by Scott Eyman
UA was going to rush the picture into general release Easter weekend, with some territories—Florida, for instance—scheduled for the end of February. This meant that the road show would be pulled within two to three months of the premiere—a clear sign of failure. UA further cut the ground out from Wayne by telling Variety that this release pattern had been its preference all along, but they had gone along with the reserved seat engagements “on Wayne’s insistence.”
It was the first open acknowledgment of the internecine war that had been going on for nearly a year over the film’s publicity and release, which was only exacerbated when Russell Birdwell announced that the general release version had been cut. “In my opinion, this is absolute suicide, and every experience in the industry proves it,” wrote UA’s Roger Lewis to Birdwell. “You can’t tell people that they are buying the cut version even if you justify it by saying it has improved the picture. It merely plants the conviction that there was something wrong to begin with, or that they are not getting their money’s worth.”
Soon after the New Year, Wayne anted up money yet again, this time for an ad campaign for Oscar nominations. Birdwell wrote UA’s Roger Lewis complaining about the studio’s treatment of the picture, asserting that they had allowed the movie to fall into obscurity over the Christmas holidays.
Lewis responded with a bridge burner:
This is sheer, unadulterated bull, and you know it. Obviously, you feel that without your master touch, nothing good can happen. This may salve your ego, but does not square the record. . . . There is no evading the money that was spent, $1.3 million up to opening in eight situations—a record high in the entire history of the motion picture business—not the fact that most of that was spent under your direction, in a manner you defined or decided and sometimes without our even being consulted. . . .
Did it or does it occur to you that perhaps you did something wrong . . . and how do you square the fact that in those areas where you had little or no part in the campaign—London, Paris, Stockholm and Japan—where we were able to do the job as we believed it should be done—the picture is a smash. . . . I must make it clear that I cannot and will not work with you on the old basis nor will I tolerate any longer the kind of assaults on the people in my organization that you have perpetrated in the past.
Then, just to derail whatever slight momentum the picture might pick up, Chill Wills got into the act by taking out trade ads masterminded by someone with the Perelman-esque name of “Bow Wow” Wojchiechowicz, who turned out to be the ex-husband of gossip columnist Sheilah Graham.
One of Bow Wow’s ads featured copy that said “We of the Alamo cast are praying harder—than the real Texans prayed for their lives in the Alamo—for Chill Wills to win the Oscar as Best Supporting Actor—cousin Chill’s acting was great.” It was signed “Your Alamo cousins.” Next to Wills’s ad was one by Groucho Marx that read, “Dear Mr. Chill Wills, I am delighted to be your cousin, but I voted for Sal Mineo.”
“Wayne went ballistic when Wills took out those ads,” said Bob Relyea. “He just thought they were in the worst possible taste.” Wayne was furious as only John Wayne could be furious. He bought an ad disassociating himself from Cousin Chill’s definitive display of hubris: “I wish to state that the Chill Wills ad published in the Hollywood Reporter, of which we had no advance knowledge, in which he wrote, or permitted to be written, that ‘we of the Alamo cast are praying . . .’ is an untrue and reprehensible claim.
“No one in the Batjac organization or in the Russell Birdwell office has been a party to his trade paper advertising. I refrain from using stronger language because I am sure his intentions were not as bad as his taste.”
Campaigning for Oscars is generally done through surrogates; it’s considered bad form for a nominee to let their desperation show. Wayne believed that Wills’s gauche appeals adversely affected the picture’s chances for Oscars.
The Alamo was eventually nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, which provoked some carping articles from critics. In the Los Angeles Times, Philip Scheuer wrote, “I find it almost impossible to understand why Pepe and The Alamo should have captured seven nominations apiece. They are two of the least distinguished films representative of the ‘art’ that have ever been shown at advanced prices on a prestige basis.”
After the expenditure of $90,819 in Oscar ads, The Alamo’s seven nominations resulted in precisely one award, for Best Sound, although it might justifiably have also won for Dimitri Tiomkin’s score and William Clothier’s cinematography.
