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 boosted Wyatt's reputation. The book later inspired a number of stories, movies and television programs about outlaws and lawmen in Dodge City and Tombstone. Lake wrote a number of screenplays for these movies and twelve scripts for the 1955–61 television series "The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp" starring Hugh O'Brian as Earp. The popular movie "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral", released in 1957, starring Burt Lancaster as Earp, cemented his place in Western history as a hero lawman. The movie also altered the public's perception of cowboys, who in Earp's time and locale were outlaws, but in the movies