Production
John Wayne and Robert Fellows's production company Batjac purchased the Burt Kennedy screenplay with the intention of having Wayne star as Stride. It was Kennedy's first film script. However, Wayne was locked into doing The Searchers for John Ford. Wayne then suggested casting Randolph Scott instead. Scott insisted on Budd Boetticher as the director. Seven Men from Now was the first in a seven-film collaboration between Scott, Boetticher, and producer Harry Joe Brown, with five of the films written by Kennedy.
The movie was shot in the Alabama Hills and other locations near Lone Pine, California in the last months of 1955. Gail Russell was cast as the female lead due to her previous work with Wayne in Angel and the Badman and Wake of the Red Witch. She had not worked on a movie for nearly five years prior to Seven Men from Now, due to her struggles with stage-fright-induced alcoholism, and Boetticher worked very hard to keep her from drinking during the filming.
Read more about this topic: Seven Men From Now
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.”
—Ernest Gellner (b. 1925)