Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove) is the most enduringly popular miniseries in television history. In Texas, it holds the same status the Iliad must have held among the Greeks. I recently came across an interview with the man behind the miniseries, Bill Wittliff. He wrote the screenplay for Lonesome Dove and also served as co-producer. Based on the interview, I compiled a list of 12 things you may not know about Lonesome Dove.
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The original screenplay that became Lonesome Dove was much shorter. In fact, that screenplay formed the basis of the novel. McMurtry wrote it in the early 1970s with director Peter Bogdanovich, following the success of their film The Last Picture Show. It was called Streets of Laredo and was supposed to star John Wayne as Call, Jimmy Stewart as Gus, and Henry Fonda as Jake Spoon. Wayne turned down the project, reportedly because he did not like how Stewart’s and Fonda’s characters would affect his role. After all, Call was not exactly the most likable character, and Wayne may not yet have been ready to play an “old cowboy.”
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The Streets of Laredo screenplay sat on a shelf for more than a decade until one day McMurtry saw an old bus with the words “LONESOME DOVE BAPTIST CHURCH” painted on its side. He knew he had found his title. He went home and began reworking the story into a novel, inspired in part by the lives of Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1986.
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The film rights to the novel were purchased by Motown, which made everyone stop and say, “What is going on?” If it seemed like an odd combination, it was not. Motown producer Suzanne de Passe joined forces with Wittliff to create a masterpiece.
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Robert Duvall turned down the role of Woodrow Call so that he could play Gus.
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Duvall said that while filming, he knew it was going to be a classic. He told his fellow actors, “Boys, we’re making the ‘Godfather’ of Westerns.” He later said that he could retire from acting because Gus was his Hamlet.
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Bill Wittliff, the screenwriter, played a small role—one of the farmers who were shot, hanged, and burned.
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Charles Bronson was supposed to play the brutal Blue Duck but had to withdraw because of contractual obligations.
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Lonesome Dove did not win the 1989 Emmy Award for Outstanding Miniseries. That honor went to War and Remembrance, which no one remembers today. Nor did a single actor from the miniseries receive an Emmy. Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Diane Lane, and Anjelica Huston were all overlooked. At the Golden Globes, however, Lonesome Dove won Best Miniseries and Duvall won Best Actor.
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Gus’s body—the dummy that Call brought back from Montana to bury in Texas—is on display at Texas State University in San Marcos, which owns the Lonesome Dove collection. Curator Steve Davis told me that some people cry when they see Gus’s body. You can also see Gus’s hat and the blacksmith’s poker that Call used to beat the “rude” army scout nearly to death.
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Larry McMurtry wrote Lonesome Dove to shatter our romantic notions about the lives of cowboys and cattle drives. He wanted to depict the brutal hardships and difficult times faced by cowboys on the frontier. In that, he may have failed. Woodrow F. Call and Augustus McCrae are now mythical figures and literary legends. They are admired and loved, at least in Texas, probably more than any cowboys in the history of Westerns.
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Lonesome Dove has sold more copies on DVD than any other Western in cinema history.
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There is a longer version of Lonesome Dove—about 30 minutes longer—but we cannot see it. It is locked away somewhere, and there are no plans to release it.
