In the mid-1960s, he spent a long time working with director Fred Zinnemann on a large-scale western called "The Day Custer Fell", concerning the battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876. Twentieth Century Fox spent a great deal of money on this project before finally deciding it would be just too expensive and abandoning it. He ruefully noted to interviewers that another film on the same subject, "Custer Of The West" (1967), was put together as a sort of cheap rip-off immediately afterwards and took only a few months to get into cinemas.