The Western That Never Happened

Two iconic Western stars almost go together for a movie in the mid-1970s.  Almost. The story goes that Clint Eastwood wanted to work with John Wayne, so he sent him a script. Wayne would star; Eastwood would act and direct.  But the Duke wasn’t so eager. Wayne sent Clint a letter, complaining about Eastwood’s 1973 revisionist Western High Plains Drifter, in which a town of cowards backs the murder of their own marshal.  That wasn’t how the Old West really was, Wayne said—and not