A Book on the Making of Lonesome Dove 9780292739482

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A Book on the Making of L onesome D ove

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T he S ou t hw e st er n & Mexica n P ho t o g r ap h y S er i es This series originates from the Wittliff Collections, an archive and creative center established at Texas State University in San Marcos to celebrate the cultural arts of the region. Bi ll W ittli f f Series Editor

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Uni ve rsity of T e xas Pre ss  Aust in

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A Book on the Making of

L onesome D ove

Interviews by John Spong Color Plates by Jeff Wilson Photographs by Bill Wittliff

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Interviewees

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P e t e r B o gdanovic h

Lynn Kr e ssel

J . P. Bryan

Diane L ane

B il ly Bu rt on

Nicholas L emann

Ma r k Bu sby

Dys on L ovell

Dav id Carpe n te r

L ar ry McM urt ry

C h r i s C oop e r

Doug M ils om e

B a r ry C orbi n

Van R amsey

G r e gory C u rti s

Willia m S ander s on

S t e ve Davi s

R icky S ch r oder

S u z a n ne de Passe

Car olyn S ee

Rob e rt Duvall

R ich ar d S lot kin

Fr e de r ic Forrest

D. B . S weeney

G e or ge Ge tsc how

B ar ry Tubb

Da n ny Glove r

M ary S lack Webb

D on Graham

Cary Wh ite

S t e p h e n H arrigan

L eon Wie seltier

Dav e H ic ke y

Er ic Williams

A n je l ic a H uston

S imon Wincer

Tomm y Le e Jon es

B illy Winn

Mich ae l Korda

B ill Witt liff

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For Julie —john sp ong

Eternal thanks to the Cast and Crew and to all the other Boys and Girls who had a hand in the Making of Lonesome Dove. — b i l l w i tt l iff Copyright © 2012 by the University of Texas Press Text copyright © 2012 by John Spong All rights reserved  |  Printed in China  |  First edition, 2012 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions  |  University of Texas Press  |  P.O. Box 7819  |  Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html ∞ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Lib rary of C ongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Spong, John. A book on the making of Lonesome dove / interviews by John Spong ; color plates by Jeff Wilson ; photographs by Bill Wittliff. — 1st ed. p.   cm. — (The Southwestern & Mexican photography series) ISBN 978-0-292-73584-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-292-73948-2 (e-book) 1. Lonesome Dove (Television program : 1989) 2. McMurtry, Larry. Lonesome Dove. 3. Television producers and directors—Interviews. 4. Television actors and actresses—Interviews. 5. McMurtry, Larry—Interviews. I. Wilson, Jeff. II. Wittliff, William D. III. Title. PN1992.77.L65S77 2012 791.45'72—dc23    2011049659

page 2  Larry McMurtry’s original script for The Streets of Laredo page 3  Opening page of Lonesome Dove with Bill Wittliff’s notations  pages 4–5  Hat Creek Cattle Company sign page 6  Contact sheet  pages 8–9 Filming  page 10  Gus, Ben Rainey, and Jasper  page 13  Texas Ranger badge  page 14  Jake, Gus, and Call  pages 16–17  Call riding herd   

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C ontents Our Epic 19 T he B o ok 29 T he M i n is e ri es 59 Ac know l e d g me nts 1 57 c a st 162 c re w 164

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Larry McMurtry, 1987

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O ur E pic C on t e mp lati ng the sw eep an d spraw l of La r ry McMu rtry ’s Lonesome Dove from the vantage of twenty-seven years, it’s easy to forget that the story is fairly simple. Sometime in the late nineteenth century, two graying, retired Texas Ranger captains, Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, embark on a final adventure, their unlikely goal to push two thousand head of cattle north from the Rio Grande and become the first cattlemen in the Montana territory. But you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who would describe Lonesome Dove so modestly. It is the great hero myth of Texas, the state’s favorite depiction of itself and the world’s favorite depiction of Texas. Since its publication, on June 13, 1985, more than 2.5 million copies have been printed in the United States; the 1989 miniseries, which is the way most fans first came to the story, is the best-selling western DVD of all time. But the better measure of Lonesome Dove’s import is anecdotal. If you know a Texan named Gus under the age of twenty, odds are he was named after McCrae. I know two such kids—and one is a girl. 19

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To some, Lonesome Dove is a novel, the achievement that turned McMurtry—an author of moderately read books that had been made into great movies—into one of the most popular and respected writers of the twentieth century. To others, it’s Austin screenwriter Bill Wittliff’s miniseries, the finest western film ever produced. Some would describe it as an epic journey of distinctly American ambition; others consider it a universal depiction of loyalty between friends. One fan will say the story belongs to the endlessly charming Gus, that everything you need to know about living and loving

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is contained in his portrait. Another will argue that it’s the story of ramrod Woodrow Call, a man who abided by the code of the time, who refused to allow himself to feel and wound up alone. The wildly varied interpretations point to the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Lonesome Dove, the thing that distinguishes it from mere entertainment. It’s at once a celebration and a critique of the myth of the Texas cowboy, a reflection of McMurtry’s lifelong ambivalence about the people and the place that shaped him.

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It’s a story that makes such an impression that you remember not only its substance but where you were when you initially took it in. I first read Lonesome Dove in 1989, through the weeks that followed my college graduation. Every time I’ve picked it up since it has taken me back in time, not to the Old West but to an inflatable pool in a front yard in Waco—and the sense of limitless possibilities that I recall aren’t Gus’s and Call’s, but my own. Then, as I watch these familiar characters go about their living and dying, I remember why I love the book: it’s the best depiction of a friendship that I’ve ever read, an 843-page expansion on a comment Dizzy Gillespie made after his friend Charlie Parker died: “He was the other half of my heartbeat.” When I compiled this oral history for Texas Monthly in the spring of 2010, I talked to dozens of people involved in the creation of the book and the miniseries, as well as to critics and scholars. But I also talked to fans. There’s an archive devoted to the miniseries’ production housed in the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, in San Marcos, and staffers there used a mailing list of Lonesome Dove lovers to solicit testimonials. Responses came in from around Texas, the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Some were cute: people had crafted poems, songs, Gus and Call action figures, and even a backyard replica of the Hat Creek Cattle Company’s border bunkhouse. One man

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said his daughters’ suitors had to watch the miniseries before they could be accepted into the family. But other revelations ran deeper. A woman described finding refuge in the book over the eight months she spent caring for her dying mother. A family watched it on a hospital VCR during the weekend their patriarch died. A man placed the novel on his dead uncle’s chest just before burying his coffin. Lonesome Dove is not a place where these people go to escape. They turn to it for definition, for heroes who look and talk like them, who address life in a way they wish they could. Few books or films manage to do that for an entire culture, and none has done it for Texas to the extent that Lonesome Dove has. It’s our Gone with the Wind. It’s the way we want to see ourselves.

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Gus and Jake

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Call with horses  | overleaf : Stolen horses running through Lonesome Dove

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T he B ook The novel is lengthy by any standard, populated by a dizzying array of major and minor characters, each of whom requires an investment of time to get to know and keep straight. And though it can accurately be described as a cattle-drive book, Larry McMurtry spends a very leisurely 250 pages getting around to the drive itself. Still, while many fans identify Lonesome Dove as the longest book they’ve ever read, they also say that they raced through it—and that it’s one of the few books they’ve reread.

TOMMY LEE JONES portrayed Woodrow Call in the mini-

written almost in vengeance to show that novels can do anything better than a movie.

series. Lonesome Dove is a mosaic of jokes, legends, superstitions, and real people, all of it coming together in a fascinating narrative. The language sounds like it’s coming from my country. Halfway through I realized I wasn’t going to want it to end, so I would only read maybe fifty pages a day.

M ARY S LACK WE BB is the owner of the Lonesome Dove Inn, in Archer City, and a childhood friend of McMurtry’s. Larry would send copies of his new books to my mom, and I remember when we got Lonesome Dove. It was summertime. I started it at 6 a.m. and turned the last page at 6 a.m. the next day.

ROB ERT DUVALL

portrayed Augustus “Gus” McCrae. I read it in ten days. And later I named a horse Woodrow.

CARY WHI T E

was the set designer on the miniseries. My family was leaving on a trip someplace, my wife trying to pack and get the boys going, and she couldn’t find me. I was hiding in the car reading Lonesome Dove.

P E T ER B OGDANOVICH

directed and cowrote, with McMurtry, the film adaptation of The Last Picture Show. I read it in one week and thought it was brilliant. I felt it was

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LEON WIES ELTIER is the literary editor of the New S T EVE DAVI S is the curator at Texas State’s Southwestern Republic. I’ve got two copies, one that Larry inscribed Writers Collection, the home of Bill Wittliff’s Lonesome Dove and a Hebrew translation. It’s about the least Jewish book I could ever imagine. But in Hebrew it’s also impossible to put down.

B ARRY COR B IN

portrayed Sheriff July Johnson’s deputy, Roscoe Brown. Go to any ranch in the country and there’s two things you’ll see consistently. One is a copy of Elmer Kelton’s The Time It Never Rained. The other is a DVD or a VHS of Lonesome Dove, usually worn-out and usually about the fourth or fifth copy they’ve owned.

archive, which includes numerous props from the film. The exhibit draws people from all over the world, and when they see the prop of Gus’s dead body, it makes some of them weep all over again. I’ve seen people drop to their knees and pray.

LARRY MC M URT RY is the author of Lonesome Dove. You know . . . it’s just a book. The fact that people connect with it and make a fetish out of it is something I prefer to ignore. I haven’t held Lonesome Dove in my hands or read it in years. I just don’t think much about my books, particularly not ones that go back twenty-five years.

Brooch

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McMurtry was born in Wichita Falls in 1936 to a family that had worked cattle and horses in the area since 1877, when his grandparents arrived from Missouri. He grew up on the family ranch outside Archer City and worked it as a teen but eventually declined to continue in the McMurtry cattleman tradition. He’d already been seized by books, the passion that would come to define him. After high school he fled ranching and Archer City—which he once famously referred to as a “bookless town, in a bookless part of the state”—for the singular paradise of a university library. He eventually earned a bachelor’s degree in English from North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas), in Denton, and a master’s from Rice University.

DAVE HICKEY

is an art critic, a professor of art practice at the University of New Mexico, and a longtime friend of McMurtry’s. Larry is a writer, and it’s kind of like being a critter. If you leave a cow alone, he’ll eat grass. If you leave Larry alone, he’ll write books. When he’s in public, he may say hello and goodbye, but otherwise he is just resting, getting ready to go write.

Archer City once for a month or two and began to understand what living in the country means: it’s sitting in a little bitty restaurant and looking out the window at a cow, but you only have powdered creamer for your coffee.

GEORGE GE T S CHOW

is writer-in-residence at the May­born School of Journalism at the University of North Texas. When he was a kid, he would walk from the family homeplace on Idiot Ridge to this little red barn a few hundred yards away, climb to the loft, and read. He said that if the cowboys caught him with a book, they’d tell him to take off his spurs and check himself into the nervous hospital.

M ICHAEL KORDA is McMurtry’s longtime editor at Simon & Schuster. Writing is like breathing for him. He gets up every morning and stacks a bunch of yellow paper next to his typewriter, and from then until breakfast he types. If you stay down at the ranch, you hear him doing it because he uses that old-fashioned typewriter that goes duh-duhduh-DING! Just typing away. That’s what he does.

M ARK BUSBY is the director of the Southwest Regional Humanities Center at Texas State. He talked in his early work about not being cut out to be a cowboy. But, he said, that’s what all of his family had been raised to be, cowboys, with this basic value on work and production. So if you ask him how many

DAVE HICKEY

We’re close in age, but he grew up in an older world, out in the country. I stayed at his house in

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books he’s published, he can tell you immediately. It’s as if he realized, “I can’t drive a hundred head of cattle, but I can produce this many pages and this many books.”

GREGORY CURT IS

was the editor of Texas Monthly from 1981 to 2000. Larry’s probably read ten times more than anyone I know. I took a fiction-writing course from him when I was a senior at Rice, in the late sixties. He distributed long reading lists, mostly contemporary books and authors that I had never heard of. But there were also literary westerns like The Ox-Bow Incident, by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and cowboy memoirs like We Pointed Them North, by Teddy Blue Abbott. I’d never heard of them either.

P E T ER B OGDANOVICH

The first time I saw him on his home turf was in the Dallas airport. He was wearing a T-shirt that read “Minor Regional Novelist” and had a chipped front tooth. He was very Texas.

LEON WIE S ELTIER

Larry is an uncommonly disabused man. I remember once we were having dinner at Nora’s in Washington, and he was telling me about some famous fight Kit Carson had with a great Indian chief. He said that, according to legend, they waded into a creek and fought hand-to-hand until Kit Carson valiantly overcame his opponent. Larry said, “Well, the truth isn’t that. The truth is that Kit Carson waited for the Indian to show up and shot him in the back.” Then Larry paused and said, “Which is exactly what he should have done.” I thought, “Oh, so that is who my friend is.” The very antithesis of the awful Liberty Valance rule: He prefers printing the truth to printing the legend. He’s a born demythologizer. But he stays with the places and the people that he has unsentimentally demythologized. He doesn’t do it out of contempt.

Tomahawk

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Gus at the Dry Bean

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McMurtry was twenty-five when his first novel came out, 1961’s Horseman, Pass By, and he followed that with two more by the end of the decade, Leaving Cheyenne (1963) and The Last Picture Show (1966). They became known as the Thalia trilogy for their shared setting—the fictional small town of Thalia, a thinly disguised Archer City—and their exploration of the collision of urban modernity and old, rural Texas. Hollywood adapted two of those books into Oscar-nominated movies, 1963’s Hud (Horseman, renamed) and 1971’s The Last Picture Show. In 1972 his Picture Show collaborator, Peter Bogdanovich, convinced Warner Bros. to pay the two of them to work on a western. The film was never made, but it planted the seeds of McMurtry’s opus. P E T ER B OGDANOVICH

Cybill Shepherd [Bogdanovich’s girlfriend at the time] was shooting Heartbreak Kid in Miami Beach, and Larry and I decided to meet there to discuss the picture. I will never forget the incongruity of Larry and me sitting on a balcony at the Fontainebleau, overlooking the Olympic-size swimming pool where Cybill is doing laps, and Larry saying to me, “So what kind of western do you want to make?” So I told him. I wanted John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, Cybill, the Clancy Brothers [an Irish folk group], Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, Ellen Burstyn, Ryan O’Neal, and so on. I said it needed to be a trek: they start somewhere, they go somewhere. We didn’t want to do cattle because that was Red River. Larry suggested horses. Fine. And he said we might as well start at the Rio Grande and go north.

