Capturing the Cowboys

By Josh Tyrangiel

As the premier novelist of the American West, Larry McMurtry, 69, has won a Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove and seen film adaptations of his work--including Hud, The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment--earn 26 Oscar nominations. But Brokeback Mountain was another writer's story, and, as McMurtry tells Josh Tyrangiel, he almost didn't read it.

When your writing partner, Diana Ossana, first showed you Annie Proulx's short story, is it true you said, "I don't read short fiction"? I've never been able to read short fiction, and I've never been able to write it. It's a blank in my intellectual life, and I don't know why. I guess I'm naturally a novelist. I want a few hundred pages to make my statement. But that resistance only lasted a minute or so. I read it, and we wrote Annie Proulx our letter asking if we could option it an hour later.

Isn't the first rule of Hollywood Never put up your own money? I've been working in Hollywood since the early '60s, and it's the first time I've ever put up any amount of money at all. And yet it seemed if there was ever a time to do it, this was it.

You must have been aware that it would be a potentially controversial film. What made you think it would be a good investment? I wasn't even thinking anywhere near that. I was thinking of getting the rights and writing the screenplay, and what came later came waaaaay later. We just thought it was the greatest story to address the American West. I instantly thought, "Wow, why didn't I write it?"

A lot of your work is about the West, but it's also about the illusion of the West. Is the idea that all the men were platonically macho and never emotionally entangled one of those illusions? I write stories that turn out to be set in the West because the West has been the context of my life, but I don't think about things like that. I think about the characters, [but] I have often pointed out that the shoot-'em-up, bang-bang, fast-draw West is a Hollywood invention. It didn't exist. And anybody who knows much about the famous characters of the West knows that it didn't exist, so I have said that. But when I'm writing a story or novel set in the West, [that version of] it is not in my head.

You and Ossana wrote the screenplay together. How do you make that work? I write five pages a day and am usually through by 8:30 in the morning. I give the pages to Diana. She puts them into the computer, subtracts, adds, moves them around, restructures. And we do that every day until we have a draft.

Why limit yourself to five? If you let yourself go on a good day and write 25 pages, the well is sucked dry, and it's harder to go on. The thing about a long narrative is momentum. A little bit every day is better than a lot one day and nothing the next.

One of the main things you added to the story was women. In a lot of your work, women turn out to have far richer interior lives than men. I have always argued that if you want to learn something about emotion, you have to ask women. That's why I've had three women characters who've won Oscars--[for] Patricia Neal, Cloris Leachman and Shirley MacLaine. I've always thought that for my interests, emotionally, I have to seek women to talk about. Men don't talk about emotion. They don't understand it.

Have you been happy with the films made from your work over the years? I feel I've been maybe the luckiest of American writers in that my novels have generated very good films, more than the average. Maybe Steinbeck was luckier.

You attribute that to luck? No, I attribute it to coming from a strong place that breeds strong characters, and strong characters are what major actors and actresses want to play. They want to play somebody vivid.

Do you still see a lot of movies? Not much. I'm old. I've seen a lot of movies. I have the same problem with fiction. I can't read fiction anymore. I've reviewed over 1,000 novels, and I just burned out a long time ago. Occasionally I'll reread War and Peace or Anna Karenina or Middlemarch.

So what do you read for fun?

History. Memoirs of World War I, trying to figure out how we got from 1895 to 1945.

In your Golden Globes acceptance speech you thanked your typewriter. Have you ever used a computer? Never.

How do you know that you wouldn't like it? I don't. I just know that I'm satisfied with my typewriter. I've been typing on it 50 years, and I don't see any reason to change.