Box Office Bomb: While it was something of a Sleeper Hit that made $31.7 million of its $20 million budget and became the sixth highest-grossing film of the year, it came out when movie musicals were on the decline and it failed to make back its high budget.
Breakaway Pop Hit: Despite not being a natural singer, Lee Marvin's rendition of "Wand'rin' Star" was nonetheless an international novelty hit. Not only that, it was a number one hit single in the UK in 1970. It kept The Beatles' "Let It Be" off the top spot there!
Creator Killer: For director Joshua Logan. He only directed one more project (a short-lived Broadway musical called Look to the Lilies) the following year before spending the rest of his life teaching.
Romance on the Set: Clint Eastwood and Jean Seberg had an affair. This drew the attention of tabloids - and Seberg's husband, French director and novelist Romain Gary. Gary arrived on set planning to kill Eastwood, who fled into the woods.
Star-Derailing Role: Despite the success of Airport the following year, Paint Your Wagon effectively put an end to Jean Seberg's Hollywood career. She moved to Europe permanently the year after its release, where she'd remain for the rest of her life.
Troubled Production: Thanks to its chaotic production and questionable quality, it was a punchline long before The Simpsons mercilessly spoofed it.
Director Joshua Logan, along with Alan Jay Lerner and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, drastically rewrote Lerner and Loewe's original musical. The stage version concerns a frontier girl falling for a Mexican man despite her father's disapproval; the movie depicts two prospectors "sharing" a Mormon wife. Apparently, Lerner thought an unconventional love triangle would appeal to younger audiences in The '60s. Then Lerner decided to add new songs, co-written not by his regular collaborator Fritz Loewe but Andre Previn.
Initially, Logan wanted Mickey Rooney, James Cagney and Lesley Ann Warren for the leads. Although they were hardly box office draws in 1969, they at least had musical experience. The same couldn't be said for Paramount's preferred stars, Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin (who turned down The Wild Bunch to appear in the movie because it offered a bigger paycheck), and Jean Seberg, trying to restart her career after spending the '60s in France.note The producers also approached Julie Andrews and Faye Dunaway for Seberg's role, neither of whom were interested. This would have been an incredible casting coup, if any of them could sing. While Seberg's songs were dubbed by another actress, Eastwood and Marvin were forced to sing themselves, with less-than-impressive results.
Following The Sound of Music's lead, Logan decided to shoot on location. He commissioned a huge mining town in the middle of Oregon's Cascade Mountains, which was painstakingly constructed over seven months. This caused the film to run wildly overbudget before filming even began. The location caused logistical nightmares: cast and crew slept in tents on location, constantly running low on filming supplies, food and other amenities. Including trees: Logan wasn't impressed with Oregon's natural flora, importing pine trees from Hollywood to augment the local forest.
The shoot attracted local vagrants and hippies, who stole food and supplies from the set. Logan cast them as extras, though they refused his instructions to cut their hair or wear period clothing. Eventually the extras organized a makeshift union, demanding $25 a day payments and commissary bags full of food for fellow hippies. Logan, aggravated by an overlong shoot and lacking replacements, gave into their demands.
As filming dragged on, tensions between cast and crew erupted. Lerner micromanaged the production, overseeing filming and constantly countermanding Logan's decisions. This drove Logan, who suffered from bipolar disorder, to despair; he confided in film critic Rex Reed, "I don't know what the hell I'm doing here." Marvin drank heavily, constantly botching takes and arguing with Logan. Eastwood and Seberg engaged in an affair which drew the attention of tabloids - and Seberg's husband, French director and novelist Romain Gary. Gary arrived on set planning to kill Eastwood, who fled into the woods. Filming climaxed with Logan dynamiting the set, a fitting end to a long, painful shoot.
Thanks to a major marketing splash, Wagon proved a surprise hit, becoming the sixth highest grossing movie of 1969. However, due to its colossal budget and advertising costs, it failed to turn a profit. It also received terrible reviews; Eastwood and Marvin's off-key singing earned particular ridicule, though Marvin's rendition of "I Was Born Under a Wanderin' Star" became a novelty hit. Wagon ended Joshua Logan's film career and derailed Jean Seberg's hope for a Hollywood comeback. It also served as an abject lesson to Clint Eastwood; observing the bloated production, he resolved that his own directorial efforts would come in on time and under budget.
Underage Casting: Lee Marvin had to be made to look older in the movie, since at 44 he was only six years older than Clint Eastwood.
Lerner originally commissioned an entirely new screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky, who turned in what Clint Eastwood described as an unusually dark and interesting script for a musical. By the time filming was ready to start, however, Lerner rewrote the script, using Chayefsky's story but with a lighter tone. A disappointed Eastwood, whose contract said he could drop out if he didn't like the final screenplay, considered leaving but decided this would hurt his career in Hollywood.