We started talking about the characters. Larry said they could have a pig farm, that that would be funny. I said, “Yeah, Duke Wayne and Jimmy Stewart with a pig farm would be funny.” Then we discussed who Fonda would be. Really the characters that emerged were a combination of people that Larry knew about from his childhood, combined very strongly with the personas of the actors we were going to use. Fonda always had a slightly ambiguous quality, so he became the slick one, the one who made you wonder if he was a good guy or a bad guy. Jimmy was the character most connected with the land. We named him Augustus, because we liked the way Jimmy Stewart would say, “Augush-tush.” And Wayne’s character was always in charge. But we sent him up quite a bit.

Cover page of Larry McMurtry’s The Streets of Laredo

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ST E P HEN HARRIGAN is an Austin novelist, screenwriter, and essayist. In McMurtry’s script these guys are tramps, stalled out completely, just gabbing on the porch.

that I rewrote or cut down. We tried a lot of different titles: The Brazos, The Compadres. The one we settled on was Streets of Laredo.

P E T ER B OGDANOVICH

LARRY MC MURT RY

I wanted the Clancy Brothers because [director] John Ford had told me his uncles had come from Ireland to fight in the Civil War, and when I’d asked which side, he said, “Either side!” I liked that. And Cybill had a cut on her lip from running into a barbed wire fence as a child. So I said let’s emphasize that. Let’s have someone say, “Where’d you get the scar?” and she could respond, “Somebody bit me.” Things like that went into the plot.

ST E P HEN HARRIGAN

Fonda’s character, who becomes Jake Spoon, had a much bigger part. And Gus dies when he’s trying to tame a horse. He doesn’t get killed by Indians. So you don’t have the Call character bringing his body back.

LARRY MC MURTRY

This was a different story. This

wasn’t a trail-driving story.

P E T ER B OGDANOVICH

Larry went home, and I went back to Los Angeles, and he would send me pages

The draft was welcomed by the studio, but not the three actors. This was a story about aging men. Eventually Stewart and Fonda came around because they weren’t working that much. Wayne was working right up until he dropped, but he didn’t like it, and he wouldn’t do it.

DON GRAHA M is a professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. John Wayne wasn’t going to lend himself to a total critique of the genre he had been working in for forty years. He wasn’t going to make Blazing Saddles.

P E T ER B OGDANOVICH

It was definitely about the end of that era. One of the first things Jimmy’s character goes into is how long it takes to pee when you’re older. And there was an extraordinary scene where they ride into a town and go into a bar with pictures of cowboys all over the place, but none of them. So they go in the back room looking for one because they know it used to be there. They go through all of these pictures and finally find it. The sequence ended with a close-up of the photo. It was very touching.

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Indian extras

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By then McMurtry was living in Washington, DC, which put him in a kind of cultural limbo. He’d already figured out that he was too sophisticated for small-town Texas, and now he was learning, according to his editor, Michael Korda, that he was too country for the city. He opened a bookshop in DC where he could concentrate on reading, writing, and collecting. He continued to type each morning: screenplays, essays, book reviews, and fiction. The people in his novels remained contemporary, but he moved them out of the country, first to big-city Houston—the setting for 1975’s Terms of Endearment, considered by many to be his best book—then out of Texas entirely.

M ICHAEL KORDA

NICHOLA S LE M ANN is the dean of Columbia Universi-

I’d met Larry when he was looking for a publisher for Moving On [published in 1970]. It had all the makings of the Great American Novel—except that it was about rodeo. Our sales department loved it so much they had buttons made reading “I’m a Patsy,” after the heroine. However, it just wasn’t the huge success we hoped it would be. After that, I would tell the sales reps at every meeting that one of these days Larry would write the Great American Novel, and it would be a huge success.

ty’s journalism school and a staff writer at the New Yorker. Larry was considered the most important Texas writer, but at the same time he was also the bad boy of Texas letters. In a Narrow Grave [McMurtry’s 1968 essay collection] semi–made fun of such sacred figures as Frank Dobie, which you were never supposed to do.

B ILL WI T T LIFF is an Austin writer and photographer who adapted Lonesome Dove for television and served as an executive producer of the miniseries. My wife, Sally, and I started Encino Press in Austin in the sixties, and we published In a Narrow Grave, which had all these four-letter words. And it jumped some of the Texas heroes, some of my heroes. Ooh, man, once or twice a week somebody called my office and chewed my ass out.

LEON WIE S ELTIER

Larry was respected but not well understood. People in New York have extremely narrow horizons. The parochialism of the center is always greater than that of the provinces. In the provinces, they keep an eye on the center, but in the center they just gaze lovingly at themselves with both eyes.

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Luke, Elmira, and Big Zwey

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DON GRAHA M

Then, in 1981, McMurtry wrote this famous piece for the Texas Observer, “Ever a Bridegroom,” in which he went back and machine-gunned everybody he hadn’t taken out in Narrow Grave. It was like the Germans in World War II retracing the field for anyone still living. He went through the whole catalog of Texas writers and said they were too sentimental and romantic, that they should stop writing about the past. Meanwhile, he holes up somewhere and writes Lonesome Dove, which made his fortune.

what I really knew, which was how to behave at a debutante party in Fort Worth. They wanted to know about cowboys.

LARRY MC M URTRY

I had done all the contemporary material I knew anything about. I had no place to go but back in time. I suppose it is a historical novel, but I didn’t go outside my family memory. Our ranching experience goes back to the 1870s. I had nine ranching uncles, the oldest of whom were trail drivers, and I heard them talk about it when I was a little boy.

NICHOLA S LE M ANN

He declared that the big topic for writers in Texas was urban Texas, which really offended the Texas literary establishment. They believed that Texas was fundamentally rural and real Texas literature had to be rural literature. Then suddenly he writes a book about a cattle drive that is unmistakably McMurtrian but, nonetheless, treats the cowboys as heroes.

DON GRAHA M

I think part of the reason he wrote Lonesome Dove—and I have never heard him or anyone say it— was that he had a good idea of the market. Texas was coming up on its sesquicentennial, and [James] Michener had been selected by the governor to come down to write Texas and tell us about ourselves. I think McMurtry wanted to say, “I’m here. I know this past better than any Pennsylvania-Dutch Yankee does.”

LARRY MC MURTRY

You don’t have to be consistent. What I feel when I write discursively and when I write fiction are just different. For an essay you have to think from sentence to sentence and make one follow another. Fiction is less conscious. It’s a trancelike experience for me. I see the characters, listen to what they say, and write it down.

LARRY MC M URT RY

That’s stupid. That didn’t have anything to do with the creation of Lonesome Dove. The script had languished for twelve years before I finally realized they didn’t want to do it. So I bought it back for $35,000. Then I picked it up and laid it back down three times. I started it and stopped to write Cadillac Jack [1982], and then again to write Desert Rose [1983], and then I left it for another year or two. I didn’t have a title. One night I was having dinner at the famous steakhouse in Ponder, about ten miles west of Denton, and I saw this old church bus with “Lonesome Dove” written on its side and knew that was it. I went home and finished the book. I already had about 350 pages, so it didn’t take long. A few months.

DAVE HICKEY

Terms of Endearment was one of the most shocking books I’d ever read. A Texas novelist writing about shopping with Aurora? Where are the guns? A lot of us who liked Terms of Endearment felt like Lonesome Dove was Larry writing himself an annuity. I thought, “Oh, shit, he’s finally doing what everybody wants him to—he’s writing a cowboy book.” And I understood that. I’d had all these professors from Harvard in graduate school, and they didn’t want to know

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Working at his standard pace of ten typed pages a day, he produced a 1,600-page manuscript and delivered it to Simon & Schuster in late 1984. On its surface it was the story of a cattle drive, based loosely—and, in parts, closely—on the real lives of Texas trail drivers Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving. But the book had a greater ambition. It was written in the style of a Victorian novel, with dozens of characters to fall in love with or detest, and sharp social commentary, in this case on the ethos and mythos of the American West. Korda quickly informed the sales reps that this was the epic they’d been waiting for.

LAR RY MC MU RTRY

It all comes out of Don Quixote. It is the visionary and the practical man. Gus and Call. That is the only thing that is the same as the original script, these two characters, these archetypes.

CAROLYN SEE is a Washington Post book critic and UCLA English professor who teaches Lonesome Dove. Gus is about affection as much as achievement. He is immensely lovable, performing meaningless acts of gallantry just to watch himself being darling. And Call is such a pain in the ass. He’s just awful. But that’s why it’s an American story. If we didn’t have the Captain Calls, we wouldn’t have skyscrapers or the Golden Gate Bridge or the Pentagon.

MAR K BU S BY

Call is a figure lacking some redeeming qualities. There’s the way he treats his son, the way he’s incapable of sustaining a relationship with another human being except for Gus. Yet people don’t see those as flaws. They think the strength of his character overrides that.

Deets’s hat

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L A RRY MCM U RT RY

Why won’t Captain Call acknowledge his son? You know, that has puzzled me as much as it puzzles readers. I don’t know. I kept expecting him to, and then he didn’t, except to give Newt his horse.

RIC HA R D SLO T KIN

is a professor emeritus of English and American studies at Wesleyan University and the author of an award-winning trilogy on the myth of the American West. They go to Montana because they understand themselves as heroes, men of a certain function in the world. The frontier is closed in Texas. Their function has passed. So they make a new frontier.

S T E P HEN H A RRIG A N

They are two deeply flawed men who desperately need each other. Gus and Call are like Holmes and Watson, or Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, two halves of a single personality. Call’s emotional limitations are at the heart of the book. Gus’s grandness and acceptance of life are what keep you reading, but it’s Call’s story. It’s the story of a guy who missed out on life.

D ON G RA H A M

The book is kind of like a buddy movie, which is a constant in American literature, going all the way back to James Fenimore Cooper. They’re close friends on a grand adventure. They know the West is over, and they are doing this as a last hurrah.

S T E VE DAVIS

A lot of people think that the characters Gus and Call are modeled on Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight. Their famous cattle trail actually went through New Mexico to Colorado.

Call and Gus

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J. P. B RYA N is a Houston oil executive, lifetime member of the Texas State Historical Association board of directors, and owner of one of the largest private collections of Old West artifacts and documents. Loving was always the scout, and One-Armed Bob Wilson was his segundo. They would ride ahead of the herd to check for water, Indians, fires, buffalo, or whatever. So once they got in a fight with some Comanches, and it was just like Lonesome Dove. They dug themselves in a riverbank for cover. Loving was severely wounded, though it was in the arm. It rained. Wilson took off his clothes, floated off under cover of dark, and was almost dead when he finally located Goodnight. By then Loving had escaped and been taken to Fort Sumter by some buffalo hunters, where a doctor did a poor job on his arm. He died of gangrene, but not until Goodnight had gotten there. On his death bed he

asked Goodnight to take him back to the family cemetery in Weatherford. So Goodnight packed him in salt and took him back and buried him there.

S T E VE DAVIS

One of Goodnight’s most trusted men was Bose Ikard, an African American. Goodnight used him to get his money to the bank because he figured nobody would think a black man had any money, so nobody would rob him. When Ikard died—not like Deets, but as an old man—Goodnight erected a marker that said, “.  .  . served with me four years on the Goodnight-Loving trail, never shirked a duty or disobeyed an order, rode with me in many stampedes, participated in three engagements with Comanche, splendid behavior.”

Continuity polaroids, props

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LAR RY MC MU RT RY

The Goodnight-Loving relationship is echoed, but it’s just echoes. I did copy the words Goodnight put on Bose Ikard’s monument in Weatherford. And I knew vaguely that I was paralleling part of Teddy Blue Abbott. But I’m not thinking about that when I’m writing.

and how very early Hollywood did that. Lonesome Dove was a kind of response, a way of restoring the actual experience. Ideals without idealization: that’s Larry. If bad things can happen, they do.

DAVE H ICKE Y

Larry has something that my grandfather had, which is a ruthless view of nature. I remember watching a sunset with my grandfather as a kid. I said, “Isn’t that beautiful?” He said, “Oh, yeah. And while you’re admiring nature, nature is looking back at you, saying, ‘Yum, yum, here comes dinner.’” There is in Larry an idea of nature as this monstrous force in which we make our way very fragilely. Lonesome Dove is very good about this.

LEON W I ES ELT I ER

There are so many novels now in which you can smell the research. Gore Vidal once said that when he was writing his novel about Lincoln, he would read the historians at night and write that chapter in the morning. It was all a quick study. But with Larry, you feel that he had all the history, geography, and mythology already in him, that he possessed his subject and didn’t have to work it up.

L A RRY MCM U RT RY

The book is permeated with criticism of the West from start to finish. Call’s violence, for example. But people are nostalgic for the Old West, even though it was actually a terrible culture. Not nice. Exterminated the Indians. Ruined the landscape. By 1884 the plains were already overgrazed. We killed the right animal, the buffalo, and brought in the wrong animal, wetland cattle. And it didn’t work. The cattle business was never a good business. Thousands went broke.

RIC H AR D S L OTK IN

The myth of the West is an idealized version of American history. The Fenimore Cooper version is white people against Indians, the uncivilized. But it’s also these same white people against “dudes,” the eastern bankers who are too white, too civilized. The true American lives on the frontier, on the border between these two worlds. Fenimore Cooper could tell that story. He lived on the frontier, moved to the city, and wrote what he remembered, like a lot of nineteenth-century writers. By the time you get to the era of movies, that’s getting thin. And by the great period of western movies, the fifties and sixties, you’re not dealing with people who know the real West at all. It’s myth based on myth at that point.

N IC HOLA S LE M A N N By being as realistic as he was about cattle drives and people and their lives, by de–John Wayne-izing the West, he actually made the myth appealing for a new age.

D ON GRA H A M

The Godfather was supposed to demythologize the mob, too, but we all wanted to be gangsters after we saw it, right?

