Close-Up: Dan Ford on John Wayne and John Ford
Actor John Wayne, who would have been 100 years old this year, made many historic motion pictures with legendary director John Ford (The Informer, How Green Was My Valley). Among them were Stagecoach, The Quiet Man and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
John Ford's grandson, Dan Ford, who wrote Pappy: The Life of John Ford, sat down with Box Office Mojo to talk about John Wayne, John Ford and their extraordinary careers.
Box Office Mojo: Have you seen every John Ford movie?
Dan Ford: I haven't seen some of the really old ones.
Box Office Mojo: What did John Ford value most about John Wayne?
Dan Ford: What he liked about John Wayne was John Wayne. He was such an appealing, likable, fun guy to be around—a man's man. He was a sensational card player, like Ford, a big drinker, like Ford was, and they had a lot in common. They were outdoor guys, they both loved boats—they spent every nickel they had on their boats—and it was a personal friendship.
Box Office Mojo: To attain that level of consistency throughout their work is a tremendous accomplishment—?
Dan Ford: —They were a lot alike. Ford had similar relationships with Henry Fonda, George O'Brien, back in the Silent [movie] days—O'Brien just couldn't make the transition to a talking actor.
Box Office Mojo: So part of the John Ford process was to use certain actors in whom he identified a particular quality he liked?
Dan Ford: Everybody said it: Ford liked the same people and that was the stock company. He even used the same crew.
Box Office Mojo: Was John Wayne frustrated that he wasn't the male lead in Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance?
Dan Ford: Look at him—he was playing the guy who doesn't get the girl who becomes a drunk—in his mind he felt that he didn't have the main part and he was John Wayne. The leading man was Jimmy Stewart, whom he respected as an actor immensely, who was really the money actor in it, though [Wayne's] by far the most important character and he had a much more interesting part. I don't think Wayne appreciated that. It might have been financial, too.
Box Office Mojo: John Wayne said that a director such as George Cukor would try to make the movie fit the script and that your grandfather would try to make the script fit the movie. True?
Dan Ford: John Ford would change the script and cut the dialog. He was notorious for cutting dialog—for reaching in and getting the essence. He'd take all this great Frank Nugent dialog and cut it and find the meat. He hated long-winded speeches. Ford grew up with Silent pictures. If you couldn't tell a story visually, forget it.
Box Office Mojo: Was John Ford tough on John Wayne in order to yield better performances or was there real animosity?
Dan Ford: On Stagecoach, John Wayne and other people told me that everybody [working] on the movie knew that Wayne and Ford were friends, that they were fishing and drinking buddies. The cast were also more sophisticated actors—like George Bancroft—and the commonly told story goes that Ford rode Wayne because everybody knew Wayne was Ford's friend and Ford wanted to get the other actors on Duke's side—in order to help [Wayne].
Box Office Mojo: This needling of John Wayne continued over many years—?
Dan Ford: That was Ford. He needled everybody. The guy he really needled was Ward Bond, because he kind of went around asking for it.
Box Office Mojo: What's the greatest John Ford picture?
Dan Ford: They Were Expendable, though one of his best that most people probably aren't familiar with is Three Bad Men because it's silent and it didn't make money. It's shot in 70 millimeter and it came out when sound was coming out and people were more interested in sound. It's a great film [about the] Dakota and Oklahoma land rush. The Iron Horse gets a little play because it was quite successful.
Box Office Mojo: Who generally owns the rights to Ford's movies?
Dan Ford: Most of the movies are owned by the studios. He generally did works for hire. Most of these guys were studio contract directors until World War 2, when they wanted to get out of the studio system. They couldn't make any money given the high[er] tax rates. So, what Ford and a lot of other people did is go independent. Everybody thinks they wanted to be independent because they were tired of Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner telling them what to do. No, that's not true. They wanted to be independent because it was the only way they could make money. They could own their own pictures and have the studio release them.
Box Office Mojo: What was John Ford's estate valued at when he died?
Dan Ford: It wasn't really significant. The after market hadn't kicked in yet. There were a few residuals from television and a couple of movies that he had a piece of, but after Ford stopped working in 1965, he just couldn't afford his lifestyle anymore. He'd gone through a lot of savings and he was burned by taxes—he hadn't sheltered his money—and he didn't own a lot of his films so he wasn't in a position where he could turn around and sell them back to the studios. John Wayne owned so many of his films, though he, too, had a couple of setbacks. These are creative people and it's difficult to work the hours they work and also keep an eye on their money.
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Box Office Mojo: What's the greatest misconception about John Ford?
Dan Ford: Probably political—that Ford was so [politically] aligned with John Wayne. Not that they were on completely different ends, but, during the Depression years, Ford was a Democrat—at least during the war years. Wayne didn't really get political until after the war. It was probably the tax rates that drove him to being so political. That and the [rise of] communism. Ward Bond was really political in his anti-communism.
Box Office Mojo: As were Adolphe Menjou, Walt Disney and Gary Cooper, whose views about communism were vindicated—?
