The Big Trail: John Wayne stars in trailer for 1930 film
Having had minor film roles as the sound era was coming into Hollywood during the late 1920s, John Wayne finally had his big break with The Big Trail. The 23-year-old prop boy was spotted by director Raoul Walsh moving studio furniture when he cast him in the Western’s starring role as Breck Coleman. The filmmaker suggested that the young Marion Morrison use Anthony Wayne as his stage name after the Revolutionary War General “Mad” Anthony Wayne. However, the Fox Studios boss Winfield Sheehan thought it sounded “too Italian”, so suggested “John Wayne” instead.
The Big Trail would be the first big-budget outdoor movie of the sound era, filmed in the still largely empty American Southwest with hundreds of extras with a budget of a then-whopping $2 million. Although the 70mm epic would be a massive box office flop, the film would be praised decades later by modern critics and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the US Library of Congress in 2006.
Before his first screen test for the movie, Wayne had a demand from his director that left him extremely frustrated.
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