Gun Slinger - Bo Diddley

1960

Lean, mean, and packed with attitude

In 1993, Kurt Russell saved a dying Western. In 2025, Val Kilmer’s funeral looked like a scene straight out of it. For 32 years, their roles in Tombstone have lived inside the dust of Arizona.

It was never supposed to be a masterpiece.

Tombstone started as a disaster in 1993. The first director was fired after three weeks. The script was bleeding money. The studio thought Westerns were dead. The crew called it “Kevin Costner’s sloppy seconds” because Costner was making his own Wyatt Earp movie down the road.

Then Kurt Russell did something actors don’t do.

He became the director. Without credit. Without pay for it.

Every morning at 4 AM, Russell was drawing shot lists. He rewrote scenes overnight. He cut 20 pages out of the script himself. He told the studio, “You’re either firing me too, or you’re letting me finish this movie.” They let him. But they never put his name on it as director. George P. Cosmatos got the credit. Everyone on set knew the truth.

Russell had one rule: “We’re not making a Western. We’re making a film about friendship.”

That friendship was Doc Holliday. And Doc was Val Kilmer.

Kilmer showed up to the set having lost 30 pounds. He filled his hotel room with 19th-century medical books. He learned to roll a coin across his knuckles until his fingers bled. He stayed in a Southern drawl for six months, on and off camera. The crew stopped calling him Val. They called him Doc.

Russell and Kilmer made a pact. “No matter what happens with this film, we protect each other’s work.”

The most famous scene almost didn’t happen.

The “I’m your huckleberry” showdown. The studio hated it. “Too poetic. Audiences won’t get it.” Russell fought for it. He said, “If you cut that line, you cut the heart out of the film.”

On the day, Kilmer was sick with a 102 fever. He could barely stand. Russell told him, “We can shoot this tomorrow.”

Kilmer looked at him through sweat and said, “Doc wouldn’t wait. Neither do I.”

They did it in two takes.

Tombstone came out Christmas 1993. Critics shrugged. Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp was supposed to bury it six months later. It didn’t. Tombstone made $56 million and became a religion. Costner’s film died.

But that’s not what was being said at Val Kilmer’s memorial in April 2025.

Kilmer had fought throat cancer for a decade. He lost his voice. The man who once delivered the most quoted line in Western history could barely whisper. He died on April 2, 2025, at 65.

The funeral was in New Mexico. Small. Private. Dusty.

Kurt Russell stood up to speak. He was 74 now. He didn’t bring a speech. He brought a prop.

He pulled a silver watch from his pocket. The same one he carried in Tombstone as Wyatt Earp.

He opened it, looked down, and said only one line.

“I’m your huckleberry.”

The room broke.

Russell told the family later that he and Kilmer had talked two weeks before he passed. Kilmer could only type. His last message to Russell was four words:

“Still your friend, huckleberry.”

For 32 years, people have argued about who was the real star of Tombstone. Russell carried the film. Kilmer stole it. But on that day in New Mexico, nobody argued.

Because every now and then, a movie stops being a movie.

The costumes fade. The box office fades. The reviews fade.

But the friendship doesn’t.

Kurt Russell saved Tombstone in 1993 so it could exist.

Val Kilmer saved Tombstone in every scene so it would be remembered.

In 2017, Kilmer wrote on his blog: “Doc Holliday taught me that you can be dying and still be the most alive person in the room.”

In 2025, Russell proved it.

He signed the guest book at the funeral with one line.

“He was my huckleberry. Always.”

The truth Russell walked out with that day is one very few actors ever feel. You can win awards. You can play Batman. You can play Elvis. You can play anything.

But once in a lifetime, you get to play a friend. And if you do it right, the world won’t let him die.

Thirty-two years after Tombstone, in the quietest room in New Mexico, Kurt Russell reached into his pocket and explained, very softly, that the man lying in front of him wasn’t just a co-star.

A colored historical photograph of the American gunfighter Doc Holliday, likely taken in 1887 during his final months in Glenwood Springs, Colorado....

The most feared gunslinger of the Wild West didn’t meet his end in a hail of bullets—he died quietly in bed. This last known photograph of Doc Holliday, taken in 1887, shows a man whose life burned fast and bright, only to fizzle out in the stillness of a hotel room. A gambler, a gunfighter, a dentist turned outlaw, Holliday embodied contradictions: educated and respectable in his Georgia upbringing, yet reckless and deadly in the Arizona dust, with cards in one hand and a pistol in the other.

Holliday’s legend was cemented during the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881, where he stood shoulder to shoulder with Wyatt Earp, bullets whizzing and blood spilling around them. Tales of his deadly aim and fearless courage spread across the frontier, making him both feared and respected. Yet even as he stared down outlaws and lawmen alike, a far deadlier adversary lurked within: tuberculosis. The disease consumed him slowly, leaving him coughing blood between poker games, drinking to dull the pain, and living on the razor’s edge of life and death until his body could no longer keep pace with his legend.