Dan Ford: —That's exactly right. The communists were very active in Hollywood. And John Ford was a pretty centrist guy. I remember he voted for [Republican Richard M.] Nixon—he hated [Democrat] Lyndon Johnson—he loved [Democrat John F.] Kennedy, because he was an Irish Catholic from New England. He probably at some stage had some contact with the old man [Joseph Kennedy], who had a piece of RKO, and Ford was making movies over there. Plus it was an ethnic thing, with the Irish [immigrants] rising above the lace curtain image. People like Kennedy and Wild Bill Donovan were big heroes to Ford as successful Irishmen [in America]. That's why Frank Capra's [Ford's] soul brother—for similar reasons. Though they made different kinds of films, they were similar kinds of men. They were religious, [personally] conservative, East Coast ethnics.
Box Office Mojo: What was the impetus for you to become interested in your grandfather's career?
Dan Ford: I don't know. Everybody we knew growing up had something to do with the film business. My mother, when she divorced my father, married a guy who worked for an agency that managed Nat King Cole, Count Basie—a lot of Big Bands. I remember going to see Nat King Cole on the Sunset Strip with [comedian] Lenny Bruce as the opening act. I was eleven years old. It was an experience. I just kind of grew up with it and I wanted to be in [show] business. I don't think I realized that it was a declining business. But there were opportunities for me in television and I got a job at a tiny UHF station and I became photo film editor, which basically means I drove a truck and picked up these old movies that we used to run to stay on the air. It was a stock market station. Channel 22.
Box Office Mojo: Why didn't your grandfather give you a break?
Dan Ford: He tried. But he was inactive. He did write a letter to—who was the head of [Twentieth Century] Fox?—to [Daryl] Zanuck. Zanuck said he couldn't help. But I was hired to work on The Tonight Show. It was the world's greatest part-time job. Some of the most fun shows were hosted by guests. I remember we had acts like [Country and Western singer] Roy Clark and we had very little rehearsal time—we had 90 minutes and it was live to tape. We ran our [tails] off.
Box Office Mojo: How was working with Johnny Carson?
Dan Ford: He was professional, aloof, cold a little bit—but, over time, he got to know you and he'd confide in you. He became friendly, especially after I wrote the book and appeared on the show.
Box Office Mojo: John Ford has a reputation for expressing an anti-romantic, anti-heroic sensibility in his pictures. Is this true?
Dan Ford: That was later in his career. But earlier—look at Young Mr. Lincoln [starring Henry Fonda]. That's just the opposite—it's elevating a guy who, as Henry Fonda says, is just a jack-legged lawyer from Springfield, Illinois. In The Iron Horse, he's celebrating the American myth. But as he gets older, he kind of shifted gears. The depth was not in intellectual thoughts as much as to show true feelings of character. One of my favorite Ford films is The Last Hurrah [with Spencer Tracy]. I think it's just a tremendous character and a slice of American life, a life he knew as a kid, a life that he grew out of.
Box Office Mojo: How did John Ford change following World War 2?
Dan Ford: I'm sure he did, because he really did see the war. But he didn't talk about it a lot, which means he really saw it. He talked about the Navy ad nauseum, but not specifically about what he did in World War 2. Here's a guy who was on the [Jimmy] Doolittle raid [on Japan], at Midway, in China, Burma, India, in North Africa in combat, filming the landings—he shot down and captured a [Nazi] German aviator, went ashore at D-Day plus five, went on patrols on the Normandy coast before the invasion. He never talked about it.
Box Office Mojo: Was John Ford always acerbic?
Dan Ford: Not all the time. He was always that way on the set, depending on who he was with. He just wanted to be the alpha male. He was very gentle with women, like Sara on How Green Was My Valley and Jane on The Grapes of Wrath. He treated them like queens. With the boys, it was one thing but some of the boys you had to be like that—these rough and tumble cowboy types, like John Wayne and wannabe John Waynes.
Box Office Mojo: Was John Ford intimidating?
Dan Ford: I would say he was more funny than intimidating. He could be intimidating if you were looking for a job. To us, he was Gramps. We had to be quiet because he was so nocturnal. He stayed up late reading all the time and we'd get the green light from our grandmother when we could make noise. We used to play baseball in the backyard tennis court. We had to adjust our hours. On [Ford's yacht] the Araner, he was a pain in the ass.
Box Office Mojo: Let's talk about The Quiet Man. Did John Ford have trouble creating the movie?
Dan Ford: He went to every major studio. First, he went to Zanuck at Fox where he was under contract, and he went everywhere. He wound up at Republic because of Duke, who had a non-exclusive contract there. They were playing cards at Ford's house and John Wayne came in late—Ward Bond was there—and Wayne, who had this phenomenal memory when it came to numbers, said he talked to [Republic's] Herb Yates about making The Quiet Man. So, John Wayne engineered the deal with [Republic]. It was a three picture deal that if they made a John Wayne Western and it made money, Yates would let them make The Quiet Man. He may never have even made a movie in Technicolor, he'd never made a movie outside of the United States—Yates was not a sophisticated man. I asked Duke to give me a brief description of Herb Yates and he answered: "he had no taste." Yates kept putting Duke in with [Yates]' girlfriend, her name was Hruba Vera Ralston, or Vera Hruba Ralston, and she was some Czech ice skater, who had this unintelligible accent, and he'd have to suffer through all these movies with her in them. Finally, after they did Rio Grande, which was a successful film, Yates relented and, against his will, he agreed to let Ford make The Quiet Man in Ireland. But he stiffed Maureen O'Hara and John Wayne on their contract, which called for them to get $100,000 apiece upfront with no points. So they agreed to take less [compensation], exactly how much I don't know—I've heard $75,000 or $80,000—so Ford could make this movie.
