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: Frontier Marshal reshot from the 1939 film. After the movie "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" was released in 1957, the shootout came to be known by that name. Since then, Wyatt Earp and the conflict has been portrayed with varying degrees of accuracy in numerous Western films and books. The book later inspired a number of stories, movies and television programs about outlaws and lawmen in Dodge City and Tombstone, including the 1955 television series "The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp". Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal (1931) was a best-selling but largely fictional biography of Wyatt Earp written