LEON W I ES ELTI ER

One of the first things I learned from Larry was the extent to which what we think of as the West is what Hollywood taught us to think of as the West—

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Sketch of costume for Lorena by Van Ramsey  |  Sketch of Dry Bean by Cary White

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When Lonesome Dove hit bookstores, in June 1985, the reaction was universally glowing. The Los Angeles Times called it “McMurtry’s loftiest novel, a wondrous work.” Writing for the New York Times Book Review, Lemann dubbed it “the Great Cowboy Novel.” The book spent twenty-four weeks on the hardcover best-seller list and then twenty-eight weeks more on the paperback side. It also changed the way the world viewed its author. In April 1986 Lonesome Dove won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and three years later McMurtry was elected president of the PEN American Center, the prestigious literary organization whose past presidents included Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag. McMurtry was the first non–New Yorker to head PEN since 1922.

DON GR AH AM

M A RK BU S bY

That same year, 1985, Cormac McCarthy published Blood Meridian. It sold about 1,200 copies. Michener’s Texas sold well, but McMurtry’s book immediately became the favorite of all sentient Texans. I was going out to L.A. a lot at that time to work on a book about Audie Murphy, and every time I got on a goddam airplane, it was littered with copies. Everywhere you looked, there was Lonesome Dove.

I think it could have been a smaller book. The side story about the Arkansas sheriff, July Johnson, is not particularly compelling. That whole section probably could have been cut and wouldn’t have hurt the novel at all.

MIC H AEL KOR DA

C A ROLY N SE E

DAVE H ICKE Y

Lonesome Dove’s like the Richard Pryor joke: “And it’s deep, too.”

The reviewers were beginning to feel a degree of guilt over the way they had reviewed Larry in the past. That was doubled by the dawning recognition that, with his bookshop, he was involved in the cause of books, and even if he did grow up in Archer City, he was a bona fide intellectual and literary person. But the only thing that mattered was that Lonesome Dove is a terrific book.

There are sections in the book where the action isn’t necessarily going forward, people kind of wander around . . . a guy picks up a feral child . . . here’s a mountain of bones. But once you get out on the road, that’s all you do, meet weird people. Look at Kerouac. He’s not just going from here to there, he’s stopping and wandering. The country is enormous, it’s weird and haunted.

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Daily call sheets

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Call’s return to Lonesome Dove

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LEON W I ES ELT I E R

It’s one of those books that crushes the distinction between high literature and popular fiction, the way Dickens did. I mean, Dickens was high and Dickens was low: he serialized great art. Lonesome Dove shows that a sophisticated writer can move millions of people.

There’s a reputation to be made among intelligent readers, and McMurtry has that readership. He has it in Australia, Europe, England, here. But he doesn’t have it in the academy, where Lonesome Dove doesn’t count as “literature.” It doesn’t have the rhetorical flourishes that English professors want. That’s a crude statement, but I don’t ever hear anybody in the academy talking about Lonesome Dove, whereas McCarthy’s Blood Meridian has got a small library of scholarly exegesis and analysis.

a good time, somebody is about to get shot. You’re sitting around having a nice conversation in the Dairy Queen, and then you go outside and get mowed down by gunfire. There’s a Calvinist rhythm to that, and a vision of the omniscience of evil that is so profound as to encourage complacency. If we’re all going to be shot after we have a good meal, why bother? In No Country for Old Men, the Mexican mafia are totally omniscient; they know when you’re at the bus station. That’s not good storytelling. But Larry has what Dickens had: no matter how horrible what’s happening in the narrative is, there’s a little bubble of laughter underneath that’s all about how much fun it is to write. The words never quite touch the page. There’s this sort of ludic energy—thank you—this joyful propulsion that drives the prose along.

DAV E H IC K EY

L E ON W IE SE LT IE R

DON GR AH AM

Professors ignore Larry because you can’t teach seamless talent. He does what Henry James did; all the ideas and commentary are subsumed in the narrative, and trying to teach that would be like using Stevie Wonder to teach songwriting. What you learn is that he can do it and you can’t. McCarthy’s writing, on the other hand, is house-proud. It’s this collage of antique and modern prose, chock-full of tropes and maneuvers—pure professor bait. They’re also drawn to his unrelenting pessimism. He has this little tic characteristic of abused children—whenever we’re having

When Larry won the Pulitzer, people sat up and paid attention. There is a certain kind of Manhattan literary snob who cares about status. You may have heard that about Manhattan.

L A RRY MCM U RT RY

Well, that didn’t have as much effect on me as people might think. It’s a journalist’s prize. I was glad to get it, I guess, but I was busy and didn’t go to the ceremony. I’d rather be considered a man of letters, functioning over fifty years, than be known as the author of one book.

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Peach and town girls

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Lorena and wranglers  |  overlea f : Indians in pursuit

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T he M iniseries For all the reverence accorded McMurtry’s masterpiece, when the names Gus and Call come up, most people don’t picture McMurtry’s descriptions but the faces of Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. That can’t be chalked up simply to the monstrous divide between the number of people who watch TV and the number who read books. Duvall and Jones seemed to live in the roles, growing them from the characters that McMurtry imagined and Wittliff adapted into something of their own. Jones plays Call a little warmer than he is depicted in the book. He’s no more able than McMurtry’s Call to acknowledge his pride in Newt’s maturation or the pleasure he takes in Gus’s friendship, but when Jones is on the screen, you see those feelings on his face. Similarly, Duvall’s Gus has a slightly harder edge; it’s less of a surprise when he beats down the San Antonio bartender. And the gestures, the walk, and the glint in his eye when he asks the prostitute Lorena for “a poke” all belong to Duvall. Oddly enough, close readers of the book were skeptical when the two were cast. Physically, Duvall looked more like the book’s description of Call, four inches shorter and grayer than Gus. Jones in costume didn’t look

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like either of them so much as he did pop-country singer Kenny Rogers. That may be one reason McMurtry says he’s never seen the miniseries in its entirety; he has a different picture in his mind for every character. Or maybe it’s because of the grand musical score and romantic cinematography—if McMurtry was nonplussed by his readers’ rush to find heroes in his book, he must have been put off by the elements in the miniseries that were calculated to make that very thing happen. Still, the miniseries proves that, though television has a lower common denominator than literature, it’s not precluded from occasionally qualifying as art. Wittliff insists that whatever greatness the miniseries achieved is due to its fidelity to the source material. There’s a truth to that, but Wittliff’s love of the story and characters shows up on the screen just as surely as McMurtry’s love of writing shows up on the page. But before Wittliff could get anywhere near Lonesome Dove, the book had to wind its way through the Hollywood sausage-grinder. Suzanne de Passe, president of Motown Record’s TV and film division, was the early driving force in getting it made. Not quite thirty-seven years old, she’d been involved in some of Motown’s seminal events, including introducing label founder Berry Gordy to the Jackson 5. She’d been nominated for an Oscar for screenwriting in 1973 for the Diana Ross star turn Lady Sings the Blues, then won an Emmy in 1984 for producing Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever.

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De Passe knew McMurtry primarily through film versions of his books before friends introduced them at a Tucson restaurant in early 1985, and she jumped at the chance to work with him. Then, after shopping Lonesome Dove without success for a year, she met Wittliff. Bill had adapted a variety of works into films, from Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion to the Willie Nelson album Red Headed Stranger. He was from Texas and was friends with McMurtry. Still, none of that guaranteed that the project would get off the ground.

Sketch of Clara’s by Cary White

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Suzanne de Passe, Bill Wittliff, and Dyson Lovell

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SU Z ANNE DE PAS S E was an executive producer of Lone-

me luck and moved on to his next project. But shortly thereafter, Lazar called again. He said, “Kid!” And I said, “Yes, Mr. Lazar?” He said, “I want you to know that today Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.” And then the world changed. My team met with CBS, and I was instructed not to ask for more than four hours. But when Peter Frankovich [the head of the network’s miniseries department] asked how many hours I thought we needed, I said six. And Peter said, “Great.” Then ICM, who represented both Bill and me, said he would be an excellent writer for it. I knew he’d been tracking my option—I think he thought I only had a year—so I knew he wanted to do it. We met, and we really hit it off.

some Dove. Larry came to L.A., and I took him to lunch and said, “What do you have kicking around that hasn’t been produced yet?” And he said, “Well, I have a book coming out in June, but you wouldn’t be interested. It’s a western.” I said, “Au contraire! I am a horsewoman, and I love westerns. When I was a young girl I watched Gene Autry and Johnny Mack Brown and Hopalong Cassidy on Saturday mornings, and I always wore a little fringed skirt and pearl-handled pistols when I made my grandfather take me from Harlem to the rodeo at Madison Square Garden.” Larry said, “Call my agent, Irving Lazar, and have a read.” So I did. The next day, a dolly rolled in from the mailroom stacked with boxes of unbound manuscript, double-spaced, with Larry’s writing in the margins. I began taking a box home each night. Before I even finished I called Irving and said I wanted to option it. He said, “$50,000.” Not cheap. But he did give me eighteen months, instead of a year, and that’s because he knew something I didn’t: Lonesome Dove had already been passed on by every studio and network. Larry and I took meetings with directors for about a year. We met with John Milius, and John Huston, and Peter Bogdanovich. And in listening to how each would approach the material, we learned—or at least I did—that there was no way Lonesome Dove could be a two- or three-hour movie. I started to believe wholeheartedly that it had to be a miniseries.

B I L L W IT T LI FF

Suzanne had somebody read the book on tape for me. Sally and I have a place at South Padre that’s essentially six hours from Austin. I’d plug one of those tapes in my pickup and head down to Padre. Driving through South Texas, listening to Lonesome Dove, I could see everything the guy was reading. Then I’d get there and write.

S UZ A N N E DE PA S SE

First Bill turned in two hours, and then another two hours—and it became real clear we couldn’t wrap it up in the next two. That’s why Peter is the unsung hero here: with everyone else at CBS being squirrely and saying, “I don’t want to lose my job over this or to be standing next to her when this bomb goes off,” Peter let it morph into eight.

B IL L W I TTL I FF

There were so many reasons this thing should not have gotten made. At that time, there was nothing deader than the western, except the miniseries. And this would be both.

B I L L W IT t LI FF

Actually, even Peter and I fought some on the length. He wanted to know why we had to spend so much time at the beginning back in Lonesome Dove. “Can’t we get them on the trail faster?” I told him, “No. You have to get to know these people before you’ll be willing to ride with them.”

SU Z ANNE DE PAS S E

Ultimately Larry said, “You know what? I’m all written out on Lonesome Dove.” He wished

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Continuity polaroids, props

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Wittliff finished the script in late 1987, at which point de Passe was able to secure the final financing and get the project rolling in earnest. CBS provided $16 million, with $4.5 million more coming from another backer. De Passe and Wittliff would be executive producers. The first three months of 1988 were then spent in preproduction, scouting locations and assembling a creative team, all the while balancing the budget constraints and Wittliff’s insistence on authenticity. The key behind-the-scenes hires seemed counterintuitive for an American western: producer Dyson Lovell was from Zimbabwe; director Simon Wincer, best known for the feature film Phar Lap, a heart-tugger about a doomed racehorse, was from Australia; and cinematographer Doug Milsome, a veteran of Stanley Kubrick films, was from England.

TOMMY L EE JONE S

I was highly amused when Bill told me that an executive had called from New York and asked, “Do we have to use cows?”

of goats to Montana.” One of the execs snapped and said, “Yeah, goats!” I said, “No, that’s a joke.”

S UZ A N NE DE PA S SE

Obviously, Bill was the authority on western culture. The happy circumstance for me was that as I brought everyone on to the project, we found a balance. I represented the part of the world that doesn’t necessarily know this saddle pommel from that one. But I do know storytelling.

B I L L W I T TL I FF

CBS calls and says, “We’ve got troubles. Can you fly out here?” I arrive, and they tell me it’s the cattle. The cattle cost too much money. But one of their guys has an idea. He says, “Bill, listen to this. What if they start that drive and right away there’s that storm and the cattle get scattered? You’re the writer; why not let the cows go and have Call say, ‘Let’s just keep going.’ Then you have all those guys going to Montana, doing all that stuff, but we don’t have to pay for the cattle.” I said, “Or, here’s a thought: why don’t we just forget the cattle and get a herd of Angora goats? They can be the first guys to drive a herd

B I L L WIT T LI FF

CBS was excited about Simon’s new film, The Lighthorsemen [about an Australian cavalry unit fighting the Turks in World War I], so they flew him and the movie to Santa Fe, where Dyson, Suzanne, and I were scouting locations. I watched it and thought it was beautifully

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filmed, but it was also on a huge screen. We were going to be in a little box. So he went back to Australia, and I thought about it for a week and decided Simon was not the guy. Then he came to Austin, and I took him out for dinner.

S I MON W I NC ER

was the director of Lonesome Dove. I ordered a prawn cocktail and Bill ordered oysters on the shell, and when they arrived, he cracked open the first oyster, and sitting in the middle was a pearl. He looked up at me and he said, “I think this is a sign.”

B I L L W I T TL I FF

Right as I’m opening my mouth to say, “You ain’t the guy,” I saw that pearl. Now, I’m spooky anyway. So I went with Simon.

S I MON W I NC ER

Every director in America wanted that job. I felt half of Texas was looking over my shoulder at this Australian proposing to film “our bible.”

DOUG MI L S OME was the cinematographer. I was doing a quick TV show in Zagreb, and I think it was Duvall who’d said, “Let’s get that guy who shot Full Metal Jacket.” There were some other cameramen in the running, and I think Simon may have wanted an Australian, but none was available. So I stepped into the breach.

S I MON W INCE R

Basil Poledouris [the composer who scored 1984’s Red Dawn and 1987’s RoboCop, and who died in 2006] was part of the USC group that had George Lucas, John Milius, Caleb Deschanel, and Randal Kleiser, who all became wonderful filmmakers. Really it’s the most famous bunch that ever went through USC.

DY S ON LOVE LL was the producer. I’d told Kleiser [the director of 1978’s Grease] that we’d need really big music for this, and he said to call Basil. Indeed, Basil sent some samples, and here was the man to give us that huge score.

D OUG M ILSOM E

I think having an Englishman on camera and an Australian as director gave it a certain flavor of seeing the West for the first time, rather like Gus and Call, who were seeing this part of America for the first time.

C A RY W H IT E

Simon didn’t know beans about the American West. And one producer was this intellectual from Africa, Dyson, and another was Miss Motown. So basically Wittliff was the only one who knew his stuff. He’d be the litmus test on everything, costumes, sets, props. You had to make it real to get Bill’s approval.

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Simon Wincer

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Pea Eye and Newt

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The producers worked with casting director Lynn Kressel to find the right actors. Among those who didn’t make the cut were Kevin Spacey, who read for July Johnson, and Uma Thurman and Julia Roberts, who both tried out for Lorena. Improbable names came up, too. Andy Griffith was considered for one of the leads. And initially Duvall was recruited to play Call.