Box Office Mojo: Hadn't The Quiet Man been approved by another studio contingent on the success of The Fugitive (1947)?
Dan Ford: I don't know. The Fugitive is an arthouse movie and it was a funny thing to do. Maybe it was the war or his emotional break from the studio system. It was a very un-John Ford movie. It didn't make a lot of money but it didn't cost a lot of money. He had [Henry] Fonda. Maybe he just wanted a change of pace after the war. Ford would put things like that before money. It's a dumb decision for his first [picture] as an independent [director] and it put him in the hole. The interest charges on The Fugitive were eating him alive and it forced him to sell off Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon later on and sell them back to RKO.
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Box Office Mojo: For someone who's never seen a John Ford picture, which movies should be seen first?
Dan Ford: The Grapes of Wrath, The Quiet Man and The Searchers. There's variety, popularity and color in those films—and it covers the spread: seriousness, comedy, action, Americana.
Box Office Mojo: You mentioned The Grapes of Wrath, based on the novel by John Steinbeck. Was Ford a socialist?
Dan Ford: No. He was a Democrat.
Box Office Mojo: John Wayne might have said that's the same thing—?
Dan Ford: He might have at one time. Ford used to say John Wayne can't spell politics.
Box Office Mojo: What is the theme of John Ford's work?
Dan Ford: Scott Eyman wrote in his book, quoting somebody, that John Ford knows what the earth is made of—that he really had an understanding of fundamental truths about human beings.
Box Office Mojo: Was he a humanist?
Dan Ford: Yes. I would say he was a humanist—that's a good word for John Ford.
Box Office Mojo: Is he more of a naturalist, showing things as they are, or a romanticist, showing things as they ought to be?
Dan Ford: I'd say he showed things as they ought to be, like everybody in Hollywood. I would say he's very much a romanticist. Even when he was a realist, in films like The Grapes of Wrath and They Were Expendable, he was also a romanticist.
Box Office Mojo: Did John Ford have a favorite movie directed by someone else?
Dan Ford: Going My Way. Leo McCarey directed that—he was a friend of Ford's. Ford wrote to him asking how he got that great performance out of Bing Crosby. I guess Bing Crosby—a great singer—was not known as an actor. Ford was very surprised he was that good.
Box Office Mojo: How did John Ford regard awards?
Dan Ford: His American Film Institute award—the first Lifetime Achievement award—was interesting because he knew he was dying of cancer and it was his last hurrah. He was very serious about that—it meant a lot to him. Toward the end of his life, he was more proud of his career in the Navy reserves.
Box Office Mojo: How did he feel about the draft dodgers and anti-war protesters?
Dan Ford: He was against the [Vietnam] War but he didn't have any respect for those people. Maybe he would have had more respect for them if they weren't a bunch of hippies and had argued serious points or had left the country. Let's face it, by that time in his career, he was pretty much of a curmudgeon like all of us in our seventies. His office, which he shared with John Wayne, was right off Sunset [Boulevard in Hollywood], and I remember driving to work with him and he'd see all these goddamn hippies on Sunset. It looked like Berkeley.
Box Office Mojo: When did you serve in Vietnam?
Dan Ford: I was there in 1968 and 1969.
Box Office Mojo: Were you shot down?
Dan Ford: Yeah.
Box Office Mojo: Were you captured?
Dan Ford: No. I escaped.
Box Office Mojo: So your training paid off?
Dan Ford: Absolutely, because I had been an instructor at the Jungle Warfare School in Panama in the U.S. Army. Myself, the pilot, and another person had all been through the school and I think it probably saved our lives—or kept us from getting captured. I had been in Vietnam about ten months and if you were an infantryman—if you survived your first six to eight weeks, your chances of surviving the whole [tour of duty] went up because of the knowledge you picked up and you picked it up fast, OJT [on job training] and from other people. I had tried to get in the Air Force and the Navy—I wanted to be an officer, which was important to me—then the Vietnam thing started picking up. So, I wanted to be a pilot and the Air Force accepted me as a weapons officer. I was there until late 1969.
Box Office Mojo: Did you see The Green Berets starring John Wayne while you were there?
Dan Ford: I had picked up hookworm from walking around barefoot so I was laid up [in sick bay]. They were just ready to show The Green Berets and I was trying to stall so I could see the movie and then they sent me back to [combat]. I missed it by one day.
Box Office Mojo: Did you know your grandfather was opposed to the war at that time?
Dan Ford: We talked about it from time to time. He was proud of me for [enlisting].
Box Office Mojo: Had you been inspired by John Wayne as Sergeant John Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima, as Vietnam veteran Oliver Stone claims to have been?
Dan Ford: Hell no. I was in the same unit as Oliver Stone. I was just after him—he was in the first of the 25th infantry in the same area, same place, same country. I was an officer, so I was treated well, but [Stone] was a grunt. In the field, of course, we all lived the same. I've never met him.
Box Office Mojo: John Ford's famous quote about John Wayne, after seeing Duke in Red River, is that he didn't know the "big, dumb sonofabitch" could act. How did Duke's acting ability elude one of the best directors of the 20th century?
Dan Ford: I think that quote was intended as sort of a friendly jab. I knew John Ford really respected John Wayne in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, because he was great in that. It was right around the same time as Red River.
