Making The Tombstone Movie Was As Eventful As The Story It Tells

Added: 10/08/2007

The movie Tombstone starring Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer has just as many twists and turns in the making of it as the real story it tells. Directors were changed, an actor turned director but was never given director credit, and the story was rewritten by a writer who had to be given producer credit because the Screen Writer’s Guild would not allow writing credit to be given.

In 1993 Kevin Jarre assembled an all star cast that included Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, and Sam Elliott to tell the story of Wyatt Earp, his brothers and Doc Holliday and their trials and tribulations in Dodge. The movie was called Tombstone and the Tombstone movie contained some of the most famous wild west stories to ever come out of the old west era and the Tombstone movie is also a movie that almost did not get made. Originally written by Kevin Jarre to be a long western Epic about Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers, the Tombstone movie experienced turmoil when Jarre was fired from the film and the future of the film was left in doubt. Actor Kurt Russell could sense that the Tombstone movie may be abandoned and soon began to rally the cast and crew to continue filming with Russell as the fill in director. After a while George P Cosmatos was hired to finish the film as the director and Russell gladly stepped aside so that the movie could be completed and released. Russell was so happy to step aside that he gave up any director credits in the movie that he may have earned to Cosmatos because it just made everything go smoother in the end. That is not a bad bit of generosity when you consider that Richard Gere was originally expected to star in the Tombstone movie in the role that Russell wound up with of Wyatt Earp. Perhaps Kurt Russell felt that a movie like the Tombstone movie needed to be released due to all of the trouble they went to for authenticity. Much of the movie is confirmed as really happening and the cast even includes the fifth cousin of Wyatt Earp himself who’s name is, conveniently enough, Wyatt Earp.

Tombstone was a mild financial and critical success but the real story behind the Tombstone movie is the story behind the Tombstone movie. Kevin Jarre had originally written Tombstone to be an epic about the gunfight at the OK Corral that included detailed accounts of not only Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers but also the band of outlaws they fought at the OK Corral called The Cowboys. When Cosmatos entered the scene he asked John Fasano to trim the script down to only focus on the Earp and Holliday stories and leave any detail about The Cowboys out. What is left is a very well done movie that has a full compliment of historically accurate details regarding the gunfight at the OK Corral. Of course a few liberties were taken as is the case with any movie, but for the most part you could research the script for the Tombstone movie and find that a great deal of it is historically accurate. It could be this sense of accuracy, or the all-star cast, that helped but the movie did make a decent profit and also gathered some praise as a very entertaining western movie.

The Tombstone movie contains scenes that seem to be fabricated for the movie but many of the more spectacular scenes really happened. The juggler being shot at in the theater really happened and according to the eyewitness account of Johnny Barnes Wyatt Earp really did walk through a hail of gunfire from Curly Bill Brocius to shoot Bill at point blank range. Earp then shot Barnes in the stomach and before he died Barnes went to a nearby farmhouse and told the story of Wyatt Earp and the hail of gunfire. How can you not like a movie like that?

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