John Wayne: An American Experience at Fort Worth Stockyards is worthy of a visit if you’re in the vicinity. Dimitri Tiomkin and John Wayne share a long history of moviemaking, including quintessential Westerns: Red River (1948), Rio Bravo (1959), The Alamo (1960), and The War Wagon (1967); and dramas from The High and the Mighty (1954) to Circus World (1964), the latter featuring Tiomkin’s reverential The John Wayne “Duke” March.

President Jimmy Carter professed “John Wayne was bigger than life” and the scope and content of the American Experience attempts to prove those words. The exhibition, gained by an entry-fee, fills 7,000 square feet of space with galleries covering Life on Screen, A Man of the People, and An American Legacy. More than 400 items document a life well-lived on and off the screen.

While composing the score for Circus World, Tiomkin said, “Wayne’s films are not easy to score. Just as Wayne himself is a big man, a powerful man, even a lusty man, so must be the music for his pictures. You have to go all out, with a hard-driving orchestra, a broad, exciting musical canvas. But always I am compensated by his expressed appreciation!” (Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, April 11, 1964)

John Wayne

Just as Tiomkin was prescient to create his own music publishing company, Volta Music, Wayne would create Batjac Productions in the mid-1950s. Astute readers of children’s literature may recall that Batjak, Limited was the feared fictitious trading firm—the name chosen for being crisp, blunt, and pleasing to the ear—in Garland Roark’s 1946 novel of romance, titled Wake of the Red Witch, set in the Dutch East Indies between 1875 and 1939. The title refers to the disturbance in the water created by the ship named Red Witch. John Wayne helms the vessel as Captain Ralls in the 1948 film adaptation. When he was forming a new company in the decade after, the actor turned producer recalled the film and selected Batjak as its name; however, a clerical error made by a staff member in the incorporation papers substituted a “c” for  the “k” and thus Wayne’s company became forever known as Batjac.

Batjac went on to produce The Alamo. On display, a coffee-stained script draft, below left, that probably never left the production office pales in comparison to the ragged-edged shooting script, below right, which bears evidence of the toll location filming took on it.

Between the two of them, Tiomkin and Wayne went home with five Academy Awards statuettes, with Tiomkin garnering one for The High and the Mighty. John Wayne’s sole Oscar, for playing the title role in Rooster Cogburn, serves as a deserving gallery centerpiece and sits beautifully displayed in a glass case.

The exhibition was brought to Fort Worth by John Wayne Enterprises run by Ethan Wayne. The adjoining gift shop offers free admission and fills 2,000 square feet with John Wayne’s name or image on everything: apparel, books, household items, leather goods, photographs, and Western accessories.

Dimitri Tiomkin with John Wayne and Pilar Wayne, 1960