John Wayne Was Asked Who the TOUGHEST Man He Ever Met Was—His Answer Silenced the Entire Studio
John Wayne Legacy
61,206 views
John Wayne Was Asked Who the TOUGHEST Man He Ever Met Was—His Answer Silenced the Entire Studio
In the spring of 1976, two months after finishing the last film he would ever make, John Wayne sat in a Burbank television studio and was handed the easiest question anybody could ask him. Forty years. A hundred and fifty pictures. Who was the toughest man you ever met?
Four hundred people in that audience had already guessed. A boxer. A general. A Marine. John Ford.
He didn't answer. He looked at the floor for so long that the crew thought something had gone wrong.
Then he said a name that meant absolutely nothing to anybody in that room. The host had to ask him to repeat it. And what John Wayne said next emptied the studio of sound, and they went to commercial, and the show never came back to it.
This is the story of the man he named. A rancher's son from the Snake River Hills who was a world champion rodeo cowboy at twenty-two, a silent-film leading man at twenty-eight, and finished at thirty-two when a sound engineer decided his voice was wrong for pictures. What he did next built the modern action film.
He taught a twenty-four-year-old prop man from Glendale how to ride, how to fall, how a real cowboy talks — and how one walks. He co-invented the way every movie fight has been shot since 1934 and never made a dollar from it. In 1939 he was dragged under six galloping horses and a stagecoach in a single take that is still argued about as the greatest stunt ever filmed. In 1959 he directed the chariot race in Ben-Hur and his name is not on the screen as a director.
And the single most imitated piece of physical behavior in the history of motion pictures — the walk that every impressionist does, that people who have never seen a western can do at a party — was never John Wayne's at all.
John Wayne knew it. He said so once, on television, in one sentence, in 1976.
This video is a dramatized retelling inspired by the lives and careers of John Wayne and Yakima Canutt. Certain dialogue and scenes have been recreated for storytelling purposes.
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John Wayne Was Asked Who the TOUGHEST Man He Ever Met Was—His Answer Silenced the Entire Studio
John Wayne Legacy
61,206 views
John Wayne Was Asked Who the TOUGHEST Man He Ever Met Was—His Answer Silenced the Entire Studio
In the spring of 1976, two months after finishing the last film he would ever make, John Wayne sat in a Burbank television studio and was handed the easiest question anybody could ask him. Forty years. A hundred and fifty pictures. Who was the toughest man you ever met?
Four hundred people in that audience had already guessed. A boxer. A general. A Marine. John Ford.
He didn't answer. He looked at the floor for so long that the crew thought something had gone wrong.
Then he said a name that meant absolutely nothing to anybody in that room. The host had to ask him to repeat it. And what John Wayne said next emptied the studio of sound, and they went to commercial, and the show never came back to it.
This is the story of the man he named. A rancher's son from the Snake River Hills who was a world champion rodeo cowboy at twenty-two, a silent-film leading man at twenty-eight, and finished at thirty-two when a sound engineer decided his voice was wrong for pictures. What he did next built the modern action film.
He taught a twenty-four-year-old prop man from Glendale how to ride, how to fall, how a real cowboy talks — and how one walks. He co-invented the way every movie fight has been shot since 1934 and never made a dollar from it. In 1939 he was dragged under six galloping horses and a stagecoach in a single take that is still argued about as the greatest stunt ever filmed. In 1959 he directed the chariot race in Ben-Hur and his name is not on the screen as a director.
And the single most imitated piece of physical behavior in the history of motion pictures — the walk that every impressionist does, that people who have never seen a western can do at a party — was never John Wayne's at all.
John Wayne knew it. He said so once, on television, in one sentence, in 1976.
This video is a dramatized retelling inspired by the lives and careers of John Wayne and Yakima Canutt. Certain dialogue and scenes have been recreated for storytelling purposes.
And I had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Yakima years ago when he was in his 70s, and it was and is my favorite and most memorable talk with a star ive had. He was classic and humble and everything you would expect a man of his experience to be. Thanks, just thought I'd share it.