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
James Earp California. James Earp died of natural causes in San Bernardino, California, on January 25, 1926. He is interred there at the Mountain View Cemetery. In the 1946 film "My Darling Clementine", James was played by Don Garner. In 1955, the actor John Smith, prior to his lead roles in "Cimarron City" and "Laramie", played the part of James Earp in the film "Wichita", starring Joel McCrea and Vera Miles. In the 1957 "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral", it is the fictional assassination of Jimmy Earp (Martin Milner) that leads directly to the titular showdown. In the 1994 film "Wyatt Earp",