The Talented Mr. Wittliff
His screenplays for Lonesome Dove and The Perfect Storm have won him acclaim in Hollywood. But back home in Austin, Bill Wittliff has been famous all along.
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Wittliff's modus operandi would drive a time-management expert crazy. Some days, when he seems deep into one of his screenplays, he'll impulsively head upstairs to his darkroom and start developing photographs. Or he'll pack up his camera gear and set off on a photography expedition. Or he'll go hunting for new treasures to add to his Southwest Texas State collections, items ranging from the historically important to the comically kitschy. With the help of a benefactor, he recently spent $45,000 for what may be the last available copy of La relación y commentarios, the 1555 travelog by the shipwrecked explorer Cabeza de Vaca, which is considered the first book ever written that describes Texas. Back when his buddy Willie Nelson was being sued for $16.7 million by the Internal Revenue Service, Wittliff once took an afternoon off and drove out to the singer's Pedernales recording studio just to swipe the IRS sticker on the front door declaring that the studio was being confiscated for back taxes.
And then there's the enormous amount of time Wittliff will devote to one of his publishing projects. The creation of Boystown: La Zona de Tolerancia is a classic Wittliffian venture. In the early seventies, while researching a screenplay set in Mexico, Wittliff visited Boystown, a red-light district in a Mexican border city where he planned to set a scene. He befriended the photographers who worked the cinder-block whorehouses and charged customers a couple of bucks for a "souvenir" of their evening among the prostitutes. Before the night was over, they took him back to the tiny studio they shared, where he saw a pile of negatives on the floor. He picked one up and held it to the light. Then, with a gasp, he picked up another.
Although the photographs were nothing more than quick snapshots, Wittliff realized that they revealed a sometimes humorous, sometimes merciless world of lust and cheap happiness that no one else had come close to capturing. (When Wittliff himself had tried to take photos in Boystown one day, he was nearly assaulted by the prostitutes.) There were shots of fraternity boys posing like bandits; Mexican laborers posing like rich businessmen; aging, naked prostitutes posing with chins proudly raised in an attempt to maintain their dignity. Wittliff cut a deal with the photographers to buy their negatives, then he cut a deal with a friend to slip the negatives across the border. In all, he collected more than seven thousand negatives, and off and on for the next 26 years, he cleaned those negatives, then printed the photos and retouched them, sometimes spending six or seven hours on one photo alone.
Although Boystown: La Zona de Tolerancia will not get even a fraction of the attention that will be lavished on whatever his next movie is, Wittliff seems as proud of this project as of anything he's ever done. "Why did Ispend so much time on these pictures?" he asks rhetorically, then pauses, as if he's not sure of the answer. "There was no way I couldn't work on them. They were this incredible human document, revealing to us lives that we never before knew." He pauses again. "Every time I looked at these photos, I saw stories that needed to be told and that needed to be preserved."Wittliff is almost obsessively driven by this need to tell and to preserve. "It's what sets him apart from everyone else I have ever known," says Keith Carter, the well-regarded East Texas photographer who has been a long-time contributor to Texas Monthly and is a close friend of Wittliff's. "Bill is not only a great storyteller, he has a great empathy for other people's stories. He loves to find the narratives that run through our lives."Although he has a reputation among studio executives as a wily dealmaker—"Wittliff is one of the few writers I know who likes going to breakfast with the Hollywood suits and negotiating," says Shrake—he also keeps one foot firmly in the past. "There's something about him that seems to be a little bit out of his time," says Connie Todd. "It's as if he had been raised at the turn of the century." He was born in 1940 in the tiny South Texas community of Taft. When he was only two years old, his mother left his father, a raging drunk, and got a job as a 24-hour-a-day switchboard operator making $30 a month. Wittliff and his older brother lived with her in a little room adjoining the switchboard office, and they would listen to her conversations with the townspeople. After they moved to another small town, Edna, Wittliff's main childhood entertainment was walking into town and listening to the owner of the hardware store tell stories. He also learned to tell stories himself. He told his school classmates, for instance, that his father was a "Flying Tiger" who had been killed in combat in World War II. Everyone believed the story, Wittliff recalls, until his father showed up at school "toilet-hugging drunk," telling the principal that he had come to wish his son a happy birthday.
Wittliff spent his high school years in the Central Texas town of Blanco, where the family had moved when his mother married a rancher. He was the quarterback of the high school football team, a starter on the basketball team, and the class cutup who always had a funny story or a joke to tell.
But even then Wittliff felt a need to keep a record of the details of his life. He kept just about everything—his notes, letters, photos, school papers. When he was fifteen, he tried to sneak into a sold-out Elvis Presley concert in San Antonio by climbing a tree and attempting to get into the auditorium through a second-floor window. It turned out to be a window in Presley's dressing room. Presley, who was then at the dawn of his career, was so charmed by Wittliff that he wrote a note on a napkin telling the security guards to let Wittliff and his buddies into the auditorium. Wittliff spent the rest of the evening carefully holding the napkin, sensing that it would someday be important. (It is now framed and stashed in his office.) "Maybe I kept all those things because it was my way of telling myself that I mattered," he says. "Maybe that's why I liked telling stories about myself—telling stories was my way of trying to matter."
One Christmas when he was in high school, Wittliff received a present from his aunt who lived in Houston. It was J. Frank Dobie's Tales of Old-Time Texas, a folklore collection. In the book was a story titled "The Wild Woman of the Navidad," about a runaway slave whose footprints were often seen in the settlements along the river. Wittliff realized that this was the same story he had heard the hardware store owner tell years before. "The book absolutely set me on fire," he says. "Until that moment it never occurred to me that books and writing could come out of your own experience, your own soil." Wittliff began to think that he too could become a writer. "Prior to that, the thought never occurred to me," he says. "I was so ignorant during my childhood that I literally thought every book in the world came from someone living across the great ocean."
Wittliff started sending ideas to the best television dramas of that era—Kraft Television Theatre, Playhouse 90, Robert Montgomery Presents. "I wrote down a million ideas for those shows, and they were all basically variations of the same theme: Three junior high or high school boys play hooky from school, which I just happened to be doing at the time, and each time they would end up doing something good for the world. They'd capture a bunch of cattle rustlers or they'd free a brilliant scientist who had been kidnapped by Russians. Needless to say, none of my submissions were accepted." He also tried to get published in Reader's Digest. He submitted an article for its column My Most Unforgettable Character. The story, entirely invented by Wittliff, was about his close relationship with Lyndon Johnson, then a U.S. senator, who had a ranch near Blanco. When that article was rejected, he sent several made-up quotes—which he claimed he had heard LBJ say—to the Quotable Quotes section. Reader's Digest turned him down again.
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