John Wayne Nearly Quit Acting Because Of A “Ridiculous” Rom-Com

First impressions aren’t always an accurate portrait of the future, but they sure do leave a lasting mark. In the dawn of his career, one project left such a bad taste in John Wayne‘s mouth that Wayne every nearly quit acting altogether. The culprit: Girls Demand Excitement.

Released in 1931, Girls Demand Excitement tells the story of a hard-working but struggling college student named Peter Brooks, played by Wayne, who is resentful of women being allowed in universities. His worldview is completely turned upside down by rich girl Joan Madison, played by Virginia Cherrill, who ensnares him with her charms. A 35mm nitrate work print of the film is preserved in the UCLA Film and Television Archive, but if Wayne had his way, the whole thing wouldn’t have existed from the start.

The Duke hated ‘Girls Demand Excitement’

In the greater context of Wayne’s career, the Duke was not yet a household name with his pick of the crop for his next project that would define the Western genre and populate it with heroes of steadfast, uncompromising virtues. He got his first taste of some fanfare and screentime in earnest with 1930’s The Big Trail. The Raoul Walsh-directed Western would be Wayne’s very first leading role – it was also a box office flop because of the Depression.

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But at least it was in keeping with what Wayne wanted to be in. Girls Demand Excitement did not even have that going for it.

“So the next picture they had me do [after ‘The Big Trail’], they had been training some girls to play basketball for some musical that they were going to make that would cost a lot of money,” recalled Wayne in a 1976 interview in The Bobby Wygant Archive. “Now with the depression, they’ve decided against it. So now they have these girls that have learned to play basketball. So they write a story about a college in which the boys don’t want the girls there. So it was probably as ridiculous a thing as I’ve ever been in.”

John Wayne nearly quit because of this film

All the while, Wayne kept one foot in the door at his own college, due to how volatile a career in Hollywood could be. While he felt safer continuing his education while trying his hand at the entertainment industry, Wayne genuinely worried that the role of Peter would get him picked on by his male classmates.

On top of that, Wayne already had some views of the world that were pretty set in stone, from his traditional views of masculinity to his refusal to ever let his movie characters shoot a foe in the back. As far as Wayne was concerned, Girls Demand Excitement was nothing but “couples hanging out of windows in each other’s clutches, leaving lipstick everywhere,” to the point he considered the film downright vulgar. These downsides all greatly tempted Wayne to just quit Hollywood then and there.