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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Jones appeared over the bluff first. He was wearing his long underwear and riding the Hell Bitch down the steep embankment with the herd of cattle behind him. The other actors—some of them total naked except for their hats, others in their long johns—followed, swinging ropes and heyahhing the cattle along to the water.
The herd plunged without complaint into the water and held their stricken faces high while they groped for the bottom with their hooves. Beside them the cowboys struggled to hold on while their horses stroked awkwardly across the narrow creek. In an instant the pretty green water had changed into a roiling mass of suspended mud and dislodged vegetation.
The crew was applauding as the drovers, sopping wet and buzzing with adrenaline, emerged from the creek.
“That look like a cattle crossin’?” Jones asked Wittliff.
“Damn right it did.”
Duvall had not been involved in the river crossing, because in the movie he is waiting for the cowboys on the far bank, having just come back from the various thundering adventures involved in his rescue of Lorena from Blue Duck. In the scene remaining to be shot, he would talk to Call and the others while the cattle crossed the river in the background.
Duvall, Jones, Tim Scott, Ricky Schroder, and D.B. Sweeney retired to their director’s chairs in the scattered shade of a huisache and rehearsed the scene in relative peace while the wranglers began recycling the cattle back to the other side of the creek.
“I was sorry to hear about Bill Spettle,” Duval said in a recitative, as yet uncommitted voice.
“Same bolt a lightin’ that kilt him kilt thirteen head a cattle,” Jones responded, hanging his wet socks up on a limb to dry. “Burned ‘em black.”
They went through it several more times, waiting for the complicated shot to be set up. When it was ready, Jones and the rest of the drovers who would be emerging from the river rode their horses into the water to get wet again. Duvall sat waiting for them on his horse, enduring numberless pesty adjustments: a makeup man standing on a ladder and combing the hair beneath the actor’s hat brim, a camera assistant taking a light reading off his face, a woman from the wardrobe department snapping a Polaroid while another daubed sweat on his back, a boom operator dangling a fur-covered microphone above his head, and a wrangler crouching beneath his horse, holding its tail. Through it all Duvall was as mute and still as an equestrian statue.
All this artifice fell away when the cameras started to roll and Jones and the others rode up from the creek as if they had just crossed with the cattle. The cattle themselves were crossing again for real, and so the background was full of marvelous chaos as Jones and Duvall delivered their lines. The takes were all good, but on the third take something extraordinary happened, something you could not explain. It had to do simply with the way Duvall said the line “I’m sorry we lost Bill Spettle”—the way his voice now seemed to have landed in some new register of compassion and tragic authority.
At that moment I was convinced. Gus and Call seemed utterly real to me, and I was struck with a vague sense of premonition that at first I could not account for. Then I remembered something I had seen the day before, when I had been poking around the set of Lonesome Dove. I was in Pumphrey’s General Store, admiring the shelves that were stocked with realistic-looking bottles of chill tonic and Chief Two Moons Bitter Oil Laxative, when I wandered into a side room filled with props. Leaning against the wall was a human form, wrapped in burlap and lashed to a board. When I saw that the form had only one booted leg, I realized what it was. It was Gus, who dies of gangrene in Montana and is hauled back by Call to be buried in Texas.
That burlap-wrapped mannequin was an unaccountably poignant sight, as if Gus were real and the body was really Gus. You get confused on a movie set, because for all the chaos and tedium the urge to believe that it is all not just a movie is as strong as it is in the theater. Watching Duvall and Jones speak to each other as Gus and Call now above the noise of the cattle and the whistles and grunts of the drovers, I found myself particularly susceptible. I was sad that Gus would die, sad that Call would end up haunted and bereft, but most of all I was sad because I could not help knowing that the myth they represented, for all its immediacy and ageless power, was still a myth.
When the scene between Gus and Call was finished and the cattle had crossed the river for the seventh and last time, somebody noticed a solitary cow still standing on the other side of the creek.
“I’ll get him!” yelled one of the actors, a young bit player still clad only in his cowboy hat and chaps. Swinging his rope, he kicked his horse toward the water.
“Stop!” Jimmy Medearis, the head wrangler, shouted after him. “Let us get him! You guys are not cowboys!”
The actor obeyed, but he cast a resentful eye at Medearis. What was the harm in pretending?