ROB ERT DUVAL L

My ex-wife at the time said she’d read a book she liked better than Dostoyevsky, Lonesome Dove, and that the part for me was Augustus McCrae. But they’d already offered Gus to James Garner. I said, “If you can get him to switch parts, I’ll be in this.”

TOMMY L EE JONE S

It became clear that Jim Garner wasn’t physically up to it. So Bobby got the part he’s more suited for, leaving me an opening to insinuate myself into the cast. I wanted a job on that movie and pursued it arduously.

LY NN K R ES S EL

was the casting director. We thought Tommy Lee was a little young, but everybody kept saying, “No, he’s just a few years younger than Duvall.” Of course, after we cast him, Dyson said, “You know he’s forty-two.” I thought, “Oh my God, he’s supposed to be the old guy.” So they made his hair and beard lighter than Duvall’s. But really, he pulled it off in what he projected.

DYS ON L OV EL L

Next we went after Anjelica [Huston]. I’d known her since she was a teenager, because she’d auditioned for me in London when we did Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. And she loved it.

A N J E L ICA H U ST ON

portrayed Clara Allen. I got a call from my agent saying Suzanne was interested in me as Clara. I was incredibly excited by this. I also learned that Larry McMurtry wasn’t keen on me, which kind of broke my heart. I think he wanted Cybill Shepherd or Diane Keaton. Nevertheless, I came aboard.

DY S ON LOVE LL

Then I got a call from the network. “Listen, we want to remind you this is CBS, not PBS. We want somebody with some TVQ [an industry measure of a performer’s appeal to television audiences].” So Ricky Schroder had done Silver Spoons, but I knew him because I produced Ricky’s first job, The Champ. I had a bit of a surprise from my colleagues on that, but I knew he could do it. The next one aboard was Danny Glover. But then again came the question of TV potency. That was when we introduced Robert Urich into the equation.

RIC KY SCH RODE R

portrayed Newt Dobbs. I actually declined the role at first. I wasn’t a great horseman. And I had a pretty severe childhood allergy to them. Then CBS called and said, “We’ll clean the horse every day. You’ll have the cleanest horse ever. We’ll get you whatever medicine you need.”

Preliminary costume polaroids

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DANNY GL OV ER portrayed Joshua Deets. I read the book. It was sweeping, but I didn’t know if there was anything significant enough in Deets. Suzanne convinced me there was.

S U Z ANNE DE PA S S E

I remember Danny came into Spago [the famous Hollywood restaurant], and I literally climbed over a table to get to him. I don’t remember the conversation, just being so anxious that he had to be Deets.

LYNN K R ES S EL

I love being able to cast unknowns in supporting roles, like Chris Cooper [who played July Johnson] and Steve Buscemi [Luke]. D. B. Sweeney was a bigger name than them, and he got cast early as Dish. Brad Pitt read shortly after that, and I thought, “Oh, shit, Dish would have been his role.”

D. B. S W EENEY portrayed Dish Boggett. I was one of the first guys hired. So I had a lot of time to make good on my lie that I knew how to ride.

B AR RY T U B B portrayed Jasper Fant. The same day as my reading in L.A., I was also entered in a bull-riding event in Santa Maria. So I’m thinking a lot more about that bull than the script while I’m waiting in the Motown offices. Finally they called me in and said, “We see that you’re a former world champion junior bull-rider, so we guess you can ride.” I said, “Yeah.” They asked if I’d read the book, and I said, “Nope.” They asked if I’d read the script, and I said, “Nope.” And then I said, “If y’all don’t mind, I’d just as soon get on with this. I’ve got somewhere I’ve got to be.” So Wittliff read some pages with me, then I put my hat on and walked out. Monday morning my agent called and said I’d gotten the part. It was a complete accident that my character was basically a jackass.

DY S ON LOVE LL

We were hoping we could get Charles Bronson for Blue Duck, but we didn’t. That was a very difficult part to cast.

D. B. SW E E N E Y

The story on the set was that Bronson’s agent turned it down without running it by him. He simply said, “Charles Bronson never takes third billing. First billing or nothing.” If that is true, I would love to have been a fly on the wall when Bronson went into his agent’s office for the explanation. You would have had your own little Death Wish there.

LY NN KRE S SE L

We really wanted a Native American for Blue Duck, and we visited some reservations, but the actors didn’t surface. I kept getting calls from Frederic Forrest’s agent, who said, “You know, Freddy is half Native American.” So, finally, we needed the actor in about a week and made the offer. Sure enough, the agent calls and says, “Well, Freddy thinks the role should go to a Native American actor.” I said, “You kept telling me he was Native American!”

F RE DE RIC F ORRE ST portrayed Blue Duck. My agent probably thought I was part Indian. My sister and I were always told we were part Cherokee when we were growing up. But after I played one in my first picture, When the Legends Die, I never did it again, because I didn’t want to take a job from a Native American. So I read McMurtry’s book and said, “It is written as an Indian, get a full-blooded Indian.” When they told me they had changed the part to a half-breed to take the onus of meanness off the Native American, I said okay.

Continuity polaroids, wardrobe  |  overlea f : River crossing

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As the casting stretched on, Wittliff shifted his focus to the rest of the preproduction process and his nonnegotiable top priority—that Lonesome Dove not look like some old Hollywood western, but the actual Old West. Or more specifically, late nineteenth-century Texas. The three key hires on that front were Texans. Van Ramsey, who’d grown up on a ranch in South Texas and worked on three Horton Foote projects (1987’s Courtship, 1986’s On Valentine’s Day, and 1985’s 1918), was brought in to design costumes. Production designer Cary White had created sets for Wittliff on Red Headed Stranger. And Eric Williams, who would eventually take over the props department, had interned in Wittliff’s office in Austin.

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B I L L W I T TL I FF

I had this kind of Texas contingent, a little cluster of guys who had sworn allegiance to Larry’s book. Initially I couldn’t get them all into top positions because they were young; it wasn’t my money. But then the original hires didn’t work out. Luckily we had the right production manager, Dick Gallegly, to work through that. He could tell when one guy was a Texan and dedicated twentyfour hours a day, and this other guy might not do that. And he was right. I remember walking around to wardrobe one night and hearing this argument. One voice was powerful and rough, and the other was Van’s. Well, the big voice was a Teamster’s, and he had turned the electricity off. But Van was still there cleaning mud off of boots, work that his crew probably should have been doing. And Van was up in this guy’s face. “Turn the fucking lights on.”

ER IC W I L L I AMS was the property master. I’d interned in Bill’s office before I graduated from the University of Texas in 1984 and helped him edit a different, longer version of Barbarosa [the 1982 film starring Willie Nelson that Wittliff wrote]. And then I’d handled props on Red Headed Stranger. Dick Gallegly had been the production manager on both of those films, and when Lonesome Dove came along, Bill hired him again and asked me to help out. But they gave the prop master job to another guy.

CARY W H I TE

I didn’t have any business at all getting that job when Wittliff called. It was a big miniseries, and I was just as green as I could be. My whole bunch was.

DYS ON L OV EL L

It’s really strange. I looked in my pocket one day before we got started and found a piece of paper with Van Ramsey’s name on it. Somebody had told me about this costume designer. He was a Texan.

VA N RA M SE Y

was the costume designer. Bill saw Horton Foote’s name on my résumé, called me in Connecticut, and asked me to come to Austin immediately. Well, I’m in six feet of snow. But I fly out the next morning in winter clothes and an overcoat, get to Texas, and it’s hotter than hell. I’m dying. Bill said, “We want you to do this, and we’ll get you a hotel room. Go start on the sketches.” I said, “But I don’t have any clothes.” He said, “Oh, we’ll send a production assistant out to buy you something.” I never went home again. We only had three weeks to prep.

E RIC W ILLIA M S

I was hustling around Austin trying to find antique gun belts and realized quickly that most old leather was rotten. So we had to spend the money to have this stuff made. Reproduction gun leather wasn’t as available as it is now. We didn’t have the Internet; you couldn’t just jump online and find something.

VA N RA M SE Y

Bill sent me off with something like twenty-five westerns on videotape that he wanted me to look at. When I got through, he said, “We don’t want it to look like any of these.” Instead he showed me all this research in his office. Everything had to be authentic. The boots couldn’t be contemporary boots. They had to be two pieces of leather with no toe box in them. So I had to have a boot maker in Los Angeles make them.

E RIC W ILLIA M S

Wittliff had that Time-Life series of books, The Old West, and, even more importantly, Life on the Texas Range by Erwin Smith. That gave us specific ideas about what the period saddles and guns were supposed to look like. If you look at those pictures, you’ll see that people didn’t wear guns on their right sides, they wore them cross-draw.

Lorena’s shirt  |  Jake’s vest

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Gus’s boot

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Call’s boot

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C ARY W H I TE

DY S ON LOVE LL

My first job was to build Lonesome Dove. McMurtry describes it as a dried-up little fart of a town, so we didn’t have to build a huge place. A lot of western movie towns are too dolled up, so I was trying to keep it simple. I went to the historical society in Austin and stole some ideas from old county books. Wittliff wanted to add one little flourish, a little cornice piece on the Pumphreys’ store. I thought we needed to put something in there, and then it just dawned on me: put the lonesome dove in there, dummy.

There’s one actor who shall remain nameless, about whom Bill said to me, “Look at the way he’s wearing his hat and sits on that horse. We can’t have him in this film.” We had to get rid of him.

B I L L W I TTL I FF

B I L L W IT T LI FF

Hats were a big deal to me. And I told Van, if you don’t see a hat in my books, then we don’t want to see it on the screen. There’d be times when some of our extras would show up in an old flop-hat out of wardrobe, or their fancy cowboy hat they brought from home. I really watched for that.

VA N RA M SE Y

The hats are very significant. When you’re doing something with this many people, sixteen guys in the cattle drive, you have to be able to recognize them when you see them in silhouette. So we tried to do it with their body types and what kind of character they were.

Call’s hat is a round top. Absolutely no frills about it. Straight off the hatter’s shelf. Gus’s hat has that crease. It’s got some personality. The idea was that every single piece would say something about the character. Newt’s hat is a hand-me-down. Strictly for shade. When you get to him at the end, it’s got a little fashion to it.

Simon Wincer and Cary White  |  Cary White’s dove from the Pumphrey’s store

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Call’s hat

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Gus’s hat

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VAN R AMS EY

Lippy had the bowler because I had a picture of some contortionist from the 1870s who was able to make his lips go big, and he had on a hat just like that. I gave Jasper a light-colored hat and a darker shirt, because he was the most back-and-forth character. You never knew if he was gonna be smart, or just a smart aleck. And you don’t really notice this, but Dish’s shirts were all subtly Mexicanembroidered to give him kind of a dandy look. Everybody had an opinion on Deets’s pants. I had a quilt that had belonged to my great grandmother, and we incorporated those old fabrics into the pants. But we only had enough quilt for three pair. My crew hated me because those pants were constant maintenance. Danny would ride in them, patches would come off, and the crew had to sew them back together every night. But my logic was that this is what Deets did in the book. My crew was not amused.

ER IC W I L L I AMS

The property master wanted to get all the props from a giant prop house in Los Angeles, which was unfathomable to me. Why not get everything in Texas?

Why get stuff from old westerns that had been gathering dust for years? But I flew out there and started slowly putting things on the tractor-trailer, and every so often these four guys from the prop house would carry all this stuff onto the truck. By the third day it’s loaded with junk. And the prop master still hasn’t even come by. Eventually they let him go. Bill told me, “You’re now the prop master. Don’t fuck it up.”

C A RY W H IT E

We were in Santa Fe scouting in preproduction and I was walking down the street with one of the producers [a representative from the company that provided the extra $4.5 million]. And I was just gushing about how wonderful this was going to be. He let me go on and then hit me with a parade-drencher. He said, “We don’t really feel that way. We just want to make it as cheaply as we can and be done with it.”

B I L L WIT T LIFF

None of my guys ever said, “Oh, don’t worry about that, it’s just television.”

Van Ramsey’s sketch and costume for Deets  |  Newt’s hat  |  Lippy’s hat

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With filming set to begin in March, the part of the process that Van Ramsey called “mass prep hysteria” moved to the shooting locations, the first being in and around Austin. While the crew readied their wares, the actors worked to figure out their characters and one another.

TOMMY L EE JON E S

As they were putting the score together, I was asked what theme would suit Call musically. I said the “Blue Bells of Scotland,” because in the book he is from Scotland. He’s very stern and probably a Calvinist Presbyterian. They worship a vengeful God and are not afraid to take action on his behalf. Pretty tough hombre.

R OB ERT DUVAL L

About a month before we started, I looked up a classmate, a rancher near Rotan, and he took me to see his neighbor Sammy Baugh [the NFL great who played quarterback at Texas Christian University in the thirties]. I thought, “Wow.” My dad took me to see him play with the Washington Redskins when I was ten. But he must have been seventy when I met him, and he didn’t even know who I was. We talked for hours about football and his life, and he just seemed to me like an old, tall Texas Ranger. So that’s where I got my gestures and everything, watching Sammy Baugh.

DANNY GL OV ER

I had to make some assumptions about Deets. I decided he was Black Seminole, that he’d worked for Santa Anna’s government before the Civil War, then came back and scouted for the Rangers. He could be close with Gus and Call because back then, responsibility was given based on your capacity to take on responsibility. They trusted each other.

A N J E LICA H U ST ON

Clara was sort of a saint. She’d thrown off the more graceful existence of a former life, or a life maybe hoped for, and was living on a horse farm with a husband in a coma. She had to run it by herself and make a lot of sacrifices, and the strength to do it came from her love of Gus. As long as he was alive she had hope in her heart. And she hated Call because he always took Gus away from her.

DI A N E LA N E

portrayed Lorena Wood. Lorie was primitive. She couldn’t read or write and was taken advantage of because of it. Men stripped her of her dignity and innocence. She didn’t talk much because her only advantage was in keeping her cards close to her chest and trusting Gus. And then came the kidnapping and abuse. Gus brought her out of her trauma. He was her protector and defender. The sex made their relationship complex, but he was a father figure. He put her on par with a capital “L” Lady.

D. B. SW E E N E Y

The casting of Bob Urich was brilliant. A part of Jake is incomplete, and anybody looking at Urich standing next to Duvall and Tommy Lee would say, “What’s wrong with this picture?” Urich had that same feeling of being incomplete, that he didn’t have the chance to do great roles. That insecurity and awareness made his Jake very interesting.

