John Wayne would be 100 today

Stumbled upon this factoid on my Simpsons/Futurama calendars. Funny, I had him pegged to be older by five to 10 years. Well, if he didn’t smoke, he might have made it.

John Wayne (really Marion Morrison) was the quintessential movie cowboy to me but Westerns were waning in Hollywood by the time I was born, thus so was his career. In the commentary for Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks mentions how he offered the part of the Waco Kid to him while in pre-production. Wayne turned it down. He said it was funny but he couldn’t do it because it was dirty. Comedy was never his forte so I think it was for the best Mel went with Gene Wilder instead, which is a story for another day.

I will leave his politics aside because I want to keep this site positive, but I’ll just say he was in the same hypocritical camp as Reagan when it came to WWII, War Profiteering and the Red Scare. I know you should separate the actor from the person when it comes to his work yet it’s pretty difficult with The Duke. He intentionally fused his film persona with his public one and it’s probably why he became unpopular with the Boomers while he was alive.

Nah, I just wanted to plug something about him because he lives on in my memory as the punchline of two great jokes and this string of dialog from a movie. Whoever can give me the first right answer in the comments wins a prize of my choosing (it’ll vary since the winners’ taste can), only stipulation is that I have to know you (disqualifying comment spammers should this article attract it) and Somara is ineligible. And if the article gets pushed out of the first 15 with no answer, it’s over and I keep the prize.

Miller: John Wayne was a fag.

All: The hell he was.

Miller: He was, too, you boys. I installed two-way mirrors in his pad in Brentwood, and he come to the door in a dress.

The rest of the dialog gets too foul-mouthed for even this site. Good luck figuring it out, it might not be as obscure as I thought.

Update May 30, 2007: I have a winner, finally. The contest is now over. Sorry if you couldn’t think of it. Click on the Comment section and the first entry was the answer.