Director John Ford said that when he was a prop boy in the early days of silent pictures, Earp would visit pals he knew from his Tombstone days on the sets. "I used to give him a chair and a cup of coffee, and he told me about the fight at the O.K. Corral. So in "My Darling Clementine", we did it exactly the way it had been." Ford did not want to make the movie, but his contract required him to make one more movie for 20th Century Fox.