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Jake

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Filming a scene on the Moody Ranch near Del Rio

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Blue Duck

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B I L LY BU RTON was the stunt coordinator. Both Tommy

looked dead, and they had a slackness to their facial muscles. I tried to capture that.

Lee and Bobby love horses and rode real well. Bobby rides hunters and jumpers, so he’s more English. And Tommy Lee rides in a flat saddle because his passion is playing polo. Urich didn’t ride as well, but his character was usually in the saloon chasing the girl. If he’d had a choice between riding a horse or a riverboat, he’d have been on the boat.

C HRI S CO OP E R

Jake was the guy who gave Newt candy, who told him about his adventures, who gave him time and smiled at him. Call never did those things. Newt needed that. He was just a cowpoke, a boy looking for his dad and trying to make sense of things. He’s kind of an orphan, raised by everybody and nobody. But the cattle drive changed him. The Buffalo Heifer certainly changed him. And his dad not being able to own him, that changed him.

portrayed July Johnson. July was absolutely the character I was drawn to. My father had three hundred head of registered Hereford outside Leavenworth, Kansas, and if I hadn’t given acting a shot I was serious about working his ranch. I loved that life and felt that there was a lot in it that I could bring to the character. July had a huge naivety and innocence. My first scene was with Roscoe, running into Peach with that chicken whose neck she was getting ready to wring. Afterwards I thought, “Roscoe and July are two very similar guys.” July didn’t know how to deal with a woman. He crosses the country looking for Ellie? He’s not a great horseman. He could barely take care of himself. He was lucky to survive.

D. B. S W EENEY

B A RRY CORBIN

RIC KY S C H R ODER

I tried to latch on to Dish’s skill as a horseman and a roper. All his confidence came from being top hand. But I lived in New York, where the only way to practice riding was on horse trots in Central Park. Some friends were making Young Guns in Arizona, Kiefer Sutherland and Charlie Sheen, and they had a great big remuda, so I went out there for a while.

Roscoe’s a gentle, slow guy. When he’s killed, you see what a monster Blue Duck is. He’s not prepared for it, nor does he understand it. It’s like when the bandits hold him up, he doesn’t understand until they threaten to take his clothes away from him.

W I L L I AM SA N DE RSON portrayed Lippy Jones. Lippy may have been no more significant than a bent coin coming out of a Coke machine. He was a bit of a loner, but involuntarily. Diane Lane wouldn’t sleep with him for $50. But he was a survivor. And I got to chase the pigs. They were great. We’d get them to tag along behind the wagon by squeaking this little toy and dropping sweet potatoes.

FR EDER IC F OR R ES T

Blue Duck was Gus and Call’s equal. He didn’t take any shit off those rangers. And he was a psychopath. Stomping on that buffalo hunter’s wounds. Killing those children. Just really vicious. So I remembered being on safari in Africa and seeing these wild dogs creep up on a lion while he was eating and attack him. Their eyes

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Though neither Duvall nor Jones qualified as movie stars of the Big Popcorn variety, their presence at the top of the credits was a big reason the rest of Hollywood had clamored to get involved. Duvall was then fifty-seven years old and thirty years into his career as one of the great actors of his generation. He’d had standout supporting roles in instant classics like To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), True Grit (1969), and both Godfather films (1972 and 1974). Nominated for four Oscars, he’d won Best Actor in 1984 for playing country singer Mac Sledge in Horton Foote’s Tender Mercies. Jones, on the other hand, was fifteen years Duvall’s junior and regarded as a great actors’ actor, though it was not yet clear whether he’d parlay that into the quiet career of a Rip Torn or the larger success of a Gene Hackman. But he’d been nominated for a Golden Globe (Coal Miner’s Daughter, 1980) and won an Emmy (The Executioner’s Song, 1982). For the rest of the cast, he and Duvall brought a sense of gravitas that was every bit as outsized as Gus and Call’s.

B I L L W I T TL I F F

Everybody was showing up for preliminary stuff—to get a horse, make sure they could ride, get their costume and hair—when I get a call. “Bill, you’ve got to come out here.” I said, “What’s the problem?” and they said, “Well, Ricky’s here . . . and you’d just better come.” So I go out there and find Ricky in one of those masks like they wear in Mexico during flu epidemics. I thought, “My God, he’s allergic to horses. What have we done?” But that

mask flew off his face within ten minutes of being around Tommy Lee and Duvall. Nobody wanted to look bad around those guys.

E RIC W ILLIA M S

I remember Tommy Lee taking Ricky under his wing and telling him, “You need to go stand over there” or “You need to stop waving your pistol at people like that. Put it back in your holster until you use it.”

Continuity polaroids, wardrobe

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D. B. S W EENEY

VA N RA M SE Y

I showed up in Austin the first day they had horses. Tommy Lee came down too, because he had concerns about a New Yorker playing Dish. He invited me to his ranch in San Saba to help doctor two hundred head of cattle that he had. A couple days into it, Bob Duvall showed up, and though they weren’t quite in character, there’s so much of them in those characters that it was sort of like a roundup with Gus and Call. Tommy Lee put me on this immature polo pony, maybe hoping I would break my neck and be replaced by someone from Texas. Sure enough, it dumped me. I lost my reins, and it ran two miles back to the barn without me, which was kind of humiliating. But then I shot a wild goat that had been tearing up Tommy Lee’s polo field and made a cabrito stew for his ranch hands. After that I was okay.

Even his diet. If you notice, Gus got leaner and leaner as the trail went on. Duvall had these special, low-fat meals prepared to get that look.

ER IC W I L L I AMS

W I L L I A M SA N DE RSON

Duvall was looking for me as soon as he came on. He very much wanted to get his hands on the props, to start working with them and talking about how they related to his character. What kind of gun and belt was Gus going to wear? What kind of pocket watch would he carry? That was all-important to him.

DYS ON L OV EL L

Bobby brought an absolute specialist on guns down to consult with him.

ROB ERT DUVAL L

That was a guy who made his living chasing cattle rustlers in eastern Wyoming. He could hit anything with a pistol, and he showed me how to track somebody.

CARY W H I T E

We built these faux outhouses around Lonesome Dove, and Duvall would take a crap in them because he was in character.

C HRI S CO OP E R

I remember spotting Duvall in a hotel lobby surrounded by a crowd of civilians. He was in character, telling this story about getting his horse shot out from under him in a shoot-out with the Indians. It was beautiful.

E RIC WILLIA M S

Tommy was more of a Laurence Olivier actor. Olivier once said he didn’t understand how actors could live their characters for days or weeks. Tommy’s like that. He’s able to find that place inside himself and somehow step in and out of it. Tommy Lee came to pick me up for rehearsals but wouldn’t come into my hotel. I said, “Why are you lurking outside?” He said, “I don’t lurk. I loom.”

B A RRY T U BB

Jones and Duvall both received tapes of the dailies, and if you’d go to Duvall’s house, he wouldn’t be watching his own stuff. He’d be watching Jones, saying, “Watch this son of a bitch . . . right here!” And you’d go to Jones’s house, and he’d be watching Duvall. It was like an actor’s duel. They were raising the bar on each other. Every morning, Duvall showed up at the catering truck and said, “We’re making The Godfather of westerns.”

ROB E RT DUVA LL

I loved saying that because one of the makeup guys was connected with the mob in Brooklyn. He’d always say, “Whaddayamean? No way!”

Continuity polaroids, wardrobe

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Robert Urich on set, with his children

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Tommy Lee Jones on set, with his son and town children

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The shoot began on March 21, and for the next three and a half months the cast and crew worked to pack the long months of McMurtry’s trail drive into six and a half hours of television, with the various stops along the way to be re-created in either Texas or New Mexico. As with most productions, scenes were filmed out of sequence. The first were of Elmira and Big Zwey on the buffalo hunters’ boat, which floated on Austin’s Town Lake instead of the Arkansas River. Roscoe’s sojourn through East Texas was filmed in the Lost Pines area around Bastrop. Jake was hanged on some property Wittliff owned outside Austin. Eventually, they would move to New Mexico, where the set from 1983’s Silverado, located near Santa Fe, would serve as Ogallala and Clara’s ranch, and Angel Fire pastures would sub for Montana. But the meat of the miniseries was shot in and around the Texas border town of Del Rio, on a large ranch owned by an old cattle family named Moody. That’s where Cary White would build the Dry Bean, the Pumphreys’ store, and the Hat Creek headquarters, and where Wincer would choreograph and shoot most of the cattle drive scenes. It was also where the miniseries would open, and the production really kicked into gear.

First day of filming near Austin

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B I L L WIT T LIFF

We built Lonesome Dove right on the banks of the Rio Grande. And it was funny; we would be filming down the street, and all of a sudden you’d see a dozen foreign exchange students wading across. And you’d say, “¡Ándale! ¡Ándale! We’re making a movie here!” and they’d hurry on across.

C A RY W H IT E

There was just nothing around there. You’d get lost every time you would try and find that place— there was nothing there to mark it. That ranch is all cut up with roads that crisscross everywhere. People were always showing up way late because they’d been lost for hours.

DI A N E LA N E

I understood the heightened sense of responsibility that everybody felt as soon as I got on location. Even the drivers in the transportation department were concerned about the placement of the scar on my lip.

VA N RAM SE Y

Robert Urich would not come to fittings. He said, “Design it to fit my stunt double.” He shows up the night before his first scene, and the man has gained forty pounds! The shop was up all night long making new clothes. We split his vest open in the back to get it on him.

S I MON W INCE R

There’s a moment, very early in the piece, back at Lonesome Dove, when Jake arrives—Robert Urich. They’re sitting at breakfast, and he relates how he accidently shot this dentist through a wall. Then he starts to laugh and says, “Worse yet, his brother’s the sheriff.” I could see Tommy Lee and Bobby and Danny Glover all start to realize, “Holy shit, this is not just a TV guy.”

Call, Gus, and Jake

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DA NNY GL OV ER

That scene established the characters’ relationship. And Deets is right there in the center of things. Every time he’s around, you get a sense of things from his point of view. Simon gave Deets more depth by where he placed the camera.

ER IC W I L L I AMS

So Gus wants to cut cards with Lorena for a poke. Well, we had to stack the deck. We had these great old cards that didn’t have any numbers on them, just symbols and faces. My prop assistant, Byron Thomas, shaved the deck so Gus’s fingers would grab it just right, and every time he would come up with that ace. So Lorena was cheated. But I think she probably knew that. Tommy Lee was standing in Lonesome Dove right before they cross the river to steal the horses, and this guy runs up to adjust his bandana. As he reaches out, Tommy Lee pushes his hand away and says, “What are you doing?” The guy goes, “Well, your bandana needs to be more . . . uh . . .” Tommy

Lee says, “What?” The guy says, “There is a continuity problem . . .” And Tommy Lee yanks it from the left side to the right and says sharply, “How’s that?!” And the guy goes, “Well . . . I guess that . . . uh . . .” and Tommy Lee interrupts, “You know what? You’re a coat rack, not a costume designer!” The guy just stands there. We wait for him to say something like, “I am just doing my job,” but he doesn’t say anything. So Tommy Lee turns and walks away, and I turn and go with him. As we are walking, he looks at me and winks.

B A RRY T U BB

I kept bugging Bill because I wanted to do a rope trick in the movie. And he said, “If you can find a place in the book where Jasper does a rope trick, you can do it.” I had this little lasso made out of a piggin’ string that I was always roping my foot with when we were sitting around. Simon saw me do it and decided to open the scene just before the cattle drive starts with it. Wittliff saw it in the dailies the next morning and said, “You son of a bitch, you snuck it in there.”

July  |  Stacked deck  |  overleaf : Cast and crew chairs

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Sequences with cattle were among the most difficult. Wittliff purchased three hundred and fifty head of Mexican Corrientes, which, thanks to an uptick in the market price, were actually sold for a profit after shooting ended. Making them look like a herd of two thousand on-screen would prove to be the easy part; there were plenty of camera and editing tricks available for that. The real challenge was in getting the cows to follow the lead of actors who’d been cowboys for only a few weeks.

Jimmy Rainey getting dusted for the drive to water scene  |  Continuity polaroid, props

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B I L L W I TTL I F F

The head wrangler was Jimmy Medearis. He and his guys took the cast members who couldn’t ride and essentially made cowboys out of them. They didn’t just work the cattle when we were shooting. At the end of the day, they had to get them to the pens, or bed them down, or whatever.

DAV I D C AR P ENTE R

portrayed Needle Nelson. The first thing we’d hear from Simon on days when our characters weren’t going to be featured was, “You are on the herd today, mate.” Meaning we were going to be on horseback a mile from the camera, somewhere out in the desert, making sure the cattle didn’t run off. That ended up being fun— so long as we remembered to take our Ray-Bans off when he said, “Action.”

B AR RY T U B B

You learned real quick who could ride, because the first cattle drive sequence was when we had to ride naked. I remember us all sitting around between takes, wearing nothing but our chaps, when Jones walked up. I hadn’t seen that I was sitting in his chair. “Oh, shit, sorry, Mr. Jones.” He said, “Naw, sit back down. There’s no ceremony here,” and went and sat on a log. That was the beginning of him getting his cowboys together.

T OM M Y LE E JON E S

The majority of them had no experience moving large numbers of cattle over long distances. I saw them take great pride in getting better at that, like any bunch of green kids starting out on a trail drive. It was kind of cool.

B A RRY T U BB

You did have to buy the wranglers a case of beer if you got bucked off. I got bucked off once, but nobody saw.

DAVI D CA RP E N T E R

I was standing by one of the assistant directors [between takes on a river crossing scene] and heard him say into his radio, “We are going to bring the ambulance in a little closer for the next one.”

B I L L W IT T LIFF

People could absolutely have gotten hurt if they didn’t know what they were doing. One day the lead steer swam into the middle of the river and started circling, and the rest of the cattle followed and couldn’t get out. I thought, “My God, we’re going to lose the whole herd.” Suddenly everybody became real cowboys. The cast and wranglers jumped on their horses, piled into the water, and turned the herd. We weren’t even filming.

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Among the most memorable scenes were the snakes . . .

B I L L W I T TL I F F

Everybody always wants to know about the snake scene. They say, “How’d you do that?” I tell them a lot of actors are dispensable.

