John Wayne made over 170 films during his incredible film career, which spanned the silent era to New Hollywood in the 1970s.
But did you know that after filming his last movie, The Shootist, in 1976, Duke was set to star in another Western?
The film was the comedy “Frisco Kid” with Gene Wilder in the lead role as a Polish rabbi on his journey to San Francisco.
Wayne was supposed to play Tommy Lillard, the bank robber with whom the main character becomes friends over time.
In the Netflix documentary “Remembering Gene Wilder,” producer Mace Neufeld said before his death in 2022: “When we started the film, we wanted to use John Wayne, and he was very excited to be a part of the project.”
According to John J Puccio of Movie Metropolis, Wayne “really wanted to tackle the comedy as a sequel to True Grit and Rooster Cogburn. However, salary worries scuttled the idea, and it is doubtful that he would have finished filming at all, since he died shortly before the premiere of The Frisco Kid.”
In an archival interview before his death in 2016, Wilder recalled: “I was so excited and one of the executives came up with the idea of driving to Long Beach, California, where John Wayne lived, and trying to get $250,000 out of him, and (Duke) said, ‘Forget the whole thing!'”
