As much as cinephiles might not want to believe it, moviemaking is, first and foremost, a business. Of course, everyone in the industry has artistic aspirations and wants to create the best films they possibly can—but at the end of the day, they need to work, and their projects need to make money.
For Hollywood actors, only a rare few reach a level where they can truly pick and choose their roles without worrying about their careers fading away. Even a star as iconic as John Wayne understood the need to play the game, which led him to make plenty of bad films. He didn’t mind, though, and that was largely down to a piece of advice he received early in his career as a rising leading man.
In 1930, a 23-year-old Wayne starred in The Big Trail, an epic western that should have set him on the path to cowboy stardom—only that’s not how things unfolded. The film was shot in an early widescreen format called 70mm Grandeur, but during the Great Depression, very few theatres in America had invested in the technology needed to screen widescreen films. As a result, The Big Trail tanked at the box office, and the studio got cold feet about immediately casting Wayne in more Westerns.
Suddenly, Wayne found himself in a very different picture as his follow-up to The Big Trail. In a movie named Girls Demand Excitement, he was cast as college basketball player Peter Brooks, leader of an all-boys team that doesn’t want girls at the school to play their sport. Brooks leads the male team in a match against the women’s team, all while romancing a spoiled socialite named Joan Madison. Given what Wayne’s career became, it’s evident that this doesn’t sound like a film he’d be interested in – and true to form, he hated every minute of it.
Later, The Duke told Bobby Wygant that Fox “had been training some girls to play basketball for some musical that they were going to make that would cost a lot of money. Now, with the depression, they’ve decided against it.” They’d spent all this money to train the female actors to play, though, so Wayne claimed the studio hired Harlan Thompson to write a cheaper script that could showcase their skills. “It was probably as ridiculous a thing as I’ve ever been in,” groused Wayne.
Interestingly, at this time, Wayne wasn’t just playing a college student in a movie – he was a student in real life, too. He was worried that starring in a picture like Girls Demand Excitement would cramp his style on campus, as it was vulgar and featured guys and girls “in each other’s clutches, leaving lipstick all over”.
He told Wygant, “I just didn’t think I could face my fraternity brother if they saw this picture”.
Admittedly, this pious view might seem strange to a modern audience. After all, why would frat boys be offended by a film in which their mate romances attractive women? However, as we know now, Wayne had a very specific idea of traditional masculinity.
In John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth, author Michael Mun revealed Wayne hated making the movie so much that he considered quitting the business. “It had no substance to it,” he complained, “And was a big comedown after the adventure I’d had on The Big Trail.” Worst of all, though, he noted, “My part was pretty lousy.”
However, an unlikely saviour was on hand to completely reframe the way Wayne looked at the business of Hollywood. Will Rogers, who was one of Fox’s most prominent names at the time, noticed Wayne looking sad on the studio lot and asked him what was wrong. The young star grumbled, “I’m making a terrible movie,” to which Rogers replied, “But you’re working, aren’t you? Just keep it up.”
This seemingly off-hand comment, designed to keep Wayne’s spirits up, turned out to be the best advice he’d ever heard. He realised that, no matter how bad a film was, all he had to do was keep working and never stop learning, and eventually, he’d find his path to the pictures he truly wanted to make.
With a new mindset in place, The Duke explained, “That’s what I did,” before he quipped, “And boy, I made some lousy pictures!”