Box Office Mojo: One criticism of Stagecoach is that the strong visual style takes the viewer out of the story—?
Dan Ford: Would they rather have him do everything in a process shot in that Republic backlot? It is a Western. It's not film noir or a gangster film. Stagecoach elevated the genre, starting a run of big budget, major studio Westerns. Stagecoach made a lot of money. He had a hard time selling it; he'd shopped it to every studio in town and he wound up with Walter Wanger at United Artists.
Box Office Mojo: What did Ford regard as his favorite John Wayne performance in one of Ford's movies?
Dan Ford: I can only speculate and I would say She Wore a Yellow Ribbon because [Wayne] was out of character. Or The Searchers. I think he respected Wayne more when he did good work for other directors, because he could kind of get out of himself. Ford thought he was terrific in Rio Bravo and True Grit and I think if [Ford] had been around for The Shootist he would have really thought John Wayne was great in that. When you work on a movie as a director and you're there for every shot and every take, you lose your perspective.
Box Office Mojo: What John Ford movie do people comment about the most often?
Dan Ford: Some of the bar scenes in My Darling Clementine, the whole background action of smoke—a lot of people comment on that.
Box Office Mojo: That picture starred Henry Fonda, whom Ford also directed in several other pictures, including Drums Along the Mohawk and Mister Roberts.
Dan Ford: They were both contract players at Fox and they were good friends—until Mister Roberts, when they had a fight, a physical fight. Fonda had played the role on Broadway and he had a whole concept of how it should be [done] and he knew where the laughs were, and he was going to play it as he'd played it all along and Ford was trying to make it broader and more slapstick for the movie audience, not the Broadway audience.
Box Office Mojo: Howard Hawks was a good friend of John Ford's?
Dan Ford: Yes, particularly when they were both at Fox.
Box Office Mojo: Elia Kazan said that the best advice he had from John Ford was to hold and trust the long shot—?
Dan Ford: It sounds like good advice to a stage director.
Box Office Mojo: What would John Ford have thought of today's movies?
Dan Ford: It depends on the movie. I think he would have liked Kevin Costner's movie, Dances with Wolves. It was like [Ford's] Cheyenne Autumn with a love story.
Box Office Mojo: What would John Ford have thought of Brokeback Mountain?
Dan Ford: I don't think he would have bothered to see it but I think he would have thought that it was fine—I know how he thought about that issue—that it's fine; there were a lot of people of that persuasion that worked for him and he thought it was their business. He wasn't a gay-basher. His wardrobe guy was of a gay persuasion. I think John Wayne was like that, too. He made a picture with Rock Hudson. People went to greater lengths to hide it back then.
Box Office Mojo: Did John Ford promote his movies?
Dan Ford: Not really. He was more concerned with what serious critics thought about his movies. He was always sending them letters explaining what he was trying to do in a movie—on The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, he let them know it was a different kind of movie. That's where they screwed up The Wings of Eagles, which is a small, personal story that MGM marketed as a big John Wayne movie.
Box Office Mojo: Did John Ford track box office?
Dan Ford: I think so. But that was [primarily his production partner] Merian Cooper's job.
Box Office Mojo: Can you describe the first time you met John Wayne?
Dan Ford: I can't remember it. I remember a couple of times over at Catalina [Island] running down to Avalon and he was there with the Wayne kids—it's one of the first memories I have. But I can't remember the first time.
Box Office Mojo: Can you describe the last time you met John Wayne?
Dan Ford: When I interviewed him [for my book] in Newport Beach. I was trying to get him and the publisher really expected John Wayne. He was doing The Shootist, and I had to wait until after that, when he gave me all the time I wanted. I saw how sick he was.
Box Office Mojo: Can you describe the last time you saw John Ford?
Dan Ford: I saw him two or three days before he died. It was really hard because he had cancer and he'd wasted away and lost 75 pounds. I interviewed him and I talked to him about the book and I knew I had to do it while he still had his faculties. He had moved to Palm Desert and I was working at CBS. I'd go every other weekend to see him—whenever I could.
Box Office Mojo: Did he chase after certain actors for roles?
Dan Ford: Katharine Hepburn and Duke. He had a lot of correspondence with Duke. I know he had a hard time figuring out who to play the Spencer Tracy part in The Last Hurrah. At that time, Spencer wasn't box office, and it hurt the movie, but Katharine Hepburn persuaded [Ford] to do it. Ford was thinking of John Wayne and Ward Bond—who had done Wagon Master and he was great in it—but Ward's wasn't a name that opens a movie.
Box Office Mojo: Do you see John Ford's influence in today's pictures?
Dan Ford: [Director Steven] Spielberg steals his shots all the time and you see the influence in some of [Kevin] Costner's Westerns and [Martin] Scorsese's films. Spielberg's probably the most versatile director today.
Box Office Mojo: What was the hardest part of John Ford's work for John Ford?
Dan Ford: He knew everything—he really worked his way up from the engine room. There wasn't anything about making a movie that he didn't know, whether it was scheduling or whatever. I remember my uncle, Wingate, telling me that he had the schedule storyboard type of thing—like "Indians attack fort" and he'd allowed something like one day for it—and Ford said "now, wait a f****** minute, this is going to take a week." He knew everything.
