The Gunfighter turned it down, despite having expressed a strong desire to play the part, because of his longstanding hatred for Columbia's president, Harry Cohn. Columbia sold the rights to Twentieth Century Fox, where the role went to Peck. Wayne's final film, "The Shootist" (1976), is often compared to "The Gunfighter" and contains numerous plot similarities. The script was loosely based on the purported exploits of an actual western gunfighter named Johnny Ringo, a distant cousin of the outlaw Younger family and a purported survivor of the infamous gunfight at the OK Corral against Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers. As in
Wyatt Earp a western screenwriter for years to come. It also established the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in the public consciousness and Earp as a fearless lawman in the American Old West. The book "is now regarded more as fiction than fact", "an imaginative hoax, a fabrication mixed with just enough fact to give it credibility". Josephine Earp worked hard to create an image of Wyatt as a teetotaler, but as a saloon owner and gambler, he drank occasionally as well. When Flood and Lake wrote their biographies, Prohibition was in force. Among the other facts Josephine wanted scrubbed from Earp's