True Grit (1969 film) Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, Jeff Corey and Strother Martin. The title song, sung by Campbell, was also Oscar-nominated. "True Grit" was adapted again in 2010, starring Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Hailee Steinfeld. Frank Ross is murdered by his hired hand, Tom Chaney. Ross's young daughter, Mattie, travels to Fort Smith, Arkansas, where she hires aging U.S. Marshal Reuben "Rooster" J. Cogburn to bring Chaney in, raising his fee by shrewdly horse trading with Colonel Stonehill. Mattie has heard that Cogburn has "true grit." She gives him a payment to track and capture Chaney, who has taken up with outlaw
True Grit (1969 film) but the producers turned him down when his agent demanded top-billing over both Wayne and Darby. Glen Campbell was then cast instead. Wayne began lobbying for the part of Rooster Cogburn after reading the novel by Charles Portis. Wayne called Marguerite Roberts' script "the best script he had ever read," and was instrumental in getting her script approved and credited to her name after Roberts had been blacklisted for alleged leftist affiliations years before. This came in spite of Wayne's own conservative ideals. He particularly liked the scene with Darby where Rooster tells Mattie about his life in Illinois (where