It is a secular tradition in Hollywood that, at some point in the career of a movie star, they will give an interview during which they reveal: “What I would really like to do is direct“If what they would also like to do is winning an Oscar is not the worst idea. The actors established Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, Richard Pantal Boir, Kevin Costner, Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson and Ron Howard all won the Academy Prize for the best director, so the pace is there. Busey.
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The film’s star’s desire to achieve was not so much a thing in the 1940s and 1950s. If the actors had aspirations beyond the reputation on the screen, they generally wanted to produce. This is what the biggest star of this period, John Wayne, did when he launched his Batjac productions in 1952 with the “Big Jim Mclain” of Godawful, a political thriller that valued investigators from the non-American activities committee that burst the Hawaii post-war Communists. Batjac has not always made rotten films. The existence of the company would ultimately be justified by its support from the brilliant western of Budd Boetticher “seven men from now on” (which Paul Schrader and Ethan Hawke wanted to redo) in 1957 and that the romance of Frank Borzage “China Doll” by Frank Borzage had a vision for an epic which, let’s hope to be its coronation, the cinematographic realization.
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Since 1945, he wanted to make a film on the battle of Alamo, and he finally realized that, to preserve the integrity of his vision, he should lead him. It would be the first of twice that Wayne dared to climb behind the camera. The two were war films, and they both failed their artistic ambitions.
John Wayne’s movie star did not translate behind the camera
On paper, John Wayne’s idea heading like Davy Crockett in “The Alamo” looked like a winner. Released in 1960, when Wayne’s presence almost guaranteed a well -tidy profit, the film was excited in the heavens. The criticisms, however, were not impressed, and the length of the 161 -minute film (202 minutes if you took the release of Roadshow) wore moviegoers. Considered simply as a patriotic spectacle of meat and meat, he fails to raise blood. Richard Widmark, the biggest name in the film next to Wayne, expressed his dissatisfaction with the heavy staging of the star. Others were more complementary in the Duke’s manner in the camera, but when the film disappointed $ 20 million on a budget of $ 12 million (1.5 million dollars that Wayne said came out of her pocket), Hollywood thought it would be the last time that the star has made a crack on the staging.
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Hollywood was wrong. In 1968, led by the support of the public of the Vietnam War, Wayne and Batjack rallied behind an adaptation of the semi-fictional of Robin Moore “The Green Berets”. Wayne made no bone on the fact that his film was intended to shoot the public feeling about the conflict, so he played ball with the Pentagon at all levels. When the American army asked Moore, whose account was not explicitly pro-war, to be excluded from production, Wayne bought the writer.
“The Green Berets” is now considered one of the worst films in Wayne’s career, and quite one of the worst films ever made, but it made $ 35 million with a budget of $ 7 million. If nothing else, Wayne has proven that he was always banable in a war film. But by playing a role of co -director alongside Ray Kellogg, his interest in cinema seemed to decline. Wayne would continue to handle a huge amount of power as a star producer until his retirement in 1976 with “The Shootist” by Don Siegel, but he never made another film. In retrospect, we can safely say that it was not cut for work. But there was a better rental than Gary Busey.
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