gene Wilder as a Polish rabbi travelling to San Francisco.
Wayne was going to play Tommy Lillard, the bank robber who the main character befriends along the way.
In the Netflix documentary Remembering Gene Wilder, producer Mace Neufeld said before he died in 2022: “When we started on the film we were going to use John Wayne and he was all excited about joining the project.”
According to John J Puccio of Movie Metropolis, Wayne was “eager to take it on as a comic follow-up to True Grit and Rooster Cogburn. Salary concerns nixed the idea, though, and it’s questionable he would have finished the shooting, in any case, as he died shortly before The Frisco Kid opened.”
In an archive interview before he died in 2016, Wilder recalled: “I was so excited and one the executives got the idea of going out to Long Beach, California where John Wayne lived and tried to knock him down $250,000 and [Duke] said ‘Forget the whole thing!’”
Another source claims that Wayne also wasn’t keen on making The Frisco Kid due to the “vulgarity” of the script.
In the end, the role of Tommy went to an up-and-coming young actor called Harrison Ford, who had recently starred in a little movie called Star Wars.
And it turns out that the 1977 sci-fi classic features an uncredited cameo of Wayne in what arguably was his actual final film before he died of stomach cancer in July 1979.