The Alamo has been castigated for not being faithful to the sketchy historical record, in a far more vociferous manner than have other historically fanciful films—Ford’s My Darling Clementine, for instance—a difference probably stemming from enduring grudges over Wayne’s politics.
But Wayne never intended the film to be a documentary; rather, it was supposed to be emotionally true, a stirring ballad, a call to arms that would revive America’s combative strength. As Frank Thompson wrote, Wayne’s intentions were to create “an ode to a heroic era, aimed at a generation that didn’t seem to believe in heroes anymore.”
Although Wayne studied at John Ford University, where the image always took precedence over the word, in The Alamo characters are positioned more by speech—lots and lots of speech—than they are by action, although the superior attitude of Laurence Harvey’s Travis is visually emphasized by usually staging his scenes so that he’s literally above the men he’s addressing.
Harvey gives the best performance in the picture because he alone is able to rise above the script’s needlessly explicit exposition—introductory scene after introductory scene with people standing in the background, not to mention irrelevancies such as a cantina dance solo that, just as Wayne promised Spyros Skouras, re-creates John Singer Sargent’s El Jaleo. (Disastrously, the first half of the picture has virtually no action.) Harvey’s Travis is icy and arrogant, but he’s also compelling, and the actor doesn’t have to wade through Jimmy Grant’s faux-backwoods dialogue (“You don’t get lard ’lessen you boil a hog.”).
Richard Widmark gives a surface performance that indicates his lack of interest; the three leads don’t seem to be in the same movie. Conversely, a lot of the supporting actors come on too strong, in Hollywood’s best get-out-of-the-way-and-give-me-the-Oscar fashion. Wayne cast his actors well, but he didn’t—or couldn’t—sculpt the performances.
Once the film moves into its second half, it comes alive. While Wayne’s blocking of the interior dialogue scenes is often unimaginative, he has a real feel for epic compositions and action, even if he’s oblivious to emotional reality—when Linda Cristal’s Flaca tells Crockett she loves him, he responds with a speech about right and wrong.
The battle scene is first-rate, full of fire and sweep and vistas of violence, and there’s an effective tag at the end, as the sole survivors—a woman and her little girl—leave the ruins and the bodies behind while Santa Anna doffs his hat in respect. Helping out is Dimitri Tiomkin’s music score, which continually gives the film a spaciousness and grandeur that is absent until the film’s climax.
Oddly, there’s an internal inconsistency that neither the film nor most critics ever address: Travis insists on defending the Alamo at all costs, while Bowie counsels a guerrilla cut-and-run strategy. Every time the defenders leave the fort, they win, but then they troop back to the Alamo so they can die. Since there’s really not much emphasis placed on living under siege, Travis’s insistence on staying in the fort makes no dramatic sense and seems self-defeating.
Wayne had been vociferously representing his political and social viewpoints since Big Jim McLain, so the Mexicans are less a brown peril than they are the faceless minions of a totalitarian dictator bent on subjugating people who want to be free. In other words, Communists. But Wayne’s deep affection for Mexico and its people wouldn’t have allowed him to promote negative stereotypes, so Santa Anna’s handsome spokesman is played by none othe
r than the legendary matador Carlos Arruza.
“I think that the directorial job Duke did was excellent,” said Bob Relyea. “It’s just that he couldn’t sit down with an actor like Willy Wyler could and talk about a performance. He would just blurt out something, or yell. And the conversational part of directing cannot be completely ignored.
“Duke could make The Alamo, but Duke could not make The Searchers, where you’re frightened by the shadow of an Indian. Look at The Searchers. It should be required viewing in every film school, so young people can see just what images can look like and how much can be communicated by them. But the truth is, I don’t know if John Ford could have done a better job with the script of The Alamo than Duke did.” Burt Kennedy believed that Wayne was stretching beyond his emotional capabilities. “Duke didn’t have the patience to be a director,” Kennedy said. “He had a short, short fuse. It’s hard to be a good director if you’re not patient.”
