John Wayne hated a lot of things. He hated several prominent actors, some of whom he worked with and others he never even crossed paths with. Some of this disdain was based on his famously conservative politics, but a large portion also came from a dislike for their acting styles or the threat he believed they represented to his career.
He hated certain movies for being anti-American or promoting progressive values he disagreed with, and he hated the studio mogul who was rude to him as a young actor. In addition, he also tangled with several directors in his career, and he hated one with such a passion that he reportedly growled that he’d like to tear him into a million pieces.
In 1980, iconic director Frank Capra was interviewed about It’s A Wonderful Life, his 1946 Christmas classic. It might seem hard to believe nowadays because that movie became such an undisputed classic, but it fared less well at the time than some of Capra’s previous Oscar-winning efforts like It Happened One Night and Mr Deeds Goes to Town.
Regardless, the director, who came from an Italian immigrant family that moved to Los Angeles when he was five years old, has always been considered the “American Dream” personified. He exemplified how anyone could rise from rags to riches in the land of the free with hard work and dedication, so you’d think this would put him in good stead with someone like Wayne, who always professed to love America so much. You’d be wrong.
In this interview, Capra revealed that, during the casting process, he was approached by Ward Bond, who would play Bert in It’s A Wonderful Life. Capra was pondering casting actress Anne Revere in the film, and Bond asked him if he’d consulted with Wayne about it. Revere was a vociferous critic of the House Un-American Activities Committee that was conducting a witch hunt in Hollywood to root out supposed communist sympathisers. Wayne naturally had no time for commies – but Capra didn’t see how his casting Revere was any of Wayne’s business.
Capra phoned Bond, a lifelong friend of Wayne, and told him – in no uncertain terms – that he didn’t care what Wayne thought about Revere. He reminded Bond that Wayne had “stayed home getting rich during World War II” and told him to tell his pal “he could go to hell.” He was adamant, “I didn’t care. I didn’t give a shit who was a Communist or who wasn’t.”
In response, Capra heard Wayne supposedly raged, “I’d like to take that little d*go son of a bitch and tear him into a million pieces and throw him into the ocean and watch him float back to Italy.”
Ultimately, Revere wasn’t cast in It’s A Wonderful Life, but any potential relationship between Capra and Wayne seemed to have been stopped dead in its tracks before it could get started. As Capra lamented, “It was an ugly time in Hollywood.”
Amazingly, though, nearly 20 years later, both men must have decided to let bygones be bygones because Capra signed up to direct Wayne in the 1964 western Circus World, which was titled The Magnificent Showman in the UK. Perhaps they should have known from their previous encounter that the collaboration was unlikely to end well.
The trouble came when Wayne rejected the script for the film and hired his regular script guy, James Edward Grant, to do a rewrite. Grant felt the script was too old-fashioned and cavalierly told Capra that he and Wayne could bang out a rewrite to ‘The Duke’s taste in only a week. Capra also claimed Grant told him, “All you gotta have in a John Wayne picture is a hoity-toity dame with big tits that Duke can throw over his knees and spank and a collection of jerks he can smash in the face every five minutes. In between, you fill in with gags, flags and chases. That’s all you need; his fans eat it up.”
In the end, Capra knew he couldn’t work with such an attitude, so after putting in six months of hard work, he simply walked off the picture with “the same relief one flees Siberia.” The movie would prove to be one of Wayne’s least beloved films, disappointing critically and at the box office.
In his memoir, though, Capra admitted to feeling regret that he and Wayne just couldn’t get it together on the film, musing, “I could have cowed the big Duke into giving his best performance. I could have made a rousing hit out of Circus.”