During filming Warren Oates would reportedly invite co-stars Ben Johnson and Peter Boyle to his trailer for a three-course meal made up of magic mushrooms on toast, Dexedrine in brandy and vanilla LSD.
The term "who shot John" liquor was used in ordering a drink in the cantina. This was a slang term in the Old West for moonshine or other illicit homemade liquor of exceedingly high strength and poor quality. It might also have been a corruption of the word "hooch."
The sense of the phrase is that one drink of "who shot John" would render the person instantly unconscious and leave his companions standing over the recumbent figure, jokingly wondering "Who shot John?" The phrase and its variants appear in several glossaries of cowboy slang, and apparently made it into the script of the Western The Shootist (1976), in which John Wayne (in his final film role) says, "I hope you're smart enough to know that who-hit-John don't go with guns." Apparently "who shot John" and its relatives were also used to mean an advanced state of inebriation. Robert Hendrickson, in his "Whistlin' Dixie: A Dictionary of Southern Expressions" (1993), defines "drunker than who shot John" as meaning "uncontrollably drunk."
It also later came to mean a long and involved explanation, finger-pointing, or assignment of credit or blame. Nonsense; rubbish.
The sense of the phrase is that one drink of "who shot John" would render the person instantly unconscious and leave his companions standing over the recumbent figure, jokingly wondering "Who shot John?" The phrase and its variants appear in several glossaries of cowboy slang, and apparently made it into the script of the Western The Shootist (1976), in which John Wayne (in his final film role) says, "I hope you're smart enough to know that who-hit-John don't go with guns." Apparently "who shot John" and its relatives were also used to mean an advanced state of inebriation. Robert Hendrickson, in his "Whistlin' Dixie: A Dictionary of Southern Expressions" (1993), defines "drunker than who shot John" as meaning "uncontrollably drunk."
It also later came to mean a long and involved explanation, finger-pointing, or assignment of credit or blame. Nonsense; rubbish.
Kid Blue (1973) was shot in Chupaderos, Mexico, a town of 400 people, which had become a popular filming location in the 1960s. Eleven films had been shot there prior to Kid Blue and it had become a permanent movie set with false fronts on the villagers' adobe huts.