B I L LY BU RT ON

Half the snakes had been brought in from Thailand, nonpoisonous obviously, and half were rubber. We attached a fake one to the kid’s cheek, then did what we call a reverse load in the camera. We filmed the snake being pulled off his face and then played it backwards.

D. B. S W EENEY

The New Yorker in me kicked in for

. . . and the San Antonio saloon . . .

that scene. I said, “I’ll be fine over here while you shoot that. I don’t need to be in the water for that one.”

B A RRY T U BB

Somebody said the real snakes had their mouths sewed shut. So I got some fishing line and cut it into little pieces, then right before they dropped the Irish kid in the water I went up to him and showed them to him and said, “I think they might have missed one.”

S I MON W INCE R

Newsweek said we’d done for the water moccasin what Jaws did for the great white.

. . . and Gus and Lorena by the creek . . .

S I MON W I NC ER

I rather like the way Tommy Lee knows what’s coming in the bar and shuffles slightly sideways just before Duvall whacks the guy. This insolent bartender doesn’t appreciate all they did for Texas? It’s a bloody insult.

C ARY W H I T E

We filmed old San Antonio in Brackettville, and Tommy Lee said, “The Germans were a big part of San Antonio. Where are the signs in German?”

DI A N E LA N E

At one point Duvall decided that to get the proper reaction he’d flash me for real. That “shriveled my pod” bit? I’m telling you, he loved Gus.

VA N RA M SE Y

I’ll never forget Gus and Lorena in the stream, her talking about how she just wants to go to San Francisco, and him very lovingly explaining that she has to be happy with life’s everyday things.

TOMMY L EE JON E S

That’s true. I did. And after lunch, there were four German signs hanging from stores like there should’ve been.

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Cary White and Leonard in Lonesome Dove

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. . . and the chaps-and-hats-only river crossing.

ER IC W I L L I AMS

It so happened that a cute blonde reporter from a San Antonio TV station came out that day. I was standing there on the banks with her and her cameraman and these guys are starting to rehearse, coming in and out of the water, and her jaw just drops. “They’re really naked! Frontally naked!” Before I could say anything, Barry Tubb came over and asked her, “Hey, how are you doing?”

DAV I D C AR P ENT E R

I saw Tommy Lee strip down and then put his chaps and boots back on. I thought, “Well,

he lives down here and knows what’s going on, so that’s how I’m dressing, too.” Thank God I did, because the guys that didn’t put their chaps back on got their legs shredded by mesquite thorns.

S I MON W INCE R

That scene opened Night Three, and if you look very closely, you can see a lot more than the network ever noticed, more than had ever been seen on U.S. network television before. It’s towards the end of the scene, sort of bottom right.

Sign from the Dry Bean  |  Naked river crossing

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No movie set is free of conflict. The tension on Lonesome Dove came from Forrest and Duvall and their battles with Wincer. Forrest had been an Oscar nominee for 1979’s The Rose and a costar of Duvall’s in Apocalypse Now that same year. But by the late eighties he was playing a cop in the Gen-X TV series 21 Jump Street. When Forrest and Wincer fought, Wincer won. Duvall, on the other hand, was at the top of the marquee. In many ways he owned the production the same way he did the final product.

VAN R AMS EY

Everybody had Charles Bronson in their head, and then Fred Forrest showed up. Fred is the better actor, but it’s hard to replace somebody if you’re a totally different type.

there he had gone from dresses to brooches. He had decided that every time Blue Duck killed a woman, he would take her brooch. His vest was covered with all these women’s brooches.

B I L L W I TTL I F F

FRE DE RIC FORRE ST

He’s a good Blue Duck. And he’s up on the screen, so he’s Blue Duck forever. But his [prosthetic] nose did fall off a couple times.

VAN R AMS EY

At two o’clock in the morning, Fred was getting ready for one of the first times we see Blue Duck. He ran into Tommy Lee in makeup, and Tommy Lee brings up this thing. “Wouldn’t it be interesting,” he said, “if you wore a woman’s dress, like you had just killed a woman and put her dress on?” And they proceed to get a dress off the trailer. I called Bill. “You better get to the set. You will not believe this thing happening here.” So there’s a back-andforth . . . and anyway, the dress was canned.

B I L L W I TTL I F F

I wanted to see Blue Duck with various parts of costume, like he had taken them off a victim. So I had some black boots made in San Antonio like a soldier’s, and then I got a bunch of hair from my hairdresser and made scalps to put on them. And I went to a pawnshop in Taos and got a brooch.

S I MON W INCE R

Duvall hated the casting of Frederic Forrest. So Blue Duck’s first scene, when he rides down to the stream where Duvall’s on the rock and Lorena’s hiding in the bushes, Duvall refuses to rehearse with him. It turned out great because it gave the scene a powerful edge. They were feeling each other out, two old archenemies looking at each other for the first time.

After we finished filming Blue Duck in Del Rio, Freddy went out to Santa Fe. By the time we got

Gus between takes

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F R EDe R IC F OR R E S T

When we got to the point where Blue Duck kills those children, Simon had already shot the end of the scene, showing their dead bodies piled up together. So he told me to kill them in various places, drag the bodies, and stack them. I said, “No, they are stacked because he killed them right here, spontaneously, and they happened to fall this way.” That’s the way I’d read it. But he insisted. So I said, “You want me to stack them up? Fine. We’ll have Blue Duck pancakes.”

B I L LY BU RTON

My cowboy friends always ask about one scene. There’s that sequence when Duvall’s looking for Lorena and that ragtag band of comancheros shoot at him. He’s sitting on his horse, drinking from a canteen,

and the bullet’s supposed to land between the horse’s front feet. So we placed a squib [a small pyrotechnic] right there, rolled the cameras, and when the squib went off, the horse bucked.

B I L LY W IN N was an animal wrangler. Threw his ass off big-time. And damn, they never cut nothing. Duvall held the bridle and jumped back on. Ninety-nine percent of actors would have hollered for the paramedics and a stuntman. But not Duvall. He just mounted up and went on.

ROB E RT DUVA LL

The horse I had been riding had gotten spoiled, so they got ranch horses from the local cowboys near Del Rio. But my new horse wasn’t used to gunfire,

Shields  |  overleaf :Gus pursued

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and he started bucking on me. I stayed on for maybe four or five seconds, and then I went off. When I hit the ground, I told the director to get a cutaway shot of me getting back on—which we did.

uation. In the scene where we save Diane, when Gus kills a few Indians and I don’t get a shot off, his gun wouldn’t fire. Bobby got hot, flung the weapon, and missed my head by about a foot and a half.

DOUG MI L S OME

DI A N E LA N E

Bob thinks a director is just there to be a traffic cop, to put him in position. He’ll kick against direction if he feels it disparages his concept of what he’s doing.

He threw that pistol from up on a hill, and it landed not far from me down in the camp. That thing must have weighed fifteen pounds.

S I MON W INCE R

Simon would usually just retreat. How are you going to fight back against Colonel Kilgore?

It’s no secret that Bobby and I had our moments. But I don’t care. What we ended up with is fantastic.

B AR RY T U B B

B I L L W IT T LIFF

D. B. S W EENEY

Simon asked for a second take once, and Duvall said, “How long have you been in this business?” Simon says, “Seventeen years.” And Duvall says, “I’ve been in it thirty-five fucking years, Junior!”

When we shot close-ups, I’d literally lean in, just short of touching the camera, to watch Duvall. And I’d come away saying, “Yeah, Gus, that was wonderful.” Then the next morning I’d watch the dailies, and there would be stuff you cannot see with the naked eye. Like when Jake’s hung. Go back and look at that. When Jake spurs his horse, Duvall does this little flinch, this little blink, and it is so real. It’s just [snaps his fingers] that fast.

B I L LY BU RT ON

I remember one day he told Simon, “I’ll bite your fucking nose off!”

B AR RY TU B B

He hates Australians. The director of Tender Mercies, Bruce Beresford, was Australian, and there was a story about Duvall chopping his director’s chair up with an ax.

ROB E RT DUVA LL

That never happened. But Australians do tend to have an attitude. They remind me of Argentines. Talented people, but they’re from so far away, yet they’re going to come show us how to do it?

When we hung Jake Spoon, Simon says, “Do you want one more take?” And I am glad he said that because something happened to me, this strange, split-second, emotional reaction. There was no logic to that flinch. It just happened. But then, when I saw the first cut—and thank God I saw it first—they’d cut that out. I could only think they were trying to get back at me. Well, I called Dyson. He was an ally.

CH R I S C OOP ER

DY S ON LOVE LL

ROB ERT DUVAL L

It was not the most comfortable sit-

We fixed it immediately.

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Of course, the production wasn’t all work. While the big names like Duvall, Jones, and Glover were able to rent good-sized houses in Del Rio, the balance of the cast filled a Ramada Inn, and most of the crew stayed at a nearby Red Lion. For the crew, the only days off were Sundays. But for the cast, days without scenes were often wide open. Still, finding something to do in a place like Del Rio was easier for some than others.

Newt

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RIC KY S C H R ODER

The ranch was like my playground. If I wasn’t working then, I was either rally-car driving on the dirt roads or bow-hunting for wild pigs. I shot a javelina, and a Teamster helped me cook it in the ground for a luau. And I killed a six-foot-long rattlesnake and had some boots made out of it.

DAV I D C AR P ENTER

Ricky had a crossbow and would shoot rattlesnakes, armadillos, jackrabbits, anything. People started saying we needed to put signs up warning the ranchers to keep their dogs in the house while Ricky was on the set. It was really cool, though, to sit around the hotel with a young James McMurtry [the author’s son, now a noted singer-songwriter, who played a Hat Creek cowhand], who would pull out his guitar and start playing.

WI L L I AM S ANDER S ON

A carnival came through Del Rio when we were there, and Tommy Lee asked if I’d been over there yet. I said, “No, have you?” And he said, “No, for me it was enough to know it was there. But for you . . .” One of the carnies came into the bar, a chatty little guy, and I bought him a drink. I think he thought I wanted a job. He said, “I can get you on at the carnival.” I take that as one hell of a compliment.

D. B. S W EENEY

Since Spenser: For Hire was set in Boston, Urich had gotten a deal as a spokesman for Boston Whaler [the motorboat manufacturer]. Wherever he went filming, they sent him a boat. So they shipped one down to Lake Amistad and we did a lot of fishing and swimming.

B IL L W I TTL I F F

Urich took me bass fishing one day, but I was working most of the time, so I didn’t get to mix

much with the local community. And as far as the cast and crew were concerned, I think their interaction with locals was probably more across the river in Mexico.

DY S ON LOVE LL

On Saturday nights, we all used to cross the border for margaritas and Mexican food. And very often on a Sunday, Duvall would throw these tango parties. They were brilliant.

VA N RA M SE Y

His parties were incredible. Incredible. We’re in the middle of Del Rio, Texas, and he flies in the cast of Tango Argentino, for a big tango party there, and then another one later in Santa Fe. It was unbelievable.

B A RRY T U BB

Duvall liked music, and Blondie Calderon—Ray Price’s keyboard player—lived in Del Rio and had a place where Duvall liked to go on weekends to dance.

ROB E RT DUVA LL

Blondie had a band of his own. They were all Mexican American, so you could get salsa and country-western—two for the price of one!

D OUG M ILSOM E

My experiences with the tequila in Mexico were quite damaging. You know, they put it in this sort of goldfish bowl rather than a glass. And when I started a second one once, my gaffer, who was a teetotaler, said, “There aren’t many people that can drink two of these.” And I said, “Well, I feel perfectly fine.” Then I stood up and tried to tango with Bob, and of course fell completely over. My legs were gone. I don’t remember much more about it except being piled into a cab, ushered back to the border—where I had to wait two hours while my wife went back to Del Rio to get my papers—and then not waking up for two days.

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By the time the big cattle sequences were wrapped, in late May, the cast had had their fill of trail driving and, in some instances, one another. The production moved to more civilized Santa Fe, where Anjelica Huston joined on. She was Hollywood royalty, the daughter of John Huston and an Oscar winner for 1985’s Prizzi’s Honor. Eventually, the mood on the set relaxed. Duvall’s small tango parties in Del Rio were now lavish soirees, the first a crabcake-and-mariachi fiesta to welcome Huston. Problems that arose on the set were more manageable.

ANJ EL IC A H U S T ON

I’d been in England making The Witches before coming to Lonesome Dove. The first day there, my wardrobe comes to my trailer, and I thought, “Oh, my God. I’ve made a terrible mistake.” Van and I had chosen Victorian petticoats and sunbonnets for Clara, the wardrobe of a perfect lady of the house. I ran to the costume trailer. “Van! I have to rough this woman up.” He let me in the guys’ costume trailer, and I came out with filthy boots and sweat-stained shirts.

even though Clara trained horses, she didn’t have any riding scenes. I had to beg Dyson to briefly let me ride, and got to when I went on the picnic with Gus.

VAN R AMS EY

A N J E L ICA H U ST ON

At one point Clara wears this kind of striped, pale, robin’s-egg-blue skirt with a white blouse. The skirt actually had a top that was the same color, but she decided she needed to be a little more casual. So the only other thing we had in the trailer was a nightgown. Real quick, we dipped it to age it and put it on her. So that’s a nightgown tucked into the skirt. But it looks like a beautiful blouse.

ANJ EL IC A H U S T ON

I had ridden all my life. I grew up fox hunting and have a long history with horses. But

C HRI S CO OP E R

Sitting at the table with Anjelica and her daughters when I first come upon them added a dimension to July. I’m trying to find Ellie, and the little daughter notices me crying. You see how much Ellie means to him— or how much he thinks she does.

I always loved that scene at twilight where Clara’s speaking about her plans with Cholo, the Indian who works for her. And the scene when Gus leaves Clara. Bobby knew I had grown up in Galway and that the song “Galway Bay” stirs me. So he played it on a tape recorder as he rode away. The tears flowed freely.

B I L L W IT T LIFF

Clara’s world was civilized. It had the touch of a woman, a rough woman, but a woman nevertheless. Ogallala did not.

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DYS ON L OV EL L

To be quite honest, I was absolutely terrified when we did that scene with Tommy Lee beating the army scout who’s giving Newt trouble.

SI MON W I NC ER

I wanted to do that in one take: Tommy galloping down the street, bowling over the horse, then coming around to pick up that iron and go for it. And it got bloody tense. That was Billy Burton’s last day. The stunts were over after that.

