The classic 1993 western was a team effort, but Kilmer says Russell was captain of that team.
And now, as Paul Harvey used to say, here’s the rest of the story. In response to countless queries about the making of Tombstone — the enduringly popular 1993 western in which he played a grandiloquent Doc Holliday opposite Kurt Russell’s gritty Wyatt Earp — Val Kilmer insisted in a lengthy essay posted on his website this week that “Kurt is solely responsible for Tombstone’s success, no question.”
And not just because Russell gave him all of the best lines.
“I was there every minute,” Kilmer wrote, “and although Kurt’s version differs slightly from mine, the one thing he’s totally correct about is, how hard he worked the day before, for the next day’s shot list, and [the] tremendous effort he and I both put into editing, as the studio wouldn’t give us any extra time to make up for the whole month we lost with the first director.
“We lost our first director after a month of shooting and I watched Kurt sacrifice his own role and energy to devote himself as a storyteller, even going so far as to draw up shot lists to help our replacement director, George Cosmatos, who came in with only 2 days prep.
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