IN MEMORIAMsive participant on set. His man-
tra there was “If we take care of
Lonesome Dove, Lonesome Dove
will take care of us,” and he worked
tirelessly to protect the story.
He had the final word, if not the
original thought, on every prop,
set, and costume design, on each
actor’s accent and whether they
looked right in a saddle. He made
sure all their hats communicated
something about their character
but also stayed true to the time.
He knew exactly how Lonesome
Dove needed to look, feel, and
sound. “He was involved in abso-
lutely everything,” said Jones. “He
watched every foot of dailies. He
was on the set one hundred per-
cent of the time. When I came up
against some obstinate person
with a stupid-ass Hollywood idea,
I always had Bill to rely on. He’d
say, ‘Don’t worry about it. I know
it. We’ll get rid of it.’ And he did.”
Lonesome Dove aired over four
nights in February 1989, earning
blockbuster ratings and a stag-
gering eighteen Emmy nomina-
tions. Though it was all but shut
out from major awards on Emmy
night, Wittliff kept his chin up. He
was already busy back at work on
his true masterpiece.
The Wittliff Collections are es-
sentially the sum of Wittliff ’s parts.
He started them in 1986, when he
happened upon the archive of an-
other old friend, Texas folklorist J.
Frank Dobie. He wrote a check for
it instantly, and explained why toin that ugly place. He showed those
women respect, and that showed
their beauty. And dignity. It was
there before he got there. He found
it and preserved it.”
Screenwriting began as another
sideline of the seventies. With no
proper training, Wittliff worked up
an original script stemming from
his small-town Texas childhood
with a hardworking single mother;
cowrote a star turn for his buddy
Willie Nelson; and developed a
host of other stories. By the end
of the decade his scripts were get-
ting bought and produced and soon
were on screens as Hollywood pro-
ductions. Willie carried 1980’s
Honeysuckle Rose. Sissy Spacek
followed her Oscar-winning turn
in the Loretta Lynn biopic Coal
Miner’s Daughter by playing the
simulacrum of Wittliff ’s mom in
1981’s Raggedy Man.But the script that brought the
most acclaim was Lonesome Dove.
Wittliff read McMurtry’s Pulitzer
Prize–winning trail-driving saga
when it was published, in 1985, and
was hired a year later to translate it
to the screen. Writing it took him
a year. “It wasn’t an adaptation,”
said Jones. “It was a derivation, a
condensation. You’ve got to let the
book be your guide, and that’s not
easy. It requires a confidence in
your own creativity, along with a
selflessness that not a lot of people
have. Bill had it in abundance.”
Wittliff was in no way a pas-But the magic of Wittliff was that
he never stood still. He always had
something simmering on a back
burner, some project to mull, new
craft to learn, or relationship to
cultivate that might not be realized
for decades. While Encino Press
was scraping to get going—and he
and Sally were having their kids,
Reid and Allison—he was teach-
ing himself photography. He then
spent three years off and on in the
early seventies chronicling round-
ups on a sprawling ranch in north-
ern Mexico. The images, already
a gritty look back in time when
he took them, hit even stronger
when University of Texas Press
published them as a coffee-table
book, Vaquero: Genesis of the Texas
Cowboy, in 2004, with an introduc-
tion by Graves.
I asked Jones about Wittliff ’s
photography. “I like the pictures he
made from those negatives he found
in Nuevo Laredo,” he said. That was
another long-term project. In the
early seventies, Wittliff met photog-
raphers who took souvenir pictures
at bars in the city’s Boy’s Town dis-
trict, capturing both the prostitutes
who worked there and the men who
brought them business. Wittliff vis-
ited the photographers’ darkrooms,
found thousands of deteriorating
negatives, talked them into selling
those, and smuggled them into Tex-
as. Over the next 26 years he’d occa-
sionally grab a handful and devote
hours to their cleaning and printing.
Aperture published that se-
ries in a 2000 book, Boystown: La
Zona de Tolerancia. The images
are striking, scenes from an un-
just milieu. In some shots you can
almost hear the frat boys giggling.
But Wittliff ’s curation and presen-
tation focuses the eye on the quiet
strength of the women. “You could
say the subject matter is trashy,”
said Jones, “that the photogra-
phy is done in a trashy manner by
trashy shooters, that the negatives
became trash. Almost everybody
would believe you... until Wittliff
comes along and finds the beautyBill Wittliff
and writer
Bud Shrake as
sodbusters in
Lonesome Dove.66 TEXAS MONTHLY
COURTESY^ OF^ THEWITTLIFF^ COLLECTIONS