Entertainment
Johnny Ringo Actor Reveals How Kurt Russell Officially Saved ‘Tombstone’ After On-Set Disaster [Exclusive]
Tombstone had absolutely everything going for it. It had one of the best Western casts ever assembled, some of the most quotable dialogue the genre has ever produced — courtesy of the soon-to-be former writer-director Kevin Jarre — and a gorgeous landscape. Behind the scenes, it was a wagon wreck. Jarre was fired after several weeks of filming, leaving the production facing the unenviable task of somehow getting an ambitious Western back on track. According to Michael Biehn, who starred as Johnny Ringo, Kurt Russell deserves an enormous amount of credit for making sure Tombstone survived that upheaval.
Speaking exclusively with Collider while promoting Onslaught, Biehn opened up on the madness behind the scenes and explained that a huge chunk of the movie, as well as extensive pre-production, had already happened by the time he was dismissed from his position. For his part, Biehn was pretty open about his opinion as to why Jarre was deposed.
“Kevin, who created it, did all the pre-production on it — the wardrobe and everything. Pre-production is really setting up the entire movie as far as what the movie is going to look like. They shot with Kevin for four weeks, and then they fired him. I know why, because he wanted his way or the highway, and he was not very collaborative. He had Kurt there, he had William Fraker, the DP, who was an Academy Award winner, and he had a bunch of great actors around him. He just didn’t listen to anybody.”
The problem was enormous. Biehn says Jarre’s original screenplay ran 142 pages, which he estimates would have resulted in a roughly two-and-a-half-hour movie. After Jarre’s dismissal, Russell worked alongside writer and producer Jim Jacks, to determine what the movie absolutely needed and what could be sacrificed. The result was a brutal weekend of cuts:
“Kurt was responsible, and they brought in a writer. Over the weekend, they cut about 40 pages out of that script, so everybody lost a lot. The Cowboys always felt we got the raw end of that deal as far as some of the stuff that got cut out, because you never see the Cowboys unless they’re around the Earps, and that’s not the way it was in the script at all. They had a whole different life that they lived away from Tombstone. When I say life, two or three scenes.”
Kurt Russell Saved ‘Tombstone’
Biehn explained that Russell then worked with the team to effectively rebuild the movie around the material they could realistically shoot. “Kurt is a very special human being, too. Kurt had to work with a writer, work with a producer named Jim Jacks at the time, and they had to cobble that together. They had to ask themselves, ‘What do we really need here, and what can go?’ So he cut a lot of that out.”
And Biehn is unequivocal about the importance of Russell’s contribution to the movie that ultimately reached cinemas:
“It’s because of Kurt Russell. He made the decisions of what stayed and what went. The love story between him and Dana Delany was really, really trimmed down. If I was him, I would’ve been pulling my hair out a little bit by the time he wrapped that thing.”
Russell’s involvement shouldn’t be confused with actually editing the finished film, however. Biehn stressed that Russell departed almost immediately after production to make Stargate and wasn’t involved in cutting the completed footage. His role was in helping slash and reshape the screenplay during production so Tombstone could actually be finished.
Whatever happened behind the scenes, it worked. Biehn noted that Tombstone wasn’t initially greeted as a classic — he remembers major reviews barely mentioning Johnny Ringo at all — but its reputation grew enormously through home viewing. Today, he says it’s “very rare” for him to encounter someone who isn’t in love with the movie.
Onslaught is in theaters on September 4. Tombstone is streaming now on Disney+.
- Release Date
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December 25, 1993
- Runtime
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130 minutes
- Director
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George P. Cosmatos
- Writers
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Kevin Jarre
- Producers
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Bob Misiorowski, James Jacks, Sean Daniel
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