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 Lake employed a style of fictionalized dialog that was popular during the era but which is no longer accepted in biographies. The entire book was published as "Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal" on October 7, 1931, two years after Earp's death. It portrayed Earp as a "gallant white knight" and entirely avoided mentioning Josephine Earp and Mattie Blaylock. The book was immediately and immensely popular, becoming a bestseller. It drew considerable positive attention and established Lake as a writer for years to come. It also established the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in the public consciousness and Wyatt Earp as a