Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board

The first time I fully registered Larry McMurtry's name was when The Last Picture Show came along -- though it then became widespread knowledge he'd already been responsible for the novel that inspired Hud. Those two movies accounted for four acting Oscars, and Terms of Endearment a decade later added two more (plus best picture/director). All of this was before his greatest best-seller success, Lonesome Dove, which became a celebrated TV miniseries. (Had it been made for the big screen, Robert Duvall might have another Oscar.) And after THAT came his Oscar for Brokeback Mountain.

Serious question: has any contemporary novelist been as well served by the screen?

Lonesome Dove probably has as much claim to the Great American Novel title as anything published in the past fifty years. Adjust downward if you are not a western fan, but it's a genuinely great book in my mind. Ironically, he was not at all involved in the production of the miniseries (which is also excellent) and reportedly did not like it all that much. It was claimed that the role of Clara, played by Anjelica Huston, was miscast in his mind, and he couldn't get past that. He'd had Diane Keaton in mind when writing the book. The sequel and prequel miniseries--except for Return to Lonesome Dove, which no Lonesome Dove fan ever talks about or considers part of the canon--were made with McMurtry's involvement, and were all much less acclaimed than the original, although fans of Lonesome Dove do tend to like the books pretty well.

Although he was credited with the screenplay (in collaboration with Diana Ossana) for Good Joe Bell/Joe Bell, which premiered at TIFF last year to a very mixed reception (it's supposedly going to be heavily re-edited before it's released), he actually hadn't published a book since 2014--and this was after years of publishing a book every year or two--so I wonder if he had been in bad health for awhile.

I forgot he wrote Terms of Endearment so I guess that makes the third of the "I forgot something" trio with Jessica Walter and Richard Gilliland.

Story.

R.I.P.