ER IC W I L L I AMS

Burton had asked me, “Do you have any rubber props? Rubber branding irons? Rubber hammers?” I didn’t have anything rubber. So we got into this terrible argument right there in the middle of the Old West street, just frothing at the mouth. Finally Tommy Lee

steps between us and says, “Boys, let’s not get to fistfighting.” Then he walked off with Burton. A few minutes later Tommy Lee comes back holding a branding iron. He says, “All I need is this made of rubber.”

B I L LY W IN N

That was a great shot—Tommy Lee’s horse never did touch that horse he knocked down.

S I MON W INCE R

Call just lost it. And Tommy swung that branding iron so hard that he bent it. If you watch closely you can see him straightening it out, though it looks as if he’s feeling the thing, considering another strike. He actually connected on one swing, accidentally. By the time Duvall ropes him and drags him away, half off his feet, he’s in a literal blind rage. We nailed it in the first take.

Call beating army scout

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Cary White’s trail map  |  Call sheet map to shooting location on Moody Ranch

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One of the frequent sights on the set was actors carrying around dog-eared copies of McMurtry’s book. It was their original text, the primary resource for who their characters were and what they were thinking. Wittliff encouraged them in that regard, often repeating the production’s golden rule: “If we do right by Lonesome Dove, Lonesome Dove will do right by us.” His version of the narrative strayed only occasionally from McMurtry’s, most notably in omitting Wilbarger, the educated cattleman who bought horses from the Hat Creek outfit early and was later killed by the Suggs brothers. As filming wore on, the book would remain the cast and crew’s Bible. But eventually the production took on mythical proportions of its own.

B I L L W I T TL I F F In Larry’s novel, Gus tells Newt that T OM MY LE E JON E S

I think Call’s relationship with Deets is apparent when he delivers the eulogy. Anybody who says Call doesn’t have any emotions hasn’t seen that scene.

Call is his father when they’re burying Deets. But I thought that, emotionally, you don’t want to share those two events in the same scene, so I moved it to the fight in Ogallala. Because everybody cared about Deets. Danny had embodied him so powerfully. He did an enormous amount with very few lines. In the script I described Deets’s eyes glassing over, and then he’s dead. I don’t know how Danny did it, but when Deets dies, his eyes really did glass over. That’s where we were lucky. We could trust him and Duvall and Tommy Lee not to allow anything to get maudlin. You go from his death to the funeral, and the language that Call has to deliver is so powerful and poignant. But he holds his emotions in check, keeps everything matter-offact. That’s the deal with a scene like that: if the actors don’t cry, the audience does.

E RIC W ILLIA M S

Here’s my naivety as a prop master: Gus and Pea Eye are being chased. They’ve ridden over the hill and are coming back with the Indians after them. Well, we’d given the Indians lances with real metal points. And an archer in Austin had made me some period Sioux arrows. So all of a sudden, one guy throws this sharp lance that almost hit a horse. And another shoots an arrow right past Duvall and Tim Scott [Scott was the career western character actor who portrayed Pea Eye Parker. He died from lung cancer, in 1995]. That nearly gave me a heart attack. I was like, “Guys, don’t do that again.”

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Arrow from Gus’s leg  |  Deets’s grave marker

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Eric Williams with Gus

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Gus and Pea Eye with crew

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B I L L W I TTL I F F

B I L L WIT T LIFF

Tim didn’t want Pea Eye to be a “yuk-yuk” buffoon. Like when he and Gus are in the cave holding off the Indians. All of a sudden Duvall yells in Comanche, “Awk! Awk! Awk!” and Tim jumps. And later Duvall tells him to head south, and Tim says, “South?” Duvall responds, “That way yonder. If you run into a polar bear, you went the wrong way.” That’s all funny, but you never lose the scary aspects of their predicament. Or the moment when Pea is wandering around on the plains and Deets’s ghost comes to him. In almost every one of those scenes, there’s a point where it could have fallen off the bridge. But Tim gave Pea such dignity.

It really felt at times like the movie gods were telling us, “It doesn’t matter what you do, you’re not going to fuck this up.” In Larry’s book, there’s a blizzard. Well, we have to shoot that in June, so we’ve got airplane motors and potato flakes, because that’s how you make a snowstorm. We’re up in Angel Fire and all the special effects guys are prepared to make a blizzard the next day. And when we wake up, the whole world is white. A freak blizzard has come through.

D. B. S WE E N E Y

One day it’s sixty degrees, and then somehow a front came in overnight and dumped about five inches of snow. It was gone in five hours because it was so late in the season, but the producers were smart about it. They gave six cameras to Dean Semler [the second unit director] and he shot as many things in the snow as he could. The net effect was to add about seven hundred and fifty miles to the cattle drive because you really felt like you had gotten to the Montana cold.

WI L L I AM S ANDERS ON

Tim was a sweet man. Real knowledgeable about horses. And very careful. Early on, when we had to push that wagon up out of the mud and I fell down and got that mouthful of manure, Tim was the one who made sure the wagon didn’t roll back on me.

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Throughout the story, the layabout Gus does undertake one great, overriding mission: to make Call feel. It’s the heart of their friendship as well as the narrative. When Gus realizes he’s dying, he senses one last opportunity, and in Wittliff’s script, the scene plays out over seven pages. The network felt it could be told in half that, but Wittliff, again putting his faith in the chemistry between Duvall and Jones, refused to budge. (The scene does contain one moment that should have been rethought: in the novel Gus loses his left leg; in the miniseries it’s his right.)

DOUG MI L S OME

The mystery and beauty of that scene is the darkness, just the lantern by the bed and a little warm light coming through the window. And the whole thing was shot in one bloody day.

DYS ON L OV EL L

Gus’s death scene wasn’t even rehearsed. Bobby and Tommy Lee knew what it would be. The banter between them was wonderful. One man is dying and the other one knows it.

S I MON W I NC ER

Call and Gus are such diametrically opposed characters, who adore each other but won’t admit it. Gus is all doors and windows wide open. Life’s a party. And Call is rigid and stern and strict and just will never reveal his inner feelings. His trip with Gus’s body will be a journey of silence. But he’s made a promise to Gus. Even though he doesn’t understand why Gus wants to go all the way back to Texas, he’s going to do it, because that’s what

Gus wanted. You can hear it in his voice: “You want me to haul you back to Texas?”

DY S ON LOVE LL

The network was concerned that once Gus died the audience wouldn’t be sufficiently interested in Call to watch him hauling the body to Texas. They needn’t have worried.

T OM MY LE E JON E S

The most fun I had photographically was when the second unit director, who is now the famous Dean Semler, and I were simply sent out to get shots for the journey back to Texas. Just me, Dean, and that mule and wagon making pictures that illustrated that last bit of the narrative.

C HRIS CO OP E R

When Call leaves Clara’s horse ranch with Gus, Duvall brought music to play before the scenes to get Diane in the emotional state necessary for their goodbye.

previous page : Call arrives at new ranch in Montana  | 

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Gus’s letter to Clara

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DI ANE L ANE

E RIC W ILLIA M S

Bobby found some sheet music from that time, a song called “Lorena,” and recorded somebody playing it on an old piano. At the moment I find out that Gus is dead, Bobby played that music and stood just outside the action.

The scene was supposed to begin with Tommy Lee walking up to Blue Duck’s cell with a train of deputy sheriffs behind him, and then saying something like, “Gus would’ve enjoyed seeing you hang, all right.” But Freddy pulled out this paper and said, “OK, now, here are a few more words I would like to say.” Tommy turned on his heels and walked out the door—and all the deputies, without saying a word or being told what to do, followed him outside. I was standing by one of the hitching rails and Tommy walked over and said, “Worst behavior I have ever seen.” Perfect Call. But I said, “Really? On this show?” I thought it was mild by comparison to some of the stuff we had going. Tommy looked at me and said, “Second worst behavior I’ve ever seen.”

ANJ EL IC A H U S TON

He was amazing. He’d learned all these secrets and then used them to help me. [Throughout the production] he wrote me personal letters so when I came to the scene when I read Gus’s last letter I wouldn’t be reading him for the first time.

SI MON W I NC ER

When Tommy Lee came to see Blue Duck in jail just before he’s hanged, Freddy gave me a page of rewrites. He wanted to give Blue Duck a background that would justify why he was so nasty. Bill and Dyson just rolled their eyes. Freddy and I literally had a shouting match and had to clear the whole set. But having grown up in lowbudget television I knew to shoot a lot of stuff and cut around ad libs.

We damn near lost everything when Tommy Lee was crossing the river with the wagon and the corpse. Things got out of control and were floating down the river. It was really almost a disaster.

FR EDER IC F OR R EST

E RIC W ILLIA M S

C A RY W H IT E

Blue Duck had a hatred, and I thought how could anybody hate so much, how could he kill people with so little feeling, unless he’d suffered? I’d read about Chief Gall, who led the attack against Custer at Little Bighorn. When his family was killed by the cavalry he said, “It made my heart bad. After that, I killed all of my enemies with a hatchet.” So I added that. But everything else I added came from McMurtry. That was the only slight difference.

When we buried Gus in Clara’s orchard, Tommy had to pile the rocks up, say a few words, then sit there and cry over the grave. The camera was low to the ground and close to him, and I had to be right there by the camera so I could get in and reset rocks for a second take. I realized after rehearsing that I was right on top of him. And he had to get emotional, to get to tears. So I said, “Hey, sorry, I’ll move back out of the way.” And he said, “No, you sit right there, Williams. You’re family.”

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B I L L W I T TL I F F

The one thing I worried about most the whole time was how to end it. The book, of course, ends with Call finding out Wanz had burned himself up in the Dry Bean. But no one watching a miniseries would have remembered Wanz from Night One. So we needed a visual drumbeat, something to take you back through the emotional pieces of all eight hours. Call’s vision was the exact right vehicle to hang that on. It was his moment of self-awareness.

S I MON W I NC ER

The final scene. We had a kid playing the reporter who’d never been on-screen before, and I could see the sun going really fast. So as we were rolling, I

said, “When I say, ‘Cut!’ I don’t want anyone to talk. I’ll give instructions for the B camera to run to the other side of the bridge for a wide shot of Call walking off.” So we do the first shot, the close-ups. The reporter says, “They say you’re a man of vision,” and Tommy Lee picks his moment. “Yeah, hell of a vision.” You can see the tears in his eyes. I say, “Cut!” the cameras move, and bang! We get him crossing the bridge literally as the light went out. Tommy Lee came to me afterwards and said, “When you can feel the whole team sweating to get one shot perfect, it’s like playing sports with someone better than yourself. Everybody rises to the occasion. That was absolute magic.”

Continuity polaroid, props | Last page of novel and script with Wittliff’s notes

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previous page :

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A new home in Montana  |  Original score by Basil Poledouris

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When shooting ended, the editing team—Wincer, Wittliff, Lovell, de Passe, and editor Corky Ehlers—had one month to cut 180 hours of film down for broadcast. It was a huge task, one that involved a whole new slew of compromises and sacrifices, all of it done for a network that still didn’t realize what was being created. But to a certain extent that helped the editing team. Between Night Three’s naked river crossing and the repeated references to “pokes,” Lonesome Dove qualified as revolutionary television in more ways than the obvious ones.

B I L L W I T TL I F F

We may have gotten a little flack from Standards and Practices people at CBS [the department responsible for monitoring programming for objectionable content] during the script stage, but to be honest with you, I don’t remember talking to them during the editing. That may be because they didn’t know what some of the words in there meant. Like “cojones.”

meant renegotiating everybody’s contract, so they said, “No, that’s all.”

S I MON W INCE R

The piece it really hurt me to lose was Gus meeting Aus Frank, the bone-picker, the man walking his wheelbarrow from pyramid to pyramid, stacking buffalo bones. It was great.

D OUG M ILSOM E

Dyson did a screening of the final cut, and I came with my wife and a friend. It was a long showing, but nobody left. Nobody slept nor snored. They were all absolutely glued to it. And then, of course, my wife came unglued when Gus died. I could hear her crying, along with most everyone else.

SU Z ANNE DE PAS S E

I remember a big argument with all the guys—Simon, Dyson, Bill, and the editor—after I’d left them alone when we were cutting this thing. When I came back, they had taken out Clara’s entreaty to Gus to stay and find land, when he is ready to ride off. I had a royal conniption fit. Things were finding their way to the editing room floor, supposedly for efficiency’s sake, but really it was testosterone. I was the only girl in the mix, so I was the romance police.

S UZ A N NE DE PA S SE

We had three hundred people at that screening. It was at the Cary Grant Theater on what is now the Sony lot, and the invitations read, “Come spend the day in Lonesome Dove.” It was literally the first time we had seen the entire thing at one time, all fully mixed, fully scored, color-corrected, the whole thing. I remember standing in the back of that theater with Dyson and saying, “Oh my God, this is phenomenal.”

B I L L W I T TL I F F

The original final version was actually thirty minutes too long. I went to CBS and said, “This is the masterpiece, but we need thirty more minutes.” And you know, they pondered the idea. But it would have

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The initial reviews of Lonesome Dove were somewhat mixed. Newsweek said it “proves what television can achieve when it forgets it’s only television,” and Time claimed it offered “the most vividly rendered old West in TV history.” The New York Times, on the other hand, called Newt a cliché, Deets a caricature, and July and Lorena ciphers. No matter. When it aired over four nights, beginning Sunday, February 5, 1989, it trounced its competition each night and was the best-rated miniseries in five years. The momentum carried into the fall, when Lonesome Dove was nominated for nineteen Emmys. But there its luck ran out. Though it won seven awards, including best director for Wincer, it was denied in the other highprofile categories. The six nominees for acting—Duvall, Jones, Huston, Lane, Glover, and Glenne Headly, who played Elmira—were shut out. Wittliff’s script did not win. And the Emmy for best miniseries went to War and Remembrance, an eighteen-hour debacle that cost $100 million to make and received lackluster ratings.

S U Z ANNE DE PA S S E I

share. That would mean twenty-three percent of the TVs that were on had tuned in. He comes back and says, “Yes . . . Lonesome Dove . . . Yes . . . It received a twenty-six . . .”—and I thought, Oh, that’s a good share, but then he said—“. . . point-eight rating . . . and a forty-something share.” And I screamed “Yahoo!” and went running around my hotel suite like I had truly lost my mind. But then came Emmy night. It was a disaster.

never heard from anybody at CBS before it aired. No “Good luck.” Nothing. The morning after Night One I called [network president] Howard Stringer’s office to ask about the ratings, and his assistant—a male who spoke very slowly and sounded like Carlton the Doorman—said, “What show are you inquiring about?” And I said, “Lonesome Dove. It was on last night.” So he puts me on hold, and meanwhile, I’m remembering that the network had said they’d be happy with a twenty-three

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DYS ON L OV EL L

Certainly the War and Remembrance people were not seated as the anticipated winners. They were somewhere up the pack.

