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 records in Tombstone of a relationship between Josephine and Earp, but Behan and Earp both had offices above the Crystal Palace Saloon, competed for the same jobs, and were loyal to opposing social groups. Behan played a role in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, telling the Earps that he had disarmed the Cowboys. (Behan testified afterward that he'd only said he'd gone down to the Cowboys "for the purpose of disarming them," not that he had actually done so.) Marcus told Earp's biographers and others that Earp never owned gambling saloons and that he never offered prostitutes upstairs, but