How John Wayne Almost Kept ‘Lonesome Dove’ From Being Made
What To Know
- Lonesome Dove, now a beloved Emmy-winning miniseries and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, originally began as a 1970s film script intended for stars like John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda.
- The film adaptation stalled for years due to casting disagreements, particularly John Wayne’s reluctance to play Woodrow Call, leading the project into limbo after the original actors passed away.
- Author Larry McMurtry reclaimed the script, transformed it into a bestselling novel, and ultimately paved the way for its successful adaptation as a classic television miniseries in 1989.
When Lonesome Dove aired in 1989, it became one of television’s most beloved miniseries, winning multiple Emmy Awards and cementing its place as a Western classic. Today, both the show and the book that inspired it are winning over a new generation of fans, based on recommendations of everyone from Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan to Stephen King himself. But long before Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones brought Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call to iconic life, Lonesome Dove almost came to an end — before it was published as a book, it was a script for a film that never got made.
Author Larry McMurtry revealed that the film script was first written in the early 1970s. “It was originally written about 1971 for John Wayne, James Stewart and Henry Fonda, with Peter Bogdanovich, fresh from his triumph of The Last Picture Show, to direct,” McMurtry said in a 1995 interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram . The roles were set: Wayne as Woodrow Call, Stewart as Gus, Fonda as Jake Spoon and Cybill Shepherd as Lorena. “It was quite a good script, I think; the studios loved it,” he recalled.
Robb Kendrick/TV Guide/CBS/Everett Collection
The problem came down to Wayne. McMurtry explained, “Wayne didn’t want to play the taciturn Woodrow. He wanted to play Gus, whom McMurtry calls ‘the poet.’ This block existed for years. And Henry Fonda came around, and James Stewart came around, and John Wayne did not come around. And he died. And Henry Fonda died. And it went into a long limbo.”
CBS/Everett Collection
With the project stalled and the original stars gone, McMurtry decided to reclaim his story. He eventually bought the script back from the studio and reworked it into the novel Lonesome Dove, published in 1985. The book went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and revived interest in bringing the tale to screen, this time in the format of a television miniseries.
Millions of viewers tuned in to follow Gus and Call on their cattle drive adventure, and the miniseries became one of CBS’s biggest hits of the decade. It is hard to imagine Lonesome Dove any other way, but for years it was almost lost in Hollywood. Thanks to McMurtry’s persistence, what began as a shelved script became one of the greatest television Westerns of all time.
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Wild West- Heroes & Villains
November 2022
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