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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After graduating from high school, in 1957, Wittliff enrolled in and dropped out of four universities in his freshman year alone before finally settling on the University of Texas. He majored in journalism but wasn't a particularly dedicated student. For one thing, he didn't want to learn to type. One semester he put his arm in a sling every time he went to the journalism building in order to avoid having to participate in a typing class. Perhaps his biggest claim to fame during his university days was the horseshoe-shaped bar he built in his room at the Kappa Sigma fraternity house. At night, he and his roommate would turn the room into a gambling den, where Wittliff won most of the poker games and sold cheap Scotch that he had poured into empty Chivas Regal bottles. Among the regular visitors to his gambling den, he says, was Frank Erwin, who was the fraternity's legal adviser and later became the chairman of UT's board of regents. He did get a part-time job with the company that owned the pulp magazines Frontier Times and True West, which was then based in Austin, but his work there didn't suggest that he was destined to become one of the bright lights of Texas arts and letters. He drew a few sketches of cowboys, Indians, rifles, and such for the magazines, and he did get one short piece published, titled "The Bandana, Flag of the Range Country."
Yet Wittliff was determined to make some kind of mark. After graduating from UT, in 1963, he married his college sweetheart, Sally Bowers, and landed minor jobs, first as the business and production manager for the Southern Methodist University Press, in Dallas, and later as a salesman for the University of Texas Press, in Austin. One day he visited J. Frank Dobie, who lived in Austin, and told him that he was planning to start his own book imprint, which he was calling the Encino Press. He said that he wanted the first book he published to be one by Dobie himself. Amused by the young man's passion, Dobie agreed to let Wittliff reprint one of his older stories, royalty-free.
Using his poker winnings as seed money, Wittliff and Sally ran the Encino Press out of their Austin home. Although the company barely got by, its books, almost all of them about Texas, were well received. Wittliff used Encino as his calling card to meet the region's best writers, including Larry McMurtry, who agreed to let Encino publish a collection of his essays that became the highly praised In a Narrow Grave.
Wittliff also decided, almost on a whim, to become a photographer. Knowing nothing about cameras except how to focus and click, he headed to Mexico in the late sixties to photograph vaqueros working a roundup on a ranch. The pictures immediately created a sensation in photography circles. "When I looked at those photos," says Keith Carter, who was then just beginning his own career, "I realized I was looking at someone who knew how to tell a story through images. I said, 'This is what I want to do too.'"
"If there was a secret to my success, it was that I was so ignorant," Wittliff tells me. "Really, there is something to be said for the phrase 'Ignorance is bliss.' If I had known everything I was supposed to have known about book publishing or photography, I sure as hell would have been too afraid to try it."
It was in that same spirit of blissful ignorance that Wittliff decided to tack on a third career—screenwriting. He had never seen a screenplay when he sat down in the early seventies to start writing a movie based on a story his grandfather had told him years before. He didn't use an outline; he simply wrote down whatever came to him next. Within a month he had a screenplay. Bud Shrake saw it sitting on Wittliff's desk, read it, and asked if he could show it to his agent. The script eventually was given to the producers of The French Connection, who loved it, and a few years later it appeared as Barbarosa. Starring Willie Nelson as a onetime outlaw hunted down by a vengeful family, it was praised for its intriguing revelations about human nature by such noted critics as The New Yorker's Pauline Kael.
Wittliff quickly landed another assignment, rewriting the script of The Black Stallion, and by the early eighties was writing like a man possessed, finally getting out all the stories that had been rattling around in his head for decades. He wrote one movie based on his mother's life as a telephone operator (Raggedy Man, starring Sissy Spacek), another about the life of country musicians on the road (Honeysuckle Rose, again starring Willie Nelson), and a third about a family nearly losing its farm (Country, starring Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard). Then came the screenplay for Lonesome Dove, which many critics hailed as one of the greatest western films ever made, some saying it would have won an Oscar if it had been made as a feature film rather than a miniseries.
Wittliff suddenly found himself on Hollywood's rarefied A-list, being offered eyeball-popping amounts of money to move to Los Angeles and work on movies or television series. Yet he refused to leave Texas. He already had a fourth career in mind: literary archivist. A few years before Lonesome Dove, he had received a call from a former secretary of J. Frank Dobie's asking if he might be interested in buying the great man's desk, which she had inherited. Wasting no time, Wittliff met her at Dobie's house, wrote a check for the desk, and then noticed about thirty cardboard boxes in a corner of the room. When he learned that they contained papers and other items remaining from Dobie's estate—from the writer's favorite books to his beloved white suit to the shoes that had been specially made to compensate for his bent feet—Wittliff pulled out his checkbook again.
"When the Dobie material came to me, I knew what I was going to do," he says. "Sally and I wanted to create something that we would call the Southwestern Writers Collection. It would be a place you could go to see the artifacts of Texas writers who had struggled throughout their lives to find just the right word or the right phrase, who wanted to express a feeling, who needed to tell a story. I wanted a place that might inspire a new group of young Texas writers. I wanted them to sense that they were part of a brotherhood and sisterhood that went back all the way to Cabeza de Vaca, that continued with Dobie, and that continues today."
Once the Southwestern Writers Collection was established in 1986, Wittliff turned his attention to a fifth career: photography collector. In 1996 he and Sally established the Wittliff Gallery of Southwestern and Mexican Photography, his hope this time being to inspire other photographers. Then, not long after the gallery's opening, he decided to resurrect his career as a publisher (the Encino Press now sells only its backlisted books). In 1996 he started the Southwestern Writers Collection literary series and the next year began publishing photography books under a new Wittliff Gallery imprint, both through an arrangement with the University of Texas Press.
By now, Wittliff has made so much money through his screenwriting that he probably never has to work again. He's added to his wealth through some shrewd investments in Austin real estate. His and Sally's two children are grown, and Sally has become a prominent Austin lawyer. Besides their Austin house, the couple has vacation homes on Padre Island and in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. But when I suggest to Wittliff that no one would fault him if he trimmed back his schedule and took more time off, he chuckles and says, "What the hell are you talking about?" He says he has many more screenplays left in him, along with more books of photos and perhaps a novel. "When I hear younger writers say that Texas has run out of good stories, I tell them to think again. There are still so many stories out there to tell." He finds it especially rewarding that the most recent screenplay he has sold, the one about the runaway slave, is based on the story he first heard more than fifty years ago as a little boy at the hardware store and later read in Dobie's Tales of Old-Time Texas. "I've never been more excited about everything that's going on," he says. "I guess the wind is still blowing out there."
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