Before it was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, ‘Lonesome Dove’ was almost a movie.
Author Larry McMurtry holds a distinct honor when it comes to movies. As of now, he is the only person to have one of his works be adapted into an Academy Award-winning screenplay (Terms of Endearment, adapted by James L. Brooks) and win the Academy Award himself for adapting another author’s work (Brokeback Mountain, adapted by McMurtry and Dianna Ossana from the short story by Annie Proulx.) While McMurtry is known as an author first and foremost, his career has intersected with Hollywood from very early on. His first book, Horseman, Pass By became the Paul Newman film Hud, and later his novel The Last Picture Show was made into a movie of the same name, securing huge Oscar success and launching the careers of Cybill Shepherd, Jeff Bridges, and director Peter Bogdanovich. With so many great movies starting as books by Larry McMurtry, it’s poetic that his crowning literary achievement, Lonesome Dove, started its life as a movie first.
What Is ‘Lonesome Dove’ About?
A cattle drive from the Mexican border in Texas all the way to the Canadian border in Montana is the subject of the big Western epic Lonesome Dove, which follows two former Texas Rangers. Since Lonesome Dove is a book with about a thousand pages in the paperback edition, it is a voyage that looks difficult for both the rangers and their motley crew and any reader. The book’s length did not prevent it from becoming popular, nevertheless, since many audiences are still captivated by the entertainment provided by the journey’s unanticipated challenges and sadness. Lonesome Dove went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and was quickly adapted into a major miniseries starring Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Danny Glover, Diane Lane, and Angelica Houston. None of this would have happened though if John Wayne had wanted to make the movie.
How the Idea for ‘Lonesome Dove’ Began
The Last Picture Show earned tremendous critical acclaim. The movie started Bogdanovich’s career and led to the high-profile sequels What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon. It got eight Academy Award nominations, including one for Larry McMurtry as co-screenwriter. The two of McMurtry’s most well-known novels, Terms of Endearment and All My Friends are Going to Be Strangers, were later published. However, McMurtry wasn’t quite finished with Hollywood.
As carefully detailed in a Texas Monthly oral history, after The Last Picture Show Bogdanovich recruited Larry McMurtry to write a script with him for a Western. Likely, as a student of film history, a Western appealed to Bogdanovich, so he convinced Warner Bros. to pay him and McMurtry to develop the would-be feature film. Discussions began when McMurtry and Bogdanovich accompanied Cybill Shepherd (who had formed a relationship with Bogdanovich during the filming of The Last Picture Show) to Miami for the filming of the Elaine May masterpiece The Heartbreak Kid. The initial ideas were general: they wanted it to be a trek, but not a cattle drive (to avoid comparisons to Red River,) Bogdanovich wanted to include a pair of Irish folk singers, and eventually the title “Streets of Laredo” was decided on, but the main driving force that shaped the story was the cast they wanted.
From the outset, Bogdanovich told McMurtry he wanted the Western film legends John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda in addition to a part for his girlfriend Cybill Shepherd. As McMurtry and Bogdanovich started working on pages the characters began to form around these actors and their personas. For Stewart, they wrote a more light-hearted character more connected with the land that they named Augustus because, as Bogdanovich puts it, “we liked the way Jimmy Stewart would say, ‘Augush-tush.'” Inspired by his aloof nature, Henry Fonda’s character was morally ambiguous and not exactly clear where his loyalties lie (in the novel this would become Jake Spoon.) John Wayne’s character was set to be the more in charge and closed-off frontiersman (the earliest version of Woodrow Call,) and while not confirmed it would not be a surprise had Cybill Shepherd played some version of what would become Lorena Wood, the young blonde prostitute brought along on their journey. When the draft was sent off, the studio received it warmly, unfortunately, the actors were not so eager.
The Original ‘Lonesome Dove’ Script Was Rejected
Wayne, Stewart, and Fonda initially passed on Streets of Laredo despite the reputation Bogdanovich and McMurtry had after The Last Picture Show. The aging of the characters was a major theme in Streets of Laredo. In this version of the narrative, Wayne and Stewart are beginning their careers as pig farmers with little to do other than chat on the porch, with Stewart “complaining about how long it takes to pee when you get older.”.” In his third memoir, Hollywood, McMurtry theorized that none of the stars they reached out to wanted to play the faded versions of the heroes they once brought to life, but none so more than John Wayne. Stewart and Fonda eventually acquiesced, as work was beginning to dry out for them in the 1970s, but Wayne was less in need. Wayne, not far off from his long-awaited Oscar win for True Grit, was still working regularly as a leading man and keeping a traditional sort of Western alive. “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,” said English professor Don Graham in the Texas Monthly oral history. Without Wayne on board, the project never came to be. But this wasn’t the end for McMurtry
When Did Larry McMurtry Turn ‘Streets of Laredo’ into ‘Lonesome Dove’?
After twelve years and a few more books under his belt, McMurtry decided to buy the rights to Streets of Laredo for $35,000 feeling it might make a decent novel. He stopped and started for a few years, taking breaks to write Cadillac Jack and The Desert Rose, only getting the engine going after a moment of divine inspiration: finding the title. While McMurtry would use Streets of Laredo for the sequel’s title, it was a passing bus advertising a local “Lonesome Dove Church” that gave him the clarity he needed to finish what would become the book. The manuscript reached 1600 pages but became a quick success, not only with its accolades but with the general public, spending about a year on the bestseller list when factoring in both the hardcover and paperback editions.
The script for Streets of Laredo may have made a fantastic Western, but Peter Bogdanovich doesn’t seem too disappointed about missing out. “I finished reading it in a week and thought it was fantastic. According to Bogdanovich in Texas Monthly, “I thought it was written almost with a sense of vengeance to demonstrate that novels can do anything better than a movie. And although though McMurtry believed his novel to be somewhat of a failure before he passed away, comparing it to Gone With the Wind and ultimately romanticizing the Old West mythos, it is probably his best-known piece of writing. Hollywood has wild swings in popularity, with many projects beginning one way and ending another. It was for the best in this instance.. While John Wayne’s ego may have robbed audiences of a movie with not just him and Jimmy Stewart, but Henry Fonda and Cybill Shepherd too, those who seek out the novel Lonesome Dove are not likely to be sorry.