What If: An Alternate Imagining of Lonesome Dove

 

I love Lonesome Dove. I read the book when it first came out, when I was in high school. Four years later the miniseries came along, and I loved that, too. The novel, of course, became just one part of a four-part cycle of novels, which I think compare to Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales when it comes to encapsulating the mythology of the American frontier. Years ago, I came across a fascinating story about the writing of the novel by Larry McMurtry, and it has stoked my imagination ever since. Maybe you've heard it before.

In 1971, McMurtry and the young director Peter Bogdanovich were fresh off adapting McMurtry's novel The Last Picture Show into a screenplay, and then a critically acclaimed movie. They wanted to follow it up with something even bigger: an original screenplay for an epic traditional western that would star three of the biggest names in the history of Hollywood westerns -John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda. It would be an elegiac western, a swan song about three aging cowboys facing their own mortality and the passing of their way of life. McMurtry and Bogdanovich co-wrote a treatment of the proposed screenplay -that is, a comprehensive overview of the story and the characters, essentially writing out the story in prose form which could then be hashed into a screenplay with all the dialogue. It was called Streets of Laredo.

Stewart and Fonda signed on to the project as Gus McCrae and Jake Spoon... but Wayne balked. One source says that he felt the character of Woodrow Call was "too much of a hardass" and might be bad for his image. Another says that Wayne felt the story was too elegiac, like it was the actors saying goodbye to the West, and might impact the success of his future westerns. Maybe it was both. Maybe, as this is John Wayne, he felt it was too "revisionist," though that is speculation on my part. It is worth pointing out that many of Wayne's best, most electrifying performances came when he was being a cold, somewhat cruel, hardass... Red River and The Searchers, for example. It is also worth noting that, five years later, Wayne did star in an adaptation of a very elegiac western novel (Glendon Swarthout's The Shootist), which wound up being the perfect capstone to his career.

Regardless, without John Wayne's participation the project fell apart and languished for years. McMurtry eventually bought back the rights to the treatment so he could write it as a novel (with a different title), and -one Pulitzer Prize later -the rest is history. 

But I've always wondered.

Most people couldn't imagine anyone other than Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duval as leads to an adaptation of Lonesome Dove. However, Wayne, Stewart and Fonda would have been outstanding in the roles that were, in a way, literally created for them. It is worth pointing out that all four novels in the cycle were adapted as TV miniseries -as well as a non-McMurtry-approved sequel called Return to Lonesome Dove -so, actually, there have already been five actors to play Woodrow Call.

I am going to interject what will probably be an unpopular opinion. I would give anything if someone like HBO, Prime, or Netflix would re-film the entire four-novel saga using the same set of actors throughout, for consistency's sake.

All this has set me thinking -for years -what it would have been like had the whole saga been produced with the originally envisioned Hollywood icons in the lead roles. For my own diversion -I'll do anything to avoid actual work -I have put together imaginary casts for them all. I am envisioning each novel adaptation coming at an appropriate time in the actors' lives, and have used actors from around that time to fill out all the supporting roles.

It occurs to me that AI could be used in the not-too-distant future to actually do this -but that would not only require an enormous number of permissions, but would be entirely too creepy in both a moral and "uncanny valley" sense.

But I can daydream.