Killing John Wayne

I had been listening to interviews on the New Books Network since 2016.  In the summer of 2022, I learned more about the platform, became a host, and claimed my first book.  Hosts on the NBN claim books from a list that’s updated daily with books from all kinds of publishers about all kinds of subjects.  With what monumental film would I launch my work as an interviewer?  Citizen Kane? The Big Sleep?  2001: A Space Odyssey?  

Turns out that it would be a film so terrible in so many ways–“aesthetically” the least among these–that it takes an entire book to describe.   Ryan Uytdewilligen’s Killing John Wayne: The Making of The Conqueror details the conception, shooting, and aftermath of The Conqueror (1956), which stars John Wayne as Genghis Khan and causing all kinds of trouble in the process.

I set to reading it and marking up the margins and contacting Ryan about the interview.  I also, of course, watched the film and it was as billed.  I was nervous, but it was good nervousness, nervousness born from the desire to do something I cared about as well as I could.  Ryan was great and I found the whole experience so enjoyable that I became a regular NBN host.  

The Conqueror is not one of those movies like Attack of the Killer Tomatoes or Rubber that’s so silly that if you call it a bad movie, you’re missing the joke.  It’s more like Ishtar or Battlefield Earth: the people behind it (such as director Dick Powell and his co-producer Howard Hughes) were convinced they’d have a hit and kept throwing good money after bad to get it finished.  (Note that I haven’t mentioned Heaven’s Gate or Cleopatra here: the former in its fully restored version is terrific and the latter is not nearly as terrible as it’s said to be.  When I first saw Cleopatra, I thought, “This isn’t the worst film I’ve ever seen.  It’s not even the worst film I’ve seen this month.”) 

The trouble caused by the young Khan, Temujin, had counterparts in real life: the book is filled with Devil’s Candy-like anecdotes about the budget, the animals on set, the need to find sand of a specific color, the cringeworthy makeup worn to make Wayne look Mongolian–there’s a long list.  But the story takes a more grim turn when we learn that the film was shot downwind of nuclear test sites in Nevada and that this may have caused a spike in cancer among the cast and crew.  To his credit, Uytdewilligen lets that “may” stand, although the reader is unable to shake the suspicion that the film was cursed from the beginning.  

“I think there’s a lot of people who want to hear stories of epic failure … Whenever people hear about a good conflict or a good problem, I think people are naturally drawn to it, because that’s what makes a good movie–and when it’s done for real and behind-the-scenes, it doesn’t get much better than that.” —Ryan Uytdewilligen

Uytdewilligen doesn’t gleefully heap scorn on Howard Hughes (who owned RKO, which produced the film) or John Wayne.  Instead, he offers a portrait of people under pressure and spending time, talent, and treasure on a terrible idea.  We’ve all been there.  In the last parts of the book, he gives us a compelling portrait of a Hollywood legend in his final days and how the public in the late 1970s responded to news of a celebrity’s terminal illness differently than they do today.  

You can listen to the interview here or wherever you get your podcasts.