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Lonesome Dove, written by Larry McMurtry, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning western novel and the first published book of the Lonesome Dove series. The story focuses on the relationship of several retired Texas Rangers and their adventures driving a cattle herd from Texas to Montana. McMurtry originally developed the tale in 1972 for a feature film entitled The Streets of Laredo (a title later used for the sequel), which was to have starred John Wayne, Henry Fonda, and James Stewart, and be directed by Peter Bogdanovich, but plans fell through. McMurtry later resurrected the screenplay as a full-length novel, which became a bestseller and won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[citation needed] It was then made into a four-part TV miniseries, which won six Emmy Awards and was nominated for 13 others. It spawned four follow-up miniseries, Return to Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo, Dead Man's Walk, and Comanche Moon.[citation needed] It also spawned two television series, Lonesome Dove: The Series and Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years.
OriginsThe original Lonesome Dove story had been written as a movie script for a 1960s film to be directed by Peter Bogdanovich and star John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda, but Wayne turned the part down on John Ford's advice and Stewart backed out as a result, so the movie was abandoned and McMurtry later turned the script into a full-scale novel, Lonesome Dove, which eventually became a television miniseries with Tommy Lee Jones in the Wayne role, Robert Duvall in the Stewart part, and Robert Urich filling in for Fonda as the cowboy regretfully hanged by his own friends. James Garner had been offered Robert Duvall's role in the original miniseries but had to turn it down for health reasons, and eventually wound up playing the part first portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones and originally created for John Wayne instead.[1] Plot
Captain Augustus "Gus" McCrae (Robert Duvall) and Captain Woodrow F. Call (Tommy Lee Jones), two famous ex-Texas Rangers, run a cattle ranch called the Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium in the small dusty Texas border town of Lonesome Dove. Gus is a romantic figure whose happy-go-lucky nature and good fortune with women and prostitutes, especially Lorena Wood (Diane Lane), prohibits him from doing much real work around the ranch. Call, however, is a no-nonsense, hard-working taskmaster, though his industrious nature has not rubbed off on Gus in the thirty years they've been together. Working with them are Joshua Deets (Danny Glover), a black man who is an excellent tracker and scout from their Ranger days, Pea Eye Parker (Timothy Scott), another former Ranger who works hard but isn't all too bright, and Bolivar (León Singer), a retired Mexican bandit who is. their cook. Also living with them is the boy Newt Dobbs (Rick Schroder), a seventeen-year-old whose mother was a prostitute named Maggie and whose father may be Call. The story begins as Jake Spoon (Robert Urich), a former comrade of Call's and McCrae's, shows up after an absence of more than ten years. He is a man on the run, having accidentally shot the dentist, and brother of the sheriff, of Fort Smith, Arkansas. Reunited with Gus and Call, Jake's breath-taking description of Montana inspires Call to gather a herd of cattle and drive them there, to begin the first cattle ranch in the frontier state. Call is attracted to the romantic notion of settling pristine country. Gus is less enthusiastic, pointing out that they are getting old and that they are Rangers and traders, not cowboys. But he changes his mind when Jake reminds him that Gus' old sweetheart, Clara, lives on the Platte, which is on their route to Montana. Call prevails and they enlist the Hat Creek crew and some new hands to rustle a herd from south of the border, and then they begin the long drive north. Along the way, the Hat Creek boys revisit old regrets and losses and come to terms with their past. Characters
Historical references
