IN MEMORIAMreleased so many times that the
corners of their mouths were all
scored. But it was a wonder for me.
The thinking of a fly-fisherman was
a brave new world. And [thanks
to Wittliff ] I was learning by the
minute in the presence of a master,
John Graves. It was one of the most
generous things that a very gener-
ous man ever did for me.”
Their friendship grew for thir-
ty years. They worked for many
of them on a screen adaptation of
Ernest Hemingway’s Islands in the
Stream, trading drafts, scouting
locations, and hunting for funds.
But much of their time together
was occasioned by impromptu ap-
pearances by Jones in the doorway
of Wittliff ’s Austin office. Jones
drives frequently from his San
Antonio home to his ranch in San
Saba County. “Sometimes I’d go a
little bit out of the way to get some
enchiladas with Bill and talk about
whatever there was to talk about. I
loved making Lonesome Dove, but I
didn’t realize until years later how
lucky I was to know him. I valued
him greatly as a friend.”Jones first became aware of
Witt liff the way most people did in
the sixties and seventies, through
Encino Press. Bill and Sally, his col-
lege sweetheart, started the small
publishing house in the second
bedroom of their Dallas apart-
ment not long after marrying, in- Soon they moved to Austin
and ran it from their carport. They
focused on books about Texas and
the Southwest and built a following
on the strength of, among other
things, Wittliff ’s illustration and
book design. In 1968 they pub-
lished Larry McMurtry’s first
collection of essays, In a Narrow
Grave, arguably the best thinking
on the essence of Texas that’s ever
been put to paper. It was hardly
all positive, which Wittliff liked to
say caught them both a lot of hell.
If publishing that book had been
the only thing he ever did, the state
would owe him a huge debt.
struck a chord. Five hundred years
from now it will still be around.”
Jones had much more to say.
He wanted to talk about the man.
“When we were making Lonesome
Dove and becoming friends, Bill
liked to talk about fly-fishing. He
was very proud of this arcane craft
he had developed. I had pulled a
lot of catfish off a lot of trotlines,
but I didn’t know anything about
fly-fishing. He piqued my enthusi-
asm. Two days after we wrapped,
he talked me into a fishing trip.”
Filming had wound down in
northern New Mexico, so they took
to the San Juan River, just below
Navajo Dam. Wittliff chose the
spot for convenience, not the qual-
ity of the fish. He brought along his
son, Reid, a freshman at Vanderbilt
who’d worked the production, as
well as a friend, the writer John
Graves, whose 1960 travel mem-
oir, Goodbye to a River, is a classic
of conservationism and naturalist
philosophy. It’s Texas’s Walden.
“I’d read all of John’s work,”
Jones continued. “I think he was
one of our finest prose stylists in
the twentieth century in Texas. And
that started my life as a fly-fisher-
man. The fish were old, wore-out
trout. They’d been caught andMonthly story, which was later ex-
panded into A Book on the Making
of Lonesome Dove. But such was the
nature of a connection to Wittliff
that when one of his friends rings
up another to talk Bill, the call is
taken.
Duvall wanted to talk about
movies. Lonesome Dove was “The
Godfather of westerns,” he said, a
comparison he’s made frequently
and, as a costar of both, with unique
authority. “[Wittliff ] wrote a won-
derful script from a marvelous nov-
el. I love to improvise, but there was
no real room for that because the
script was so well done. Wherever
I go now, Europe or wherever, peo-
ple mention Lonesome Dove more
than anything else I ever did.” Then
we discussed another Wittliff film,
2013’s A Night in Old Mexico. It was
a script Wittliff had been trying to
make with Duvall for 25 years. In
it, Duvall portrayed an irascible old
West Texas rancher who takes his
teenage grandson on a road trip to
the border, complete with a bordel-
lo visit, gunplay, and a bag of stolen
drug money. “It was a legitimate
shadow of Lonesome Dove. An ex-
tension. The two parts were kind
of cousins. But it didn’t make the
same impact. Lonesome Dove justJones and
Wittliff at
the Wittliff
Collections
around 1995.64 TEXAS MONTHLY
COURTESY^ OF^ UNIVERSITY^ ARCHIVES,^ TEXAS^ STATE^ UNIVERSITY