Extra! Extra!
Read all about it: how to perform a perfect cameo in three seconds.
In the television version of Lonesome Dove, I play Cornelius J. Trudell, a St. Louis pastry chef who had fled to Fort Smith, Arkansas, amid allegations that he murdered an elderly society dowager—along with her entire bridge club—by serving them a poisoned charlotte russe. A morbid genius, Trudell works by day as an assistant to the Fort Smith undertaker but labors far into the night perfecting his deadly recipes, and it is he alone who knows that his employer’s sudden surge of business has a direct connection with the local doughnut shop.
Brilliant, sardonic, mysteriously attractive to women, Trudell is one of the most complex characters ever conceived for the screen. Simon Wincer, the director, allowed me unusual latitude in bringing the character to life. Wincer clearly believed so strongly in the necessity for an actor to prepare in solitude, in the sanctum of his own soul, that he paid me the ultimate professional tribute of not consulting me at all.
The role of Trudell was particularly challenging because of the meager screen time allotted to the character—perhaps two or three seconds—and the limitations imposed by the lack of any dialogue whatsoever. That he was not mentioned either in the screenplay or in the novel added considerably to my creative burden. It was the sort of performance that an ordinary actor might not dare essay. But I was not an ordinary actor—I was an extra. Actually, the term I prefer is “background artist.”
“Your background action is going to make this look like a real town,” Matt Bearson, an assistant director, told the Lonesome Dove extras. “It’s very important that it looks like you live in your own world. One of the best ways to do this is to create character for yourself.
I had been an extra once before. I played Salmon LaChance, the dying postmaster from Chug Hole, Nebraska, who watches Willie Nelson ride his horse down the street in Red Headed Stranger. But the role of Trudell was far meatier, and I was so eager to play the part I agreed to work for scale - $40 a day, plus gas money and lunch (to include a choice of dessert).
I have to admit I was a little disappointed when I reported to the wardrobe trailer and, after a great deal of measurement and thoughtful scrutiny, was issued a black suit, a pair of clodhoppers, and a derby. Here I was, in Lonesome Dove, the quintessential cowboy epic, and I had to wear a derby! Not only that, but my scene did not even take place in Texas but in Arkansas. I could have sulked and held up production, the way Marlon Brando did on the set of Mutiny on the Bounty, but I knew if I behaved like a prima donna I risked losing the respect of the crew. So I listened quietly as Matt explained the scene. This was, he said, the part of the movie where a formidable woman named Peach (played by Helena Humann) storms across a busy Fort Smith street to confront Sheriff July Johnson (Chris Cooper) and demand that he take off in pursuit of “that murderer Jake Spoon.”
As the undertaker’s assistant, I was stationed on the boardwalk in front of the funeral parlor. During this scene, the undertaker would be seated on a bench, comforting a widow, while I, Cornelius J. Trudell, awaited the hearse that would deliver her husband’s coffin.
All morning long—upon hearing the command “background”—the extras swarmed into motion. Wagons rumbled, chickens squawked, horses whinnied, citizens greeted one another in pantomime, the undertaker patted the widow’s hand. Each take lasted perhaps a minute at the most, and then it was time to “recycle” and start the whole promenade again.
I held back a little at first, searching for the essential rhythm, the emotional fundament of the scene. Knowing what he knows, I asked myself, how would Trudell behave? As a shrewdly observant psychopath, he could not fail to notice the heated conversation a few paces away between Peach and July Johnson, but his full attention would certainly be elsewhere. I decided to have him kick an imaginary dirt clod off the boardwalk with his foot, a bit of business that seemed to hint at both his restlessness and his evil calculations.
But Wincer kept ordering more takes. He clearly wasn’t satisfied with my performance. We both knew something was missing. Then, just as the cameras started to roll for the dozenth time, it came to me. The widow! Of course! Trudell and the widow are in love! And the fact that her husband is lying in the hearse—after complaining to his wife at dinner that her corn dodgers had a peculiar aftertaste—is no accident whatsoever!
Suddenly, I had the key to the whole scene. The performance flowed out of me. Kicking the dirt clod, I felt remarkably natural, as if I weren’t acting at all. When Wincer yelled “Cut!” I saw him glance vaguely in my direction. It seemed to me that his eyes were filled with respect. “That’s a print,” he said.
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