The Making of Lonesome Dove
The basic rule on the set is to be faithful to Larry McMurtry’s revered novel.
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Though Lonesome Dove was a television production, Wincer and Douglas Milsome, his cinematographer, were shooting it like a feature, with sophisticated lighting, moving cameras, and complex staging that required scenes to be shot from up to a half-dozen different angles. The film’s fluent intercutting—which would be so thoughtlessly accepted by a viewer’s retina—required such laborious repositioning of cameras, lights, and hundreds of accessories that watching it was like watching an army strike camp only to set it up again a few yards away.
One afternoon while the crew was preparing a shot, I went over to talk to Tommy Lee Jones, who was sitting at the base of a six-kilowatt light in the dirt yard of the Hat Creek bunkhouse, idly whacking the ground with a quirt. D.B. Sweeney, who plays the lovesick Dish Boggett, had told me to ask Jones for a recitation of the vinegarroon toast, which Sweeney had termed “a beautiful Texas haiku.”
“Hell yes I can recite the vinegarroon toast,” Jones said. He held up an imaginary shot glass, narrowed his eyes and declaimed:
“‘Here’s to the vinegarroon/that jumped on the centipede’s back. / He looked at him with a glow and a glee / and he said, “You poisonous son-of-a-bitch, / if I don’t git you, you’ll git me.”’
“You can find that in one of Mr. Dobie’s books,” Jones explained. “Cow People, I believe it is.”
At 41, Jones was at least a dozen years shy of Woodrow Call’s unspecified middle age, but in the midday light he looked pretty close. In addition to the white beard, his face was covered with three layers of latex stipple to simulate wrinkles, and above that were artful depictions of burst capillaries and liver spots.
He described the application of this makeup in authoritative detail, and during the days I spent on the set his conversation touched with equal enthusiasm upon the nature of the bicameral mind, the poetry of William Carlos Williams, the lost Jim Bowie silver mine, the proper technique of flanking a steer, and the art of acting.
“The acting’s easy,” he said. “It’s like anything else—like makin’ a pan of biscuits—it’s all in the preparation. You have to go through life and find those things that accrue to the big bouillabaisse of your brain. Or the little bouillabaisse, as the case may be.”
A Harvard-educated resident of San Saba, Jones projected an appealing air of real-world savvy. His interpretation of Call—a man so interior and taciturn that he cannot even bring himself to acknowledge his own son—seemed to be a shade or two less grim than McMurtry’s but authentic all the same. Jones said he had based the character partly on his own two grandfathers, and of course he had read Mr. Haley’s book about Mr. Goodnight.
Jones had a booming voice that made me think of Shanghai Pierce, the South Texas cattle baron who bragged that his own voice was “too big for indoor use.” The makeup and fringe of white beard did their job in making him look older, but they also lent his ornery features an unexpected mildness. On a horse, he was spectacularly convincing. There was about him a certain unstated pride—a reveling—in the fact that he was a Texan, that the character he was playing came to him not just through research but as a kind of legacy, through his own bones.
“In this next scene,” he explained as he was called over for rehearsal, “I come ridin’ the Hell Bitch in from over there to where Gus is sittin’ on the porch. There’s five Hell Bitches in this movie—one to buck, one to bite, one to kick, one to drag around, and one just to stand there.”
The Hell Bitch, in the book, is Call’s prized but unbroken gray mare. This particular scene called for the horse to come charging wildly into the frame with its rider barely in control—one of many occasions in the filming of the movie in which Jones would be called upon to display his horsemanship.
The braking horse was consistently engulfed in a cloud of dust, though a few million more particles of grit were barely noticeable in the endless sandstorm that plagued the production. The crew, whose faces were often obscured by bandannas and surgical masks, had taken to calling the movie “Lonesome Dust.” Every few takes a water truck would drive by to wet down the swirling earth in front of the house and an assistant camera operator would spray a product called Dust Buster over the moving parts of the Arriflex lens. One of the wardrobe assistants had discovered a pair of orphaned baby jackrabbits, and when the wind was down she would bring them out of the protective pocket of her camp stool and feed them drops of milk from the end of her finger.
