While McMurtry would use Streets of Laredo for the sequel's title, it was a passing bus advertising a local "Lonesome Dove Church" that gave him the clarity he needed to finish what would become the book. He stopped and started for a few years, taking breaks to write Cadillac Jack and The Desert Rose, only getting the engine going after a moment of divine inspiration: finding the title. But this wasn't the end for McMurtryĪfter twelve years and a few more books under his belt, McMurtry decided to buy the rights to Streets of Laredo for $35,000 feeling it might make a decent novel. Without Wayne on board, the project never came to be. He wasn’t going to make Blazing Saddles," said English professor Don Graham in the Texas Monthly oral history. "John Wayne wasn’t going to lend himself to a total critique of the genre he had been working in for forty years. Wayne, not far off from his long-awaited Oscar win for True Grit, was still working regularly as a leading man and keeping a traditional sort of Western alive. Stewart and Fonda eventually acquiesced, as work was beginning to dry out for them in the 1970s, but Wayne was less in need.
This version of the story would have Wayne and Stewart starting off as pig farmers with little to do but make conversation on the porch, one of those conversations being Stewart "complaining about how long it takes to pee when you get older." In his third memoir, Hollywood, McMurtry theorized that none of the stars they reached out to wanted to play the faded versions of the heroes they once brought to life, but none so more than John Wayne. Much of Streets of Laredo dealt with the characters aging. Streets of Laredo was initially rejected by Wayne, Stewart, and Fonda despite the pedigree Bogdanovich and McMurtry had after The Last Picture Show. When the draft was sent off, the studio received it warmly, unfortunately, the actors were not so eager. For Stewart, they wrote a more light-hearted character more connected with the land that they named Augustus because, as Bogdanovich puts it, "we liked the way Jimmy Stewart would say, 'Augush-tush.'" Inspired by his aloof nature, Henry Fonda's character was morally ambiguous and not exactly clear where his loyalties lie (in the novel this would become Jake Spoon.) John Wayne's character was set to be the more in charge and closed-off frontiersman (the earliest version of Woodrow Call,) and while not confirmed it would not be a surprise had Cybill Shepherd played some version of what would become Lorena Wood, the young blonde prostitute brought along on their journey. As McMurtry and Bogdanovich started working on pages the characters began to form around these actors and their personas. The initial ideas were general: they wanted it to be a trek, but not a cattle drive (to avoid comparisons to Red River,) Bogdanovich wanted to include a pair of Irish folk singers, and eventually the title "Streets of Laredo" was decided on, but the main driving force that shaped the story was the cast they wanted.įrom the outset, Bogdanovich told McMurtry he wanted the Western film legends John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda in addition to a part for his girlfriend Cybill Shepherd. Discussions began when McMurtry and Bogