Rewatchables Reference

• Wyatt Earp confronting Johnny Tyler (Billy Bob Thornton) – 'Go ahead, skin that smoke wagon and see what happens.' Completely emasculates him, then takes 25% of the house.
• The OK Corral shootout – the first big action set piece.
• 'Hell's coming with me' – after Bill Paxton's Morgan dies, Russell on horseback delivering the speech, followed by the killing montage.
• The creek shootout – Russell walking on water like Larry Bird in the '87 playoffs.
• Doc Holliday vs. Johnny Ringo at the end – 'I'm your huckleberry.'
• The 'I got two guns, one for each of ya' scene – Val Kilmer emerging from the shadows of the saloon.

• The mustaches – all real. An hour and a half in, you're wondering why everyone doesn't have mustaches and hats now.
• The insanely loaded cast – basically every white actor in 1993 except for two guys.
• Val Kilmer's entire performance – he should have been nominated for Best Supporting Actor. That 1993 category was stacked (Tommy Lee Jones won for 'The Fugitive') but Kilmer deserved a spot over Malkovich in 'In the Line of Fire'.
• The 1880s Wild West world-building – liquor, brothels, gambling, and the Godfather-esque way Russell muscles into the faro game at the Oriental.
• The closing credits – four solid minutes of them walking in their outfits like a Vanity Fair photo shoot.
• Tuberculosis as a plot device – it really looks like it sucked to have TB.

• 135 minutes – it's too long. The 12-minute theater scene could have been 45 seconds.
• Bill Paxton's death scene – really feels dated, lots of lurching forward.
• The picnic scene between Russell and Dana Delany – a weird late-80s/early-90s thing where they had to establish the romantic connection. Nobody comes to 'Tombstone' for picnics.
• The last third of the movie is essentially a lynch mob going around killing everybody with unclear objectives. It basically turns into Cobra.
• Robert Mitchum's completely unnecessary narration – the cliche of how to tell a western.
• Mattie dying of a drug overdose off-screen with the narrator just casually telling us. Couldn't have given her a happy ending or at least made the death pay off on screen.

• Kevin Costner was supposed to be Wyatt Earp – he bowed out and made his own movie instead.
• Richard Gere was nearly cast as Wyatt Earp. Willem Dafoe was nearly cast as Doc Holliday – that might have been straight-to-video.
• Mickey Rourke was almost cast as Johnny Ringo and turned it down. Michael Biehn is great, but that could have been a cool Rourke role.

Val Kilmer is so good the other actors visibly change their performances to elevate his. He's like free jazz – poetic, romantic, coughing, sweating, a Byron/Shelley figure among cowboys. Every single line of dialogue he delivers is a grade-A line.

• Stephen Lang as Ike Clanton – reportedly hammered for the entire shoot. Every time you see him you think 'what a piece of shit.' Later became the star of Avatar.
• Billy Bob Thornton – maybe four scenes, improvised all his dialogue, and gets more out of his screen time than almost anyone.
• Dana Wheeler-Nicholson – 'Can I borrow your towel?' girl from 'Fletch'. Everyone between 30 and 50 had a massive crush on her.

• Powers Boothe – wears a sash, sachets around town on opium, and it's probably more Powers Boothe than the movie needed.
• Billy Zane – overacts in every movie and played the same character in his next nine movies.
• Robert Mitchum as the narrator – completely unnecessary and overdone.
• Sam Elliott arguably overdoes the western shtick.

• Kurt Russell – interesting case because he never really had an Apex Mountain. He's like rolling hills, never horrible, never at one peak. Oscar-nominated for Silkwood in 1982 around the same time as Escape from New York and The Thing. This movie is more like LeBron in the 2018 Finals for Russell.
• Val Kilmer – could be 'Top Gun', could be Heat, could be 'Tombstone'. After 'Top Gun' people thought he was neck and neck with Cruise. 'Batman' came from Heat. But 'Tombstone' is his most iconic single performance.
• Jason Priestley – 1000% Apex Mountain. The window was never bigger for Priestley, and it was precipitous on either side.
• Dana Delany – China Beach was probably her actual Apex Mountain.

• No awesome poker scene despite having the Oriental saloon right there. A 12-minute poker scene between Wyatt, Powers Boothe, and Kilmer would have been way better than the 12-minute theater scene.
• Weird edits where it's nighttime twice and unclear whether it's the same day.
• After Doc kills Johnny Ringo, there's a lot of killing that happens with unclear purpose.

• What would Kurt Russell's reconstructed 'Western Godfather' version look like? He says the movie you saw is completely different from the one they wanted to make.
• Could 'Tombstone' have worked as a miniseries instead? The Wyatt Earp story seems built for that format.
• Why wasn't Michael Biehn a bigger star? He was the lead of the biggest sci-fi movie of the '80s.

• Kurt Russell – not only the star of one of his best movies, but in the aftermath gets to take ownership of ghost-directing it.
• Val Kilmer – the reason we actually remember the movie. If you just watch it without the backstory, he was the movie.
• George P. Cosmatos did NOT win the movie. Neither did Kevin Jarre.