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 Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal (1931) was a best-selling but largely fictional biography of Wyatt Earp written by Stuart N. Lake and published by Houghton Mifflin Company. It was the first biography of Earp, supposedly written with his contributions. It established the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in the public consciousness and conveyed a mythic story about Wyatt Earp as a fearless lawman in the American Old West. Earp and his wife Josephine Earp tried to control the account, threatening legal action to persuade Lake to exclude Earp's second wife from the book. When the book was