Duvall, as Gus, sat on the porch in his weather-beaten hat and faded red undershirt. He seemed oblivious not only to the dust but to all the people and instruments that were crowded inches away from his face. Unlike Jones—whose attitude toward acting appeared as genial and uncomplicated as that of a high school quarterback who, to be a good sport, had agreed to take the lead in the senior play—Duvall was always taut with concentration. Sitting on the porch between takes, unapproachable and solitary, he muttered his lines under his breath, jerking his head this way or that with the ratchety, quizzical movements of a songbird.
Duvall seemed always to be engaged in some mysterious private rehearsal, some secret summoning act that he employed for even the most cursory scenes. One night I watched as he prepared for a shot that would be merely a cutaway view of Gus walking up to the Dry Bean saloon. Waiting for his cue, bathed in the illumination of a quartz light, Duvall paced back and forth, refining Gus’s crotchety stride. Just before “Action” was called he stopped, slapped his thighs, rubbed his hands together, planted his feet, and crouched forward, as tense as a long-distance runner at the start of a race.
Occasionally, though, when a scene satisfied him, Duvall would release his grip. “I nailed that scene!” he said after one such take, waltzing past the lights and firing an imaginary six-shooter at the ground. “Pow! Pow! Pow! I nailed it.” At such moments the grizzled and bowlegged Texas Ranger seemed to have fled from Duvall’s body like an exorcised spirit, giving it back momentarily to its primary occupant, whoever exactly that was.
The action of Lonesome Dove takes place from Texas to Montana, a range of locations that would be prohibitively expensive for any picture, much less one that involves so much livestock and period baggage. Though New Mexico would stand in for many of the more northern locations, one of the things Wittliff insisted upon was that the Texas parts be shot in Texas.
The ranch outside Del Rio on which the production company had set up shot contained 56,000 acres. Within its fence lines were landscapes that could credibly represent anything from desert to brushland to Hill Country glade. Today an impounded stretch of Pinto Creek just upstream from the ranch headquarters was being used as the Canadian River.
The scene to be filmed was described in the screenplay as follows:
EXT. CANADIAN RIVER—MORNING
The Hat Creek cowboys (naked or wearing only long johns, though all are wearing their hats) whoop and yell as they swim the herd across the Canadian River.
It was innocuous-sounding words like those—”swim the herd across the Canadian River”—that presented Lonesome Dove with its endless trials in livestock deployment. Down by the creek the Shotmaker—a half-million-dollar four-wheel-drive vehicle with a soaring camera crane—was already in position, and workers were shuttling back and forth across the creek in a makeshift ferry in order to set up another camera on the opposite bank.
At the base camp, a quarter mile up the road, some of the actors who were playing the Hat Creek drovers—including Larry McMurtry’s son James—stood around in their chaps outside the wardrobe truck, being dusted down with fuller’s earth.
In a nearby field Tommy Lee Jones was running the Hell Bitch in figure eights to get her (or him—this particular Hell Bitch was a gelding) into a calm frame of mind.
“Thar’s them bovines now,” he said, reining up and watching as three hundred head of cattle headed in his direction. The animals’ hooves, trotting over the dried brush covering the field, produced a whispery rattling sound that made it seem that the cattle were not bearing down upon the earth with their full weight.
In a perfect world, these would have been Longhorns, But as Jimmy Medearis, the head wrangler, explained to me, Longhorn cattle—particularly cows with calves—are not “maneuverable.” For the sake of historical accuracy, Mexican corrientes were the next best thing. They were framey, wild-looking beasts with substantial horns, and there were a few in the herd that were as shaggy and humpbacked as buffalo.
The wranglers herded the cattle down to the creek and then escorted them—via a much shallower crossing just upstream—to the top of the high bluff on the far side. Jones, Danny Glover, Ricky Schroder, and the rest of the actors playing the Hat Creek Outfit soon followed.
Jimmy Medearis remained on the near bank, a bag of range cubes hanging across his saddlehorn. He planned to strew the feed into the path of the oncoming cattle to slow them down after the excitement of the crossing. Nearby, an EMT team moved into position.
“This is going to be a hand-on-switch situation,” Robert Rooy, the first assistant director, announced. “All three cameras need to be ready. Everybody please clear. Speak up now if you’re not ready or forever hold your peace. Stay off the radios, please. No idle chitchat.”
There was no apparent motion for a few seconds after Wincer called “Action,” but soon a cloud of dust was visible behind the bluff on the other side of the creek.
“Cattle at sixty yards,” Rooy said, holding a walkie-talkie to his ear. “Cattle at forty yards. Cattle at twenty yards.”
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