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Tombstone is a legendary movie, almost for all the wrong reasons. Originally, Kevin Costner was to star was Wyatt Earp. He left over creative differences.
He wanted an epic Western focussing on Wyatt Earp alone. Screenwriter Kevin Jarre wanted to keep it as an ensemble piece. Costner then set up a race with his own Wyatt Earp project with Lawrence Kasdan directing.
Then Jarre was fired as both director and writer on Tombstone after delays started to kick in.
George P. Cosmatos then took over as director, and budget cuts were implemented in order to save the project.
Somehow, and against all expectation, Tombstone remains the better movie of the two projects, and has since gone on to be considered as one of the greatest Western’s of all time.
This is despite all the problems and the budget cuts being really evident at some points, with a vague “TV movie” sheen settling over the whole thing.
One of the most enduring rumors about Tombstone is that the new lead actor Kurt Russell co-directed the film alongside Cosmatos. Some agree, some disagree. The story seems to vary in the telling.
Everyone does see to agree that Jarre’s original script was something special, and that too much was cut from it.
Russell had previously refused to reveal too much about what really happened, as he said he made a promise never to reveal the details, always praising the finished article as being an achievement despite the headwinds.
Now, while out promoting season 2 of Apple TV’s Monarch, he expanded to The Hollywood Reporter.
He said the movie was good because of the screenplay, but it would have been even better if it was even closer to that screenplay:
“That’s because of the screenplay. The movie is not as good as the screenplay.”
Then asked if he was ever to make more peace with that in recent years, he said:
“I’ll never make peace with that. It could have been way better. It’s considered one of the great Westerns, right? It could have been considered one of the great movies. It had a great cast, but it had fabulous writing. And for a lot of different reasons, the money got burned through, and the director thing didn’t work out. So we had to go about it differently, and we got what we made. The impact of Tombstone is very strong, and that’s nice. That’s great. But could it have been a lot better? Yes.”
So there we have it. The mystique of what could have been. The unrealised Tombstone will remain a thing of movie myth and legend, much like the reality of the gunfight at the OK Corral.
All this just makes me want to go and watch Tombstone again.
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