The legendary gunfight took place on October 26, 1881 and lasted thirty seconds, resulting in three dead men after an exchange of thirty-four bullets. The fictionalized gunfight in this movie took four days to film, and produced an on-screen bloodbath that lasted five minutes.
Burt Lancaster as "Wyatt Earp", did all his own stunts in the film, including the famous running dive scene at the beginning of the shootout at the OK Corral, moments before he confronts the renowned character actor, Jack Elam, playing gunman, "Tom McLowery". Lancaster drew on his agility as an acrobat, which he was before becoming an actor.
Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster had worked together in L'Homme aux abois (1947), and often saw each other at various Hollywood functions. But, as Douglas recounted in his autobiography, "The Ragman's Son", they didn't become friends until this movie, which lead to some pretty loose-and-easy moments on the set. For instance, they couldn't focus during a scene in which an unarmed Lancaster is surrounded by several men in a saloon, only to be rescued by Douglas, who steals another man's gun and tosses it to Lancaster. "We go out on the porch", Douglas wrote, "and Burt says to me, 'Thanks, Doc'. I was supposed to say, 'Forget it.' When I came to 'Forget it', the ridiculousness of the scene, our great bravery, our machismo, made us howl. We did the scene over and over. It just made us laugh harder." They were finally laughing so much, an angry John Sturges had to send them home for the day.
In his 1988 autobiography "The Ragman's Son", Kirk Douglas wrote that while playing Doc Holliday, he planned exactly how many and what kinds of coughs he would have in each scene so that continuity wouldn't be a problem once the film was edited together.
This film served as one of the inspirations for Mel Brooks' spoof Le shérif est en prison (1974). The silliness of the lyrics of the theme song and the passion with which they were sung was the reason why Brooks selected the same singer - Frankie Laine.