Larry McMurtry
The 68-year-old novelist and screenwriter on leaving Archer City, working in Hollywood, eating in Tucson, and whether the cowboy myth is dead or alive.
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My writing partner, Diana Ossana, read Annie's great short story "Brokeback Mountain" in the New Yorker and persuaded me to read it. I'm a reluctant reader of short fiction. I've never liked reading short stories, and I've never written them. But I read it, and I recognized it as a masterpiece about the American West. We thought of it as a great story about doomed love. We didn't really think of it as gay or not gay. So I wrote Annie and offered her a very modest option, and she entrusted us with it. It's the easiest script I have ever written. We used every single line in the story, and when that still felt a little short, we added domestic context for both guys. Really, that's all we did. We left it as much as possible like the story.
How big is the budget?
I think it's $11 million.
I guess that's still low-budget by today's standards.
That's real low-budget. I think [director] Ang Lee is a little frustrated at the low-budgetness. He's never had to make a movie that's not shot where it's supposed to be happening. It's set in Wyoming. It's not set in Alberta. But it's 30 percent cheaper to shoot in Canada. That's just a brutal fact of life that hundreds of American movies have to deal with.
You've had a pretty long-term relationship with Hollywood—you've written maybe seventy screenplays, and at least half a dozen of your books have been made into films. Has it been a good experience overall?
Oh, very good. I've been very lucky. Several really good movies have been made: The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove. Those films are as good as anybody is likely to get.
Not everybody who writes books that get made into films necessarily thinks, "This is a good thing for me."
It's odd. I've always been treated extremely nicely by Hollywood. I've had only one or two borderline, awkward, or difficult experiences in 42 years. It's an interesting culture. I'm very comfortable in Los Angeles. I always have been, since my first visit. I also think that from the beginning, I've been realistic about Hollywood. Moviemaking is a chancy thing. You're pulling together a lot of people who haven't worked together before, and you're collaborating in a place you don't know much about. So it's hit-or-miss. I've been lucky that my movies have hit several times.
You don't feel like you've wasted your time when you write a screenplay and nothing ever comes of it?
No, because I got paid. You always get paid.
Do you see the films you've written?
I don't always see them when they come out. I always get around to seeing them sooner or later, but I don't have an absolutely burning curiosity about them. Strangely enough, if there's anything I regret about being a screenwriter, it's that it has kind of killed my interest in movies. I used to be a huge movie buff. It's professionalized my passion.
Sort of like the chef who can't bear to cook at home.
That's right. I can't remember when I last saw a movie in a theater. It's been years and years. And when I see a movie at home, it's often for professional reasons. You're looking at an actor; you're looking at an actress; you're looking at a director. You see a little of it, and that's it.
What about the movies made from books you've written?
I'm perfectly comfortable with that process, but often the movies come out so long after that I've forgotten the book. It's way back in my history. Even Terms of Endearment took eight years. I have one movie that took eighteen, a TV movie called Montana. I never saw it.
Is it true that you didn't see Lonesome Dove until ten years after it was made?
That was an accident. I was out of the country when it came out. For a while I saw only flashes of it; I didn't sit down with the whole eight hours. And then, when we were making Streets of Laredo, I watched it straight through. I liked it.
You don't feel ownership over the material to the point that you'd be desperate to see what somebody else did to your book?
I've never felt that. It's mine when I'm writing it. It's the world's when I turn it loose. You've got to understand that directors are going to come in and make a contribution, make it somehow theirs. That's natural.
When The Last Picture Show was being made, did you ever imagine it would be such a critical success—a classic?
Yeah, I thought it was going to be very good. It was a case of a director getting the right material at the right stage in his career. Unfortunately, I traveled with it in South America once. I did Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and back up to Colombia. And so I was with that movie for 32 showings, and of course I got to where I couldn't watch it. I had to get so far away that I couldn't even hear it. I haven't seen it since.
Tell me about your collaboration with Diana Ossana.
The reason Diana and I became partners—well, I should talk a little about how my heart surgery [in December 1991] changed my operating methods. When you have heart surgery, your heart is physically jumpy for a while. I had a bit of trouble in Washington. I couldn't stay there because the fire trucks would drive by and my heart would literally start jumping around. I went to Tucson to stay with [writer] Leslie Sokol, and she has parrots and cockatoos. Those cockatoos would have the same effect as the fire trucks. So I stayed instead with Diana and her daughter. I was quite depressed and mainly just sat on the couch and looked at the mountains for a couple of years, but I could still write fiction. I wrote Streets of Laredo and Dead Man's Walk and Comanche Moon. It was very much as if it were being faxed to me. It didn't take me long. I would type it out as fast as I could type. And yet I had no connection with it. It was like something somebody else had done or was doing and sending to me. So I got a very good psychiatrist, and I had Prozac and various things.
They now understand that a lot of people have certain mental deficits when they come out of heart surgery because of the heart-lung machine. The heart-lung machine makes this operation possible, but it doesn't function like a heart or a lung: It doesn't pump like a heart and it doesn't oxygenate as easily as a lung. So when you come out of it, you're sort of scrambled. I could write a letter, but I couldn't address an envelope. This wore off in about a year. During this time I was writing fiction clickety-click. I got a lot of screenplay offers—I had been doing a lot of script work before the surgery—but I had to turn them down because I knew that while fiction comes out of the viscera, script work comes out of the head. You have to be able to think through a story structurally. And I could not have done that at all. Diana started helping me so I wouldn't have to turn down too many scripts. And it worked. We were good partners.
You're working on a nonfiction book about Buffalo Bill.
I've always been slightly interested in Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley, and actually I got real interested in the aspect of their superstardom. They were big international superstars, really the first American superstars. I don't think there could have been true superstars any earlier in the world of entertainment. You have to have trains that run on time. You have to have press agents that can commission poster art. It all started in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. There were no superstars before that. Cody was probably the most famous man in the world for a long, long time. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show is still running at Euro Disney, still packing in those French kids.
How much of that is the cowboy myth? We talk a lot about whether it's run its course—
It's not the cowboy myth. Cody was a terrible cowboy. He had a ranch for a while, but he hated it. His myth was a little bit earlier. It was the myth of the prairie scout. He relates in a way to the mountain men, Kit Carson, guides—stuff like that. And Annie Oakley never lived west of Cincinnati.
Then you tell me, since you've written so much on the West: Is the cowboy myth dead or alive?
I think we've kind of worn the cowboy out. In the twenty-first century, it's just not us. The cowboy myth was based on a brief experience that lasted one generation only. It's the image of the horseman. You've got to have someone on the horse. The cowboy myth came from that twenty-year period when they had no railroads from South Texas to Montana. As soon as they got railroads, they stopped doing that, because it was slow and cumbersome and not much fun. But that's where the romance came from.
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