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• Index of Scott Holleran's Interviews
RELATED LINK
• Book: Pappy: The Life of John Ford by Dan Ford
John Ford's grandson, Dan Ford, who wrote Pappy: The Life of John Ford, sat down with Box Office Mojo to talk about John Wayne, John Ford and their extraordinary careers.
Box Office Mojo: Have you seen every John Ford movie?
Dan Ford: I haven't seen some of the really old ones.
Box Office Mojo: What did John Ford value most about John Wayne?
Dan Ford: What he liked about John Wayne was John Wayne. He was such an appealing, likable, fun guy to be around—a man's man. He was a sensational card player, like Ford, a big drinker, like Ford was, and they had a lot in common. They were outdoor guys, they both loved boats—they spent every nickel they had on their boats—and it was a personal friendship.
Box Office Mojo: To attain that level of consistency throughout their work is a tremendous accomplishment—?
Dan Ford: —They were a lot alike. Ford had similar relationships with Henry Fonda, George O'Brien, back in the Silent [movie] days—O'Brien just couldn't make the transition to a talking actor.
Box Office Mojo: So part of the John Ford process was to use certain actors in whom he identified a particular quality he liked?
Dan Ford: Everybody said it: Ford liked the same people and that was the stock company. He even used the same crew.
Box Office Mojo: Was John Wayne frustrated that he wasn't the male lead in Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance?
Dan Ford: Look at him—he was playing the guy who doesn't get the girl who becomes a drunk—in his mind he felt that he didn't have the main part and he was John Wayne. The leading man was Jimmy Stewart, whom he respected as an actor immensely, who was really the money actor in it, though [Wayne's] by far the most important character and he had a much more interesting part. I don't think Wayne appreciated that. It might have been financial, too.
Box Office Mojo: John Wayne said that a director such as George Cukor would try to make the movie fit the script and that your grandfather would try to make the script fit the movie. True?
Dan Ford: John Ford would change the script and cut the dialog. He was notorious for cutting dialog—for reaching in and getting the essence. He'd take all this great Frank Nugent dialog and cut it and find the meat. He hated long-winded speeches. Ford grew up with Silent pictures. If you couldn't tell a story visually, forget it.
Box Office Mojo: Was John Ford tough on John Wayne in order to yield better performances or was there real animosity?
Dan Ford: On Stagecoach, John Wayne and other people told me that everybody [working] on the movie knew that Wayne and Ford were friends, that they were fishing and drinking buddies. The cast were also more sophisticated actors—like George Bancroft—and the commonly told story goes that Ford rode Wayne because everybody knew Wayne was Ford's friend and Ford wanted to get the other actors on Duke's side—in order to help [Wayne].
Box Office Mojo: This needling of John Wayne continued over many years—?
Dan Ford: That was Ford. He needled everybody. The guy he really needled was Ward Bond, because he kind of went around asking for it.
Box Office Mojo: What's the greatest John Ford picture?
Dan Ford: They Were Expendable, though one of his best that most people probably aren't familiar with is Three Bad Men because it's silent and it didn't make money. It's shot in 70 millimeter and it came out when sound was coming out and people were more interested in sound. It's a great film [about the] Dakota and Oklahoma land rush. The Iron Horse gets a little play because it was quite successful.
Box Office Mojo: Who generally owns the rights to Ford's movies?
Dan Ford: Most of the movies are owned by the studios. He generally did works for hire. Most of these guys were studio contract directors until World War 2, when they wanted to get out of the studio system. They couldn't make any money given the high[er] tax rates. So, what Ford and a lot of other people did is go independent. Everybody thinks they wanted to be independent because they were tired of Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner telling them what to do. No, that's not true. They wanted to be independent because it was the only way they could make money. They could own their own pictures and have the studio release them.
Box Office Mojo: What was John Ford's estate valued at when he died?
Dan Ford: It wasn't really significant. The after market hadn't kicked in yet. There were a few residuals from television and a couple of movies that he had a piece of, but after Ford stopped working in 1965, he just couldn't afford his lifestyle anymore. He'd gone through a lot of savings and he was burned by taxes—he hadn't sheltered his money—and he didn't own a lot of his films so he wasn't in a position where he could turn around and sell them back to the studios. John Wayne owned so many of his films, though he, too, had a couple of setbacks. These are creative people and it's difficult to work the hours they work and also keep an eye on their money.
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Box Office Mojo: What's the greatest misconception about John Ford?
Dan Ford: Probably political—that Ford was so [politically] aligned with John Wayne. Not that they were on completely different ends, but, during the Depression years, Ford was a Democrat—at least during the war years. Wayne didn't really get political until after the war. It was probably the tax rates that drove him to being so political. That and the [rise of] communism. Ward Bond was really political in his anti-communism.
Box Office Mojo: As were Adolphe Menjou, Walt Disney and Gary Cooper, whose views about communism were vindicated—?
Dan Ford: —That's exactly right. The communists were very active in Hollywood. And John Ford was a pretty centrist guy. I remember he voted for [Republican Richard M.] Nixon—he hated [Democrat] Lyndon Johnson—he loved [Democrat John F.] Kennedy, because he was an Irish Catholic from New England. He probably at some stage had some contact with the old man [Joseph Kennedy], who had a piece of RKO, and Ford was making movies over there. Plus it was an ethnic thing, with the Irish [immigrants] rising above the lace curtain image. People like Kennedy and Wild Bill Donovan were big heroes to Ford as successful Irishmen [in America]. That's why Frank Capra's [Ford's] soul brother—for similar reasons. Though they made different kinds of films, they were similar kinds of men. They were religious, [personally] conservative, East Coast ethnics.
Box Office Mojo: What was the impetus for you to become interested in your grandfather's career?
Dan Ford: I don't know. Everybody we knew growing up had something to do with the film business. My mother, when she divorced my father, married a guy who worked for an agency that managed Nat King Cole, Count Basie—a lot of Big Bands. I remember going to see Nat King Cole on the Sunset Strip with [comedian] Lenny Bruce as the opening act. I was eleven years old. It was an experience. I just kind of grew up with it and I wanted to be in [show] business. I don't think I realized that it was a declining business. But there were opportunities for me in television and I got a job at a tiny UHF station and I became photo film editor, which basically means I drove a truck and picked up these old movies that we used to run to stay on the air. It was a stock market station. Channel 22.
Box Office Mojo: Why didn't your grandfather give you a break?
Dan Ford: He tried. But he was inactive. He did write a letter to—who was the head of [Twentieth Century] Fox?—to [Daryl] Zanuck. Zanuck said he couldn't help. But I was hired to work on The Tonight Show. It was the world's greatest part-time job. Some of the most fun shows were hosted by guests. I remember we had acts like [Country and Western singer] Roy Clark and we had very little rehearsal time—we had 90 minutes and it was live to tape. We ran our [tails] off.
Box Office Mojo: How was working with Johnny Carson?
Dan Ford: He was professional, aloof, cold a little bit—but, over time, he got to know you and he'd confide in you. He became friendly, especially after I wrote the book and appeared on the show.
Box Office Mojo: John Ford has a reputation for expressing an anti-romantic, anti-heroic sensibility in his pictures. Is this true?
Dan Ford: That was later in his career. But earlier—look at Young Mr. Lincoln [starring Henry Fonda]. That's just the opposite—it's elevating a guy who, as Henry Fonda says, is just a jack-legged lawyer from Springfield, Illinois. In The Iron Horse, he's celebrating the American myth. But as he gets older, he kind of shifted gears. The depth was not in intellectual thoughts as much as to show true feelings of character. One of my favorite Ford films is The Last Hurrah [with Spencer Tracy]. I think it's just a tremendous character and a slice of American life, a life he knew as a kid, a life that he grew out of.
Box Office Mojo: How did John Ford change following World War 2?
Dan Ford: I'm sure he did, because he really did see the war. But he didn't talk about it a lot, which means he really saw it. He talked about the Navy ad nauseum, but not specifically about what he did in World War 2. Here's a guy who was on the [Jimmy] Doolittle raid [on Japan], at Midway, in China, Burma, India, in North Africa in combat, filming the landings—he shot down and captured a [Nazi] German aviator, went ashore at D-Day plus five, went on patrols on the Normandy coast before the invasion. He never talked about it.
Box Office Mojo: Was John Ford always acerbic?
Dan Ford: Not all the time. He was always that way on the set, depending on who he was with. He just wanted to be the alpha male. He was very gentle with women, like Sara on How Green Was My Valley and Jane on The Grapes of Wrath. He treated them like queens. With the boys, it was one thing but some of the boys you had to be like that—these rough and tumble cowboy types, like John Wayne and wannabe John Waynes.
Box Office Mojo: Was John Ford intimidating?
Dan Ford: I would say he was more funny than intimidating. He could be intimidating if you were looking for a job. To us, he was Gramps. We had to be quiet because he was so nocturnal. He stayed up late reading all the time and we'd get the green light from our grandmother when we could make noise. We used to play baseball in the backyard tennis court. We had to adjust our hours. On [Ford's yacht] the Araner, he was a pain in the ass.
Box Office Mojo: Let's talk about The Quiet Man. Did John Ford have trouble creating the movie?
Dan Ford: He went to every major studio. First, he went to Zanuck at Fox where he was under contract, and he went everywhere. He wound up at Republic because of Duke, who had a non-exclusive contract there. They were playing cards at Ford's house and John Wayne came in late—Ward Bond was there—and Wayne, who had this phenomenal memory when it came to numbers, said he talked to [Republic's] Herb Yates about making The Quiet Man. So, John Wayne engineered the deal with [Republic]. It was a three picture deal that if they made a John Wayne Western and it made money, Yates would let them make The Quiet Man. He may never have even made a movie in Technicolor, he'd never made a movie outside of the United States—Yates was not a sophisticated man. I asked Duke to give me a brief description of Herb Yates and he answered: "he had no taste." Yates kept putting Duke in with [Yates]' girlfriend, her name was Hruba Vera Ralston, or Vera Hruba Ralston, and she was some Czech ice skater, who had this unintelligible accent, and he'd have to suffer through all these movies with her in them. Finally, after they did Rio Grande, which was a successful film, Yates relented and, against his will, he agreed to let Ford make The Quiet Man in Ireland. But he stiffed Maureen O'Hara and John Wayne on their contract, which called for them to get $100,000 apiece upfront with no points. So they agreed to take less [compensation], exactly how much I don't know—I've heard $75,000 or $80,000—so Ford could make this movie.
Box Office Mojo: Hadn't The Quiet Man been approved by another studio contingent on the success of The Fugitive (1947)?
Dan Ford: I don't know. The Fugitive is an arthouse movie and it was a funny thing to do. Maybe it was the war or his emotional break from the studio system. It was a very un-John Ford movie. It didn't make a lot of money but it didn't cost a lot of money. He had [Henry] Fonda. Maybe he just wanted a change of pace after the war. Ford would put things like that before money. It's a dumb decision for his first [picture] as an independent [director] and it put him in the hole. The interest charges on The Fugitive were eating him alive and it forced him to sell off Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon later on and sell them back to RKO.
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Box Office Mojo: For someone who's never seen a John Ford picture, which movies should be seen first?
Dan Ford: The Grapes of Wrath, The Quiet Man and The Searchers. There's variety, popularity and color in those films—and it covers the spread: seriousness, comedy, action, Americana.
Box Office Mojo: You mentioned The Grapes of Wrath, based on the novel by John Steinbeck. Was Ford a socialist?
Dan Ford: No. He was a Democrat.
Box Office Mojo: John Wayne might have said that's the same thing—?
Dan Ford: He might have at one time. Ford used to say John Wayne can't spell politics.
Box Office Mojo: What is the theme of John Ford's work?
Dan Ford: Scott Eyman wrote in his book, quoting somebody, that John Ford knows what the earth is made of—that he really had an understanding of fundamental truths about human beings.
Box Office Mojo: Was he a humanist?
Dan Ford: Yes. I would say he was a humanist—that's a good word for John Ford.
Box Office Mojo: Is he more of a naturalist, showing things as they are, or a romanticist, showing things as they ought to be?
Dan Ford: I'd say he showed things as they ought to be, like everybody in Hollywood. I would say he's very much a romanticist. Even when he was a realist, in films like The Grapes of Wrath and They Were Expendable, he was also a romanticist.
Box Office Mojo: Did John Ford have a favorite movie directed by someone else?
Dan Ford: Going My Way. Leo McCarey directed that—he was a friend of Ford's. Ford wrote to him asking how he got that great performance out of Bing Crosby. I guess Bing Crosby—a great singer—was not known as an actor. Ford was very surprised he was that good.
Box Office Mojo: How did John Ford regard awards?
Dan Ford: His American Film Institute award—the first Lifetime Achievement award—was interesting because he knew he was dying of cancer and it was his last hurrah. He was very serious about that—it meant a lot to him. Toward the end of his life, he was more proud of his career in the Navy reserves.
Box Office Mojo: How did he feel about the draft dodgers and anti-war protesters?
Dan Ford: He was against the [Vietnam] War but he didn't have any respect for those people. Maybe he would have had more respect for them if they weren't a bunch of hippies and had argued serious points or had left the country. Let's face it, by that time in his career, he was pretty much of a curmudgeon like all of us in our seventies. His office, which he shared with John Wayne, was right off Sunset [Boulevard in Hollywood], and I remember driving to work with him and he'd see all these goddamn hippies on Sunset. It looked like Berkeley.
Box Office Mojo: When did you serve in Vietnam?
Dan Ford: I was there in 1968 and 1969.
Box Office Mojo: Were you shot down?
Dan Ford: Yeah.
Box Office Mojo: Were you captured?
Dan Ford: No. I escaped.
Box Office Mojo: So your training paid off?
Dan Ford: Absolutely, because I had been an instructor at the Jungle Warfare School in Panama in the U.S. Army. Myself, the pilot, and another person had all been through the school and I think it probably saved our lives—or kept us from getting captured. I had been in Vietnam about ten months and if you were an infantryman—if you survived your first six to eight weeks, your chances of surviving the whole [tour of duty] went up because of the knowledge you picked up and you picked it up fast, OJT [on job training] and from other people. I had tried to get in the Air Force and the Navy—I wanted to be an officer, which was important to me—then the Vietnam thing started picking up. So, I wanted to be a pilot and the Air Force accepted me as a weapons officer. I was there until late 1969.
Box Office Mojo: Did you see The Green Berets starring John Wayne while you were there?
Dan Ford: I had picked up hookworm from walking around barefoot so I was laid up [in sick bay]. They were just ready to show The Green Berets and I was trying to stall so I could see the movie and then they sent me back to [combat]. I missed it by one day.
Box Office Mojo: Did you know your grandfather was opposed to the war at that time?
Dan Ford: We talked about it from time to time. He was proud of me for [enlisting].
Box Office Mojo: Had you been inspired by John Wayne as Sergeant John Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima, as Vietnam veteran Oliver Stone claims to have been?
Dan Ford: Hell no. I was in the same unit as Oliver Stone. I was just after him—he was in the first of the 25th infantry in the same area, same place, same country. I was an officer, so I was treated well, but [Stone] was a grunt. In the field, of course, we all lived the same. I've never met him.
Box Office Mojo: John Ford's famous quote about John Wayne, after seeing Duke in Red River, is that he didn't know the "big, dumb sonofabitch" could act. How did Duke's acting ability elude one of the best directors of the 20th century?
Dan Ford: I think that quote was intended as sort of a friendly jab. I knew John Ford really respected John Wayne in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, because he was great in that. It was right around the same time as Red River.
Box Office Mojo: One criticism of Stagecoach is that the strong visual style takes the viewer out of the story—?