CARY W H I T E

Van Ramsey did win. But Duvall was halfway out of his seat thinking the Emmy was his when they gave it to James Woods.

VAN R AMS EY

It’s a strange voting process, and unfortunately a lot of it is political. My union had told me, “You better take an ad out in the trade papers thanking them for this nomination.” So I did. But there was no campaign beforehand for the rest of Lonesome Dove.

D. B. S W EENEY

I think that because most everybody on Lonesome Dove was so authentically Texan, they didn’t kiss enough ass in Beverly Hills to win any Emmy Awards.

LY NN K R ES S EL

Frankly, Duvall gave as fine a performance as any I’ve ever seen. But Jimmy Woods played the guy who founded AA, and that’s the kind of role that strikes a chord with members of the Academy.

VAN R AMS EY

That’s true, but it’s not the reason Woods won. I’m on the Academy’s Board of Governors now and I have an idea what might have happened: I’ll bet Duvall and Tommy Lee split the vote, and Woods came up with it. But Bill, especially, is the one who was burned.

B I L L W I TTL I F F

I like to accuse Van of buying his

Emmy.

Gus’s costume

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Call and Dish

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The sting faded quickly, as the production went on to win Golden Globes for best miniseries and best actor (for Duvall), along with a Peabody Award for television excellence and a Bronze Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum for best television feature film. But the greater victory came in the popular response of viewers around the world. War and Remembrance became the answer to a trivia question, and Lonesome Dove became a cultural touchstone.

B I L L W I T TL I F F

B A RRY T U BB

That first night, Sunday, a big cold front dropped out of Canada and settled over the United States. So people were home. They started watching. And they called their friends and said, “You’ve got to tune in to CBS.” A week after it aired, guys were already wearing buttons that read “How about a poke?”

People love it to the same degree as Trekkies. Maybe you call them Doveys, I don’t know. But every now and then I’m on an airplane and hear someone say, “She gave me a look like she was ready to carve my liver.”

D. B. SW E E N E Y

I couldn’t buy a beer in Texas for the next ten years. I would take my wallet out in a bar in Austin, and the bartender would say, “That guy down there says Dish Boggett drinks free.”

S TEV E DAV I S

People ended up doing studies on the meaning of uva uvam vivendo varia fit [the slogan Gus wrote on the Hat Creek Cattle Company sign]. The consensus is that it’s a corruption of a proverb from the original Latin, where the idea was something like, “A grape ripens in the presence of other grapes.” Some say that’s a metaphor for the journey that these people took, which is then a metaphor for the journey through life. Basically, somebody like Newt, who’s young and immature, ripens when he’s with other grapes.

DAVID CA RP E N T E R

Tim Scott and I were sitting in a hotel in Montana once and the band Steppenwolf came in and saw him sitting there. They almost lost their minds. They said Lonesome Dove was their favorite movie, and then took us out to their tour bus and showed us that it was in the video player. Steppenwolf.

B I L L W I TTL I F F

Sure. And if one goes for that, then the cluster of grapes is all the characters. It’s Gus and Call, Pea Eye and Jake, Lorena and so on. But in my view, the grape that ripens is the myth of the West.

S T E P H E N H A RRIG A N

My claim to fame is: I was an extra in the movie. People hear that and are amazed. It’s like being a munchkin in The Wizard of Oz.

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Stephen Harrigan  |  Van Ramsey, Manny Gammage, and Joan Thomas

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DOUG MI L S OME

I now live in the deepest, most rural part of England, and the farmers here all borrow my copy. I can’t lend it out enough. They’re hooked.

to come up to the level of the novel. Whether we really did, I don’t know.

B I L L W IT T LIFF

I visited the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and met these two fighter pilots. One of them said, “We were on our first combat mission into Afghanistan, and my buddy comes over the radio and says, ‘I guess this is where we find out if we was meant to be cowboys.’” They couldn’t have been five years old when Lonesome Dove aired.

I have a view about great art, whether it’s stories, poetry, music, whatever. None of it tells you anything new; it merely reminds you of something you already know but forgot you knew. And that’s what Larry did. You start reading Lonesome Dove, and you feel you already know these people. They’re already in you. They’ve always been in you. That’s its great magic.

ROB ERT DUVAL L

L A RRY MCM U RT RY

D. B. S W EENEY

I was fortunate enough to be in the biggest thing in American cinema history and the biggest thing in American television history, The Godfather, parts one and two, and Lonesome Dove. Now, The Godfather was better directed, but the novel was only okay; the movies went beyond it. For Lonesome Dove, we had to do everything we could

We still don’t know that it is a classic. It hasn’t been long enough to make that assessment. I’ve said myself several times that it is the Gone with the Wind of the West. That means making a judgment about both books. Gone with the Wind is not a despicable book. It is also not a great book. And that is what I feel about Lonesome Dove.

Props

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Call and Gus on the trail

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A cknowledgments One Monday morning in February 2010, my boss at Texas Monthly, editor Jake Silverstein, called me into his office to inform me that the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Lonesome Dove was coming that July. The significance of the milestone cannot be overstated. Even those historical events that define us as a people—presidential campaigns, murder sprees, football championships—require a hook before a magazine editor will assign a story about them, and the best excuse is always an anniversary ending in a “0” or a “5.” Jake asked if I was interested in writing about Lonesome Dove. He suggested we could run it as an oral history. My gut reaction was to kiss him with my mouth open, an instinct I managed to hold in check. Instead I hustled to my own office and started making phone calls. Thus began the project that became this book, and the first thanks go to Jake for coming up with the idea and the manner of execution. The story we produced, “True West” (July 2010), was a no-brainer choice for the cover, and the issue was far and away the best-selling Texas Monthly that year. (We actually sold 85 percent of copies delivered to the newsstand, an unheard-of sell-through rate for the industry.) Still, its optimal ultimate fate would have been as a keepsake for Lonesome Dove lovers were it not for an equally fortuitous conversation initiated by Bill Wittliff. Wittliff had been instrumental in creating the magazine story, sitting for some six hours of interviews and providing contacts for the miniseries’ cast and crew. Maybe more important, his saying grace over the project was the only reason some of those folks called me back. But once he finished reading the article, he had an idea of his own: double the length of the oral history, combine it with a deeper look

at items in the Wittliff Collections, and turn it into this book. My task was simple, as most of the interviewing had already been done. Wittliff had the tougher job of creating this volume. He worked with the staff at the Wittliff Collections—Connie Todd, the collections’ former director; Steve Davis, the curator of the Southwestern Writers Collection; Carla Ellard, the curator of photography; Katie Salzmann, lead archivist; Mary Garcia, archives assistant; and Michele Miller, media and publications specialist—to comb the archived photographs, documents, props, and wardrobe. He hired Jeff Wilson, the Austin photographer whose images ran with the original magazine story, to shoot for the book. And he used the Collection’s long-standing relationship with the University of Texas Press to get the thing published. UT Press designer Ellen McKie helped Bill with the layout, and editors Allison Faust and Lynne F. Chapman did a wonderful job holding my hand as the book’s deadline loomed. Note that I would not have met their deadline without the grunt work of Kate Hull and Ali Finney, young Austin freelancers whose flawless interview transcriptions were the only cover I had for never having learned to type. But back to the original article. Senior editor Jeff Salamon rode herd over the story, and his experience as the books editor at the Austin American-Statesman was invaluable in helping me think about literature, as were his exacting requirements as a line editor. The grammar and spelling were policed with customary authority by Kristen Remeza, Courtney Bond, Megan Giller, and Stacy “Duke” Hollister, and the article’s facts were checked by David Moorman, who is also my personal shaman. And Texas Monthly creative direc-

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tor T.  J. Tucker and his assistant Caleb Bennett, country boys from Baird and Del Rio, respectively, managed to lay the story out in a way that looked simultaneously elegant and Texan—no simple task. Special thanks go to Texas Monthly deputy editor Brian D. Sweany, who regularly works on my stories and whose encouragement helps me work up the confidence necessary to do things like write about writers who write better than I do. I also need to thank the magazine’s longtime editor Greg Curtis for hiring me as a fact-checker in 1997, and his successor, Evan Smith, for bumping me up to staff writer

in 2002. And, of course, I must thank Texas Monthly founder Mike Levy. The colleagues mentioned above are also all dear friends, as is Mike. I wouldn’t know any of them if he hadn’t created the institution that brought us together. Finally, I want to thank my wife, Julie Blakeslee. Our first date was actually postponed for a month while I struggled to finish the magazine story in April 2010. We eloped one year later but had to forgo a honeymoon, in part because I was still not done with the manuscript for the book. Your patience is appreciated, dear.

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Continuity polaroid, props  |  overleaf : Cast and crew at Clara’s on last day of filming

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C ast Robert Duvall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Augustus “Gus” McCrae Tommy Lee Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Woodrow F. Call Danny G lover . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joshua Deets D iane L ane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lorena Wood Robert Urich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jake Spoon Tim S cott . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pea Eye Parker R ick S chroder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Newt Dobbs A njelica Huston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Clara Allen C hris C ooper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . July Johnson G lenne H eadly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Elmira B arry Corbin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Roscoe Brown D. B. Sweeney . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dish Boggett Frederic Forrest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Blue Duck William S anderson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lippy Jones B arry Tubb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jasper Fant Lanny Flaherty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Soupy Jones David C arpenter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Needle Nelson S onny C arl Davis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bert Borum James Mc Murtry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jimmy Rainey C harlie H aynie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ben Rainey Travis S words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allan O’Brien B radley G regg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sean O’Brien Le ón S inger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bolivar Jorge M artínez de Hoyos . . . . . . . . . . . . Po Campo P ierre E pstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Xavier Wanz S teve B uscemi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Luke Frederic Coffin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Big Zwey

A dam Faraizl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joe Boot N ina Siemaszko . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Janey Gavin O’Herlihy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dan Suggs Jerry B iggs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Roy Suggs S ean H ennigan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eddie Suggs Julius Tennon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frog Lip B randon Smith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bartender H elena Humann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Peach Johnson Todd M errill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reporter Olan Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sally Skull Jack Caffrey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cholo L auren S tanley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Betsy Allen M issy Crider . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sally Allen M atthew Posey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jim #1 Terry Mc Ilvain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cowboy John B ark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1st Trapper R ichard S laughter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2nd Trapper E d Geldart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Undertaker K evin O’Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Doctor Ron Weyand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hugh Auld C urtis Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Blacksmith David L ittle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sheriff K enny Call . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Deputy #2 Michael Tylo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dee Boot Margo M artindale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Buffalo Heifer E dwin “B ud” S hrake . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sodbuster Antoine Bill Wittliff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sodbuster Humphrey

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Thomas C onnor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bob Allen M atthew C owles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Monkey John Nada D espotovich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mary Robert D onley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Old Sam K ee B ahe E lsisie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kiowa Brave Tony Epper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dixon M a x E vers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Charlie Barnes Daniel Kamin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Capt. Weaver Eddie Komolestewa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Young Brave Jordan L und . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hutto Wallace M erck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fowler David O de . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dog Face J immy P ickens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bill Spettle Vern Porter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dr. Arandel Dave P owell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2nd Cowboy M ichael Berlin P ritchard . . . . . . . . . 1st Cowboy John Quijada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pedro Flores Timothy Todd R ay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Teamster G ene S ovo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ermoke B oots S utherland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sergeant Adam Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Deputy #1 B. C. Todd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Townsman, Ft. Smith Jos é Rey Toledo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Medicine Man Paul James Vasquez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Buffalo Hunter Allison Wittliff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Town Girl

Gus’s long johns

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C rew S uzanne de Passe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Executive Producer B ill Wittliff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Writer / Executive Producer Robert H almi , J r. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Co-executive Producer Dyson L ovell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Producer Michael L. Weisbarth . . . . . . . . . . Supervising Producer B asil P oledouris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Original Music D oug M ilsome . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Director of Photography C orky E hlers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Film Editor C ary White . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Set Designer Michael S ullivan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Set Decorator Van Ramsey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Costume Designer Manlio Rocchetti . . . . . . . . . . . Makeup / Hair Supervisor Lynn K ressel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Casting D ick G allegly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Production Manager A dam Merims . . . . . . . . . . . . . Assistant Production Manager R uben R . Muñoz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Assistant Editor J ill L opez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Production Coordinator Holly G ent Palmo . . . . . . . . . . . . Art Dept. Coordinator D ean S emler . . . Second Unit Director / Director of Photography Robert Rooy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . First Assistant Director Matt B earson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Second Assistant Director C ynthia Upstill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Script Supervisor Liz K eigley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Texas Casting C onnie Todd . . . . . . . . . . . . . Executive Assistant to Bill Wittliff E ric Williams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Property Master John Frick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Art Director

Barbara H aberecht . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Set Dresser Jay Raymond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lead Man James L . Alcholtz, C.A.S. . . Sound Re-recording Mixer Jamie G elb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Music Editor Michael Herbick . . . . . . . . . . Sound Re-recording Mixer Don Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sound Mixer Joe M elody . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Supervising Sound Editor Kevin O’C onnell . . . . . . . . . . Sound Re-recording Mixer Tom Villano . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Music Editor Billy B urton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stunt Coordinator J immy M edearis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Head Wrangler S haron M edearis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Head Wrangler Billy Winn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Animal Wrangler Dennis M illiken . . . . . . . . . . . Transportation Coordinator Byron Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Assistant Property Master R eid Wittliff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prop Assistant Terry Blythe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Assistant Editor Daniel Eccleston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gaffer Gary Jay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . First Assistant Camera Tony Poston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Key Grip Don R eddy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Camera Operator Jerry C allaway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Camera Assistant S tacy Rhodes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Extras Casting Joan Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wardrobe Supervisor John G ibson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Locations Assistant J ean Ann Black . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Makeup Artist

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A Book on the Making of Lonesome Dove was designed by Ellen McKie and Bill Wittliff Production Associate Carla Ellard Text was set in Mrs. Eaves This book was printed using four-color process on 157 gsm Chinese Gold East matte paper Scans and captures by CSI, Austin Print and color management by iocolor, Seattle Printed and bound by Shenzhen Artron Color Printing LTD

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