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
Earp Vendetta Ride to the highly controversial Fitzsimmons-Sharkey fight for which Wyatt Earp was referee, the article quoted Behan: Wyatt's action in taking justice into his own hands became one of the most well known examples of American frontier justice in American history. Wyatt Earp became the archetypal image of a real-life anti-hero. In 1927, Earp defended his decisions before the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and afterward to Stuart Lake, author of the 1931 largely fictionalized biography, "": Earp Vendetta Ride The Earp Vendetta Ride was a deadly search by a federal posse led by Deputy U.S. Marshal Wyatt Earp for a