According to McMurtry, Gus and Call were not modeled after historical characters, but there are similarities with real-life cattle drivers Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight. When Goodnight and Loving's guide Bose Ikard died, Goodnight carved a wooden tombstone for him, just as Call does for Deets. Upon Loving's death, Goodnight brought him home to be buried in Texas, just as Call does for Augustus. (Goodnight himself appears as a minor but sympathetic character in this novel, and more so in the sequel, Streets of Laredo, and the prequels Dead Man's Walk and Comanche Moon.) Other books of the Lonesome Dove series feature more prominent historical events (the Santa Fe Expedition, Comanche raid) and characters (Buffalo Hump, King Ranch, John Wesley Hardin, Judge Roy Bean). Several years ago, McMurtry mentioned in a newspaper interview that he first thought of the name for his epic while at a restaurant in Oklahoma. On that day, he noticed a unique name on the side of a church passenger van that was in the restaurant parking lot. That name, which left an impression on him, came from a van which was owned by Lonesome Dove Baptist Church in Southlake, Texas. Lonesome Dove has existed as a Baptist church and cemetery in Southlake since 1846. The sidearm Gus McCrae carries in the Miniseries is the Walker Colt, designed by Texas Ranger Captain Samuel Hamilton Walker and Samuel Colt in 1847 and issued to the Texas Rangers. It was the most powerful black powder revolver ever made, and became as much of a legend as the early Rangers who carried it. The sign for the Gus and Call's Hat Creek Cattle Company includes the Latin motto "Uva Uvam Vivendo Varia Fit" which appears to be a reference to a proveb("Uva Uvam Videndo Varia Fit")first attributed Juvenal. Juvenal's proverb is translated as "A grape (uva)other grapes (uvam) seeing (videndo) changes (varia fit)." Some readers think McMurty's substitution of "vivendo" for "videndo" is an artifice McMurty used to underscore Gus's lack of education and unfamiliarity with Latin. That seems unlikely. When Call asks Gus about the motto, Gus jumbles it comically and does not even pretend to know what it means. Having established that, McMurty gained nothing by adding a spelling error that only Latin scholars would catch. Likewise, it seems unlikely - as other readers have suggested - that the substitution was simply a typographical error. Although the substitution is ungrammatical, "vivendo" means "living" so the effect is that the motto is changed from "A grape changes when it sees other grapes" to "A grape is changed by living with other grapes" or, since we are not really concerned with grapes after all, "We are changed by the lives around us." Awards
Adaptations
A television miniseries adaptation, produced by Motown Productions, was broadcast on CBS in 1989. It starred Robert Duvall as Augustus McCrae, Tommy Lee Jones as Woodrow F. Call, Rick Schroder as Newt, Diane Lane as Lorena Wood, Danny Glover as Joshua Deets, Robert Urich as Jake Spoon, Anjelica Huston as Clara Allen, Frederic Forrest as Blue Duck, Chris Cooper as July Johnson, and Barry Corbin as Roscoe Brown. Four other actors (Charles Bronson, Robert Duvall, James Garner, and Jon Voight) were offered the role of Woodrow Call but declined for various reasons before the role fell to Tommy Lee Jones. The miniseries was primarily filmed at various locations, including ranches, in Texas and New Mexico. Real ranch horses were used for authenticity during the filming of the movie. ION Television has shown a Digitally Remastered version of the miniseries starting the weekend of June 30, 2007 during the "RHI Movie Weekend" (RHI Entertainment are the current owners of the Lonesome Dove miniseries). The four episodes are entitled in order: 1. Leaving, 2. On The Trail, 3. The Plains, 4. Return. There was also a syndicated spin-off TV series centering on Newt (Scott Bairstow) taking up residence in the fictional town of Curtis Wells, Montana, having adopted his father's family name of Call. Starting out as a fairly romanticized interpretation of the west, it was heavily revamped for its second season, gaining a much grittier feel and the new title Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years. Filming took place in Calgary, Alberta, and a total of 43 episodes were produced, airing between 1994 and 1996. DVD & Blu-rayLonesome Dove, Return to Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo and Dead Man's Walk are all available on DVD in the United Kingdom and the United States. Both seasons of the TV series have also been released in the U.S. Lonesome Dove was filmed in a soft matte 1.78:1 (16:9) aspect ratio, allowing it to be cropped from the 4:3 negative, it was then released on Blu-ray Disc on August 5, 2008 just months before the film's 20th anniversary. See alsoReferences
Bibliography
External links
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