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 how a real Western should go.

So the pairing never happened.

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