Larry McMurtry by Tracy Daugherty

Author:Tracy Daugherty [Daugherty, Tracy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

* * *

“Billy Lee, do you reckon people who don’t appreciate chicken-fried steak with cream gravy can do justice to McMurtry on film?” Larry L. King asked his friend, Bill Brammer.

“Naw,” Brammer answered. “No way. I bet they don’t even drink Dr Pepper.”

The two writers were standing around Austin’s Chariot Inn, at McMurtry’s invitation, watching a film crew wolf down soggy tacos and lament the lack of bagels. The crew had gathered to make the third film from a McMurtry novel, Leaving Cheyenne. The movie was tentatively titled The Wild and the Sweet; it would be released as Lovin’ Molly in 1974, and it would not fare as well, commercially or critically, as Hud or The Last Picture Show.

The great period of auteurism, nurturing films like Picture Show, would not come to an end until the return of the blockbuster (Star Wars, Jaws) and the financial debacle, in 1980, of Michael Cimino’s bloated Western, Heaven’s Gate. But already Hollywood—sensing that Easy Rider was, after all, a one-off rather than a moneymaking trendsetter—was re-seizing control from the kid directors and returning it to the producers. As Joan Didion said, “[T]he game [was] back on, development money available, the deal dependent only upon the truly beautiful story and the right elements,” the right elements being stars and pots of money.

McMurtry knew that the timing had been just right on The Last Picture Show—a few months earlier, Peter Bogdanovich couldn’t have gotten the job; a year or so later, he wouldn’t have wanted it.

Lovin’ Molly was a slick Hollywood package, put together to capitalize on Picture Show’s popularity. The producer and screenwriter, Steve Friedman, didn’t know and didn’t care about the differences between ranching and farming, grassy plains and lush green swamps (“Is that Vietnam, or Missouri?” McMurtry blurted one day, watching the dailies). Hammers and post-hole diggers were all the same to him (“So who’s gonna know?” Friedman said. “How many moviegoers ever saw a fence made?”). Director Sidney Lumet dressed his stars, Beau Bridges and Tony Perkins, in clodhoppers and what appeared to be bib overalls. They looked like Mr. Green Jeans on Captain Kangaroo.

“You know what your book’s about?” Lumet gushed at McMurtry one day. “Larry, it’s about … well, it’s about … the glory of no reward!”

“Hm,” McMurtry responded.

He watched, chagrined, as a makeup artist—no Polly Platt—tried to turn Tony Perkins into an elderly man; he “appeared to be about two years older than Christianity,” said Larry L. King. “McMurtry took one look and grunted like somebody had poked him in the ribs with a pitchfork.”

Later, in New York, watching a rough-cut screening of the movie with a test audience, McMurtry kept sinking in his seat: “It’s not so bad if you only see the top half of the screen.” Afterward, he said, “Lumet apparently shot the thing in track shoes—zip, zip, zip. People … kept laughing in all the wrong places, and some walked out. Near the interminable end, I realized a woman behind me had been crying for twenty minutes.

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