Lonesome Dove is a grand Western epic that follows two retired Texas Rangers embarking on a cattle drive from the Mexican border in Texas all the way to the Canadian border in Montana. None of this would have happened though if John Wayne had wanted to make the movie.
The Original ‘Lonesome Dove’ Script Was Rejected
Streets of Laredo was initially rejected by Wayne, Stewart, and Fonda despite the pedigree Bogdanovich and McMurtry had after The Last Picture Show. Much of Streets of Laredo dealt with the characters aging. This version of the story would have Wayne and Stewart starting off as pig farmers with little to do but make conversation on the porch, one of those conversations being Stewart “complaining about how long it takes to pee when you get older.”
In his third memoir, Hollywood, McMurtry theorized that none of the stars they reached out to wanted to play the faded versions of the heroes they once brought to life, but none so more than John Wayne. Stewart and Fonda eventually acquiesced, as work was beginning to dry out for them in the 1970s, but Wayne was less in need. Wayne, not far off from his long-awaited Oscar win for True Grit, was still working regularly as a leading man and keeping a traditional sort of Western alive.
“John Wayne wasn’t going to lend himself to a total critique of the genre he had been working in for forty years. He wasn’t going to make Blazing Saddles,” said English professor Don Graham in the Texas Monthly oral history. Without Wayne on board, the project never came to be. But this wasn’t the end for McMurtry.
When Did Larry McMurtry Turn ‘Streets of Laredo’ into ‘Lonesome Dove’?
After twelve years and a few more books under his belt, McMurtry decided to buy the rights to Streets of Laredo for $35,000 feeling it might make a decent novel. He stopped and started for a few years, taking breaks to write Cadillac Jack and The Desert Rose, only getting the engine going after a moment of divine inspiration: finding the title.
While McMurtry would use Streets of Laredo for the sequel’s title, it was a passing bus advertising a local “Lonesome Dove Church” that gave him the clarity he needed to finish what would become the book. The manuscript reached 1600 pages but became a quick success, not only with its accolades but with the general public, spending about a year on the bestseller list when factoring in both the hardcover and paperback editions.
Peter Bogdanovich may have made a great Western out of the script for Streets of Laredo, but he doesn’t seem too upset to have missed out. “I read it in one week and thought it was brilliant. I felt it was written almost in vengeance to show that novels can do anything better than a movie,” also said Bogdanovich in Texas Monthly.
And while McMurtry, before his passing, considered his book to be somewhat of a failure, likening it to Gone With the Wind, and ultimately romanticizing the mythos of the Old West, it is likely his most remembered work. Hollywood has crazy ups and downs, with many projects starting one way and ending up another. In this case, it was for the best. While John Wayne’s ego may have robbed audiences of a movie with not just him and Jimmy Stewart, but Henry Fonda and Cybill Shepherd too, those who seek out the novel Lonesome Dove are not likely to be sorry.
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