Trivia / Wagons East!

• Contractual Obligation Project: John Candy didn't want to make the film, but Carolco Pictures obligated him to do it after production of Bartholomew v. Neff was abandoned.
• Died During Production: John Candy suffered a fatal heart attack as the film neared completion. His remaining scenes were shot with stand-ins and special effects while others were re-written.
• In Memoriam: "Dedicated to the memory of John Candy".
• Troubled Production: The film would have been an example of this without John Candy dying during production. Some of the details were covered in Robert Crane's book Sex, Celebrity and My Father's Unsolved Murder:
  • Candy was contractually mandated to make the film due to his existing contract with Carolco Pictures. Despite his misgivings about the material, and due to the fact that he owed more than $1 million due to his stake as a minority owner with the Toronto Argonauts football team, he agreed to make the film in Durango, Mexico.
  • Crane, who was Candy's assistant at the time, flew to Durango for location scouting and discovered that the conditions for the cast and crew were substandard. After securing the "best" hotel in the town and dealing with extreme heat, Crane began to notice that the project was quickly spiraling out of control, not only due to underlying factors like the script being "unfunny", but also a lack of chemistry between Candy, Richard Lewis and co-star Ellen Greene. Not helping matters was that Candy was rapidly gaining weight during his time on-set because of homesickness and the fact that he had quit smoking just before filming started. Adding to that was his discovery that Bruce McNall had sold the Argonauts to the Sports Network and Labatts Breweries behind his back — after he'd agreed to shoot on-location videos promoting their upcoming season ticket sale. In response, Candy went on a two-day tequila bender.
  • With eleven days left to go in production, Candy experienced a fatal heart attack in his hotel room. While most of his key scenes were completed, the filmmakers were forced to use a combination of Fake Shemp/re-edited clips to fill out the rest of the scenes in which his character was supposed to appear in (notably, a scene near the end where Candy's character, Harlow, pours out some whiskey in response to a fallen settler re-used footage from a similar scene earlier in the film).
  • The finished film was released to scathing reviews and became a Box Office Bomb, only earning $4.4 million at the box office. It was also part of the string of box office flops that Carolco endured in 1994/1995, culminating in their bankruptcy after the notorious flop Cutthroat Island. In an Amazon review written years later for the film's soundtrack, a musical supervisor mentioned that composer Michael Small was under immense stress due to Candy's death and political infighting at Carolco.

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