Great Man Theory and the Movies

Before Tombstone, Wyatt Earp was one more sometime criminal, sometime lawman scattered across the US West. He published a few books himself in his lifetime, including My Fight at the O.K. Corral, currently available as a Kindle edition and definitely in the public domain. You can doubtless also find My Friend Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp Speaks! He moved to Los Angeles late in life, where he hung around the studios and befriended, among others, William S. Hart, who wrote and produced Wild Bill Hickock, in which Earp was a character—the only movie he was a character in during his lifetime. However, that movie, and his time spent around the studios, influenced a heck of a lot of Westerns going forward. Among other things, he’s believed to have met young John Ford and John Wayne.

In history, there is what’s called the Great Man Theory. People go back and forth about it all the time. (And of course “great man” is not supposed to be a gendered term but given history kind of is.) There is also a modified version, where a lot of things happen because it’s time for those things to happen—steam engines, the theory of evolution, the Protestant reformation—but other things happen because a specific person arose who shaped how things would happen. If Mary I of England had been born a boy, for example, or if her uncle Arthur had lived. Debates about this can last hours. However, we can see it play out in the movies.

Obviously, Westerns were a thing in Hollywood, because it was Western time. You can predict the rise of the Western because of the rise of dime novels, and we can piece together more from there, and it’s fine. Wyatt Earp wasn’t a dime novel hero, though he knew no few of them personally—like, yes, Wild Bill Hickcock, maybe, though the evidence on that is scanty. But there would have been Wild Bill movies, and Bat Masterson maybe, and maybe even Doc Holliday, even if there hadn’t been a Wyatt Earp. But because Wyatt went to Hollywood, the Western shaped itself to what Wyatt Earp said the Old West was like.

It’s not just Wyatt, but Wyatt is the most obvious example of it. John Wayne claimed to have based no little of his speech and walk and so forth on Wyatt—it’s hard to say “Earp,” because there were ten Earp children from Nicholas Earp’s two wives. He went to Hollywood personally and shaped movies personally and not a lot of other people who fit that view are so obvious. We could talk about Preston Sturges, and there’s a lot to say about Preston Sturges, but maybe it was Preston Sturges Time and if it hadn’t been him it would’ve been someone like him. Stan Lee is probably more on the Wyatt Earp end of things. Quentin Tarantino is definitely on the Preston Sturges end.

Movies are by definition a group enterprise. Don Hertzfeldt is the closest we get to doing everything alone, and even he hires voice actors. Walt Disney was, let’s be frank, as much a figurehead and idea man as anything else for the majority of the studio’s history, for all he gets the credit. (And there was definitely an Animated Feature Time.) It’s the problem with auteur theory, which is not what we’re talking about here. This isn’t about shaping individual movies; it’s about shaping the industry, which is why we’ll never have better than a modified version of Great Man Theory shaping the movies. Even the technical end involves group efforts. But how the stories go? One person can always change that.