Wayne’s attitude toward the film in later years never changed—pride in getting it done and a stubborn refusal to acknowledge in any way that the film fell short, although he would admit, in a roundabout way, that “Everybody made money from it but me. I was so anxious to make the picture that I made bad deals all down the line.” As with most dream projects, it was more about the doing than the result. “There was such a strong feeling of accomplishment on my part, that I don’t mind the money business too much.”
As for Happy Shahan, he rebuilt the parts of the set that had been blown up during the battle sequences and opened it as a tourist attraction called Alamo Village, which he rented out for a succession of westerns and miniseries: Two Rode Together, The Alamo: 13 Days to Glory, and Lonesome Dove.
After a year or so of release, United Artists’ official figures maintained an $8 million domestic gross for The Alamo (Wayne told me that the film grossed $10 million). Before the film was released, Wayne had estimated that the film would have to gross $17 million to break even. By comparison, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment grossed $9.3 million domestically, while Otto Preminger’s Exodus grossed $8.7 domestically, and neither picture cost anywhere near what The Alamo did.
An undated financial worksheet in the Batjac files headed “ ‘Alamo’ Comparison of Costs & Grosses” gives what seems to be the most comprehensive overview of the financial realities. The picture’s negative cost is listed as $6.56 million, with an additional $2.5 million for advertising, $1.5 million for prints, $1.2 million for interest, $250,000 for “misc. charges,” and $175,000 for Todd-AO. The total: a whopping $12.2 million. Domestic road show gross was a dismal $693,000, while the domestic general release gross was $6.8 million. The foreign road shows were more successful, amassing $1.1 million, with a foreign general release gross of $6.12 million. UA’s total worldwide distribution fee added up to $4.8 million, which, added to the $12.2 million negative cost, means that the total cost and distribution fee came to $17 million. The total worldwide gross came to $15 million, leading to what the worksheet tallies as a loss of $2.048 million. Wayne’s comment that he had to gross $17 million to break even turns out to have been absolutely correct.
Relative to the hopes of its maker, The Alamo would have to be regarded as a financial disappointment. Wayne gave away too much and didn’t control his costs. Also, it’s clear that a number of people who were far less idealistic than Wayne saw him coming and adjusted their appetites accordingly.
UA certainly made out well, almost doubling its $2.5 million investment from their distribution fee. But Wayne signed off on contracts stipulating such things as royalties for Todd-AO amounting to 3 percent of a theater’s net receipts. (Todd-AO was guaranteed $250,000 in royalties, with a $50,000 advance.)
Had Batjac spent $1 million for advertising instead of $2.5 million, and controlled its print costs—Wayne always believed the $1.5 million for prints was “exaggerated”—the picture would have broken even. Wayne said that a realistic possible profit of $2 million was eaten up by what he termed “extraordinary miscellaneous charges,” plus added costs tacked on by UA’s foreign distribution, plus random interest.
Well, maybe.
The finances of The Alamo were the focus of several forensic accountings over the next five years. After a certain point, i.e., after they were assured a tidy profit, UA threw in the towel; it made flat sales to certain countries for small change: $16,000 for Turkey, $5,500 for Iceland.
But there was also an underlying problem: Batjac was on the hook to UA for other movie loans in addition to The Alamo. UA had financed Batjac’s China Doll, Escort West—both with Victor Mature—Gun the Man Down, and Legend of the Lost—losers all.
The result of this pile of aggregate debt was that Batjac owed UA $2.5 million, and this did not even take into account the money Batjac owed the McCullough Tool Company.
As early as 1965, UA made some overtures about reissuing the picture. One executive wrote, “it would be a crime to think about television until we had had at least one mass theatrical run for the picture.”
Mike Wayne was agreeable, so long as there was an even split of the gross between Batjac and UA, with Batjac’s share to go toward retiring the McCullough debt, which was still outstanding. Mike was willing to give UA ownership of the Victor Mature pictures if they could work out an accounting dispute that Mike estimated as amounting to between $150,000 and $200,000.
The deal took more than a year to come to fruition. By 1967, UA was still carrying The Alamo as $2 million in the red, so Batjac made the decision to wash its hands of the picture and sell its 16.5 percent for $500,000 and forgiveness of the debt. UA now owned the picture outright, and promptly reissued The Alamo in the shortened general release version. Over the next year the movie brought in another $710,000 domestically and $160,000 foreign. The eventual gross from the reissue was estimated at $1.2 million.
At the same time, the studio licensed the picture to television along with ninety-four other UA pictures, for $115 million. The amount allocated for The Alamo was fuzzy, although it wouldn’t be surprising if—purely coincidentally, of course—it would have been about $2 million, thereby finally putting the picture decisively into the black. United Artists paid off the debt to McCullough in 1969, just about the time the tool company went into receivership.
That was the end of John Wayne’s financial involvement with The Alamo; his emotional involvement was another thing entirely. Ultimately, The Alamo went into profit, but not for Wayne and not for Batjac.
The Alamo was a film that was born only because of John Wayne’s total dedication and will. But it fought him every inch of the way.
* * *
1. The original negative was cut to conform to the new 161-minute length, and the trims and deletions were destroyed. For over thirty years, the original version of the film was generally thought lost, until in 1991 a single 70mm print was found in Toronto and used as the master for laser disc and VHS release. Unfortunately, by the time DVDs and Blurays came in, the 70mm print had likewise deteriorated. The masters used for the laser disc and VHS were unsuitable for the increased definition of DVD or Blu-ray, so those obsolete systems remain the only way Wayne’s expansive vision of the film can be seen.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The financial failure of The Alamo wasn’t the worst thing that happened to John Wayne in 1960.
Ward Bond had chafed for years at the fact that he wasn’t a star, but he finally realized his dream when Wagon Train went on the air in September of 1957. Playing Major Seth Adams, a riff on his portrayal in John Ford’s Wagon Master, this showcase for Bond’s avuncular but firm personality granted him what he had always wanted: magazine covers and a star’s salary.
Bond’s late-life success came with a stinger—a highly competitive younger man as a co-star. Robert Horton had heard all about Bond’s strong dislikes. “Ward had many reputations,” remembered Horton, “but his main reputation was being anti-black, anti-Spanish, and of course anti-gay. And maybe anti-democratic. Ward had lots of qualities that we
ren’t admirable.”
Bond and Horton had an uneasy relationship from the first meeting, even though Horton thought Bond deserved an Oscar for his performance as John L. Sullivan in Gentleman Jim and told him so.
Initially, everything was fine. “Ward was very compatible and very warm,” remembered Horton. “Then he said, ‘Let’s go across the street to Dupar’s.’ Well, we went over there and had a bite to eat and we talked and there was no antagonism. But you know how, when you meet somebody, you can tell pretty quickly if you’re going to be long-term friends or not? That’s exactly what happened with Ward. It just wasn’t going to be a friendship.”
In the very first episode of Wagon Train, Horton had a scene of conflict with Bond, a scene about two men of equivalent strength working toward the same goal in different ways. But the scene was cut from the pilot before it aired—the first of a long list of Bond’s political power grabs.
“He acted like a despot,” said Horton, “as if Wagon Train was his own particular vehicle. In some ways, he had reason to feel that. It was based on a movie he had starred in, and he was starring in the show as well. But he thought he ran the show.”
There was only one instance of overt conflict between Bond and Horton. Horton was directed to do something that he felt would violate his character and he resisted. Bond overheard the exchange and came riding over on his horse. “How dare you tell this man you don’t want to take his direction?” he yelled at Horton.
Other than that, the two men maintained a steely courtesy. But Virgil Vogel, one of the show’s primary directors, told Horton that Bond was doing everything he could to get rid of him. If Horton had a good line, Bond would go to Vogel about cutting it; if Horton had a good scene, Bond would try to have it cut. “It was very petty,” said Horton, “and it never worked.” Bond was also telling the men on the show that Horton was homosexual—which he wasn’t.