Dan Ford: Would they rather have him do everything in a process shot in that Republic backlot? It is a Western. It's not film noir or a gangster film. Stagecoach elevated the genre, starting a run of big budget, major studio Westerns. Stagecoach made a lot of money. He had a hard time selling it; he'd shopped it to every studio in town and he wound up with Walter Wanger at United Artists.
Box Office Mojo: What did Ford regard as his favorite John Wayne performance in one of Ford's movies?
Dan Ford: I can only speculate and I would say She Wore a Yellow Ribbon because [Wayne] was out of character. Or The Searchers. I think he respected Wayne more when he did good work for other directors, because he could kind of get out of himself. Ford thought he was terrific in Rio Bravo and True Grit and I think if [Ford] had been around for The Shootist he would have really thought John Wayne was great in that. When you work on a movie as a director and you're there for every shot and every take, you lose your perspective.
Box Office Mojo: What John Ford movie do people comment about the most often?
Dan Ford: Some of the bar scenes in My Darling Clementine, the whole background action of smoke—a lot of people comment on that.
Box Office Mojo: That picture starred Henry Fonda, whom Ford also directed in several other pictures, including Drums Along the Mohawk and Mister Roberts.
Dan Ford: They were both contract players at Fox and they were good friends—until Mister Roberts, when they had a fight, a physical fight. Fonda had played the role on Broadway and he had a whole concept of how it should be [done] and he knew where the laughs were, and he was going to play it as he'd played it all along and Ford was trying to make it broader and more slapstick for the movie audience, not the Broadway audience.
Box Office Mojo: Howard Hawks was a good friend of John Ford's?
Dan Ford: Yes, particularly when they were both at Fox.
Box Office Mojo: Elia Kazan said that the best advice he had from John Ford was to hold and trust the long shot—?
Dan Ford: It sounds like good advice to a stage director.
Box Office Mojo: What would John Ford have thought of today's movies?
Dan Ford: It depends on the movie. I think he would have liked Kevin Costner's movie, Dances with Wolves. It was like [Ford's] Cheyenne Autumn with a love story.
Box Office Mojo: What would John Ford have thought of Brokeback Mountain?
Dan Ford: I don't think he would have bothered to see it but I think he would have thought that it was fine—I know how he thought about that issue—that it's fine; there were a lot of people of that persuasion that worked for him and he thought it was their business. He wasn't a gay-basher. His wardrobe guy was of a gay persuasion. I think John Wayne was like that, too. He made a picture with Rock Hudson. People went to greater lengths to hide it back then.
Box Office Mojo: Did John Ford promote his movies?
Dan Ford: Not really. He was more concerned with what serious critics thought about his movies. He was always sending them letters explaining what he was trying to do in a movie—on The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, he let them know it was a different kind of movie. That's where they screwed up The Wings of Eagles, which is a small, personal story that MGM marketed as a big John Wayne movie.
Box Office Mojo: Did John Ford track box office?
Dan Ford: I think so. But that was [primarily his production partner] Merian Cooper's job.
Box Office Mojo: Can you describe the first time you met John Wayne?
Dan Ford: I can't remember it. I remember a couple of times over at Catalina [Island] running down to Avalon and he was there with the Wayne kids—it's one of the first memories I have. But I can't remember the first time.
Box Office Mojo: Can you describe the last time you met John Wayne?
Dan Ford: When I interviewed him [for my book] in Newport Beach. I was trying to get him and the publisher really expected John Wayne. He was doing The Shootist, and I had to wait until after that, when he gave me all the time I wanted. I saw how sick he was.
Box Office Mojo: Can you describe the last time you saw John Ford?
Dan Ford: I saw him two or three days before he died. It was really hard because he had cancer and he'd wasted away and lost 75 pounds. I interviewed him and I talked to him about the book and I knew I had to do it while he still had his faculties. He had moved to Palm Desert and I was working at CBS. I'd go every other weekend to see him—whenever I could.
Box Office Mojo: Did he chase after certain actors for roles?
Dan Ford: Katharine Hepburn and Duke. He had a lot of correspondence with Duke. I know he had a hard time figuring out who to play the Spencer Tracy part in The Last Hurrah. At that time, Spencer wasn't box office, and it hurt the movie, but Katharine Hepburn persuaded [Ford] to do it. Ford was thinking of John Wayne and Ward Bond—who had done Wagon Master and he was great in it—but Ward's wasn't a name that opens a movie.
Box Office Mojo: Do you see John Ford's influence in today's pictures?
Dan Ford: [Director Steven] Spielberg steals his shots all the time and you see the influence in some of [Kevin] Costner's Westerns and [Martin] Scorsese's films. Spielberg's probably the most versatile director today.
Box Office Mojo: What was the hardest part of John Ford's work for John Ford?
Dan Ford: He knew everything—he really worked his way up from the engine room. There wasn't anything about making a movie that he didn't know, whether it was scheduling or whatever. I remember my uncle, Wingate, telling me that he had the schedule storyboard type of thing—like "Indians attack fort" and he'd allowed something like one day for it—and Ford said "now, wait a f****** minute, this is going to take a week." He knew everything.
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• 5/4/07 - Scott Holleran: John Wayne Centennial in Newport Beach
• Index of Scott Holleran's Interviews
RELATED LINK
• Book: Pappy: The Life of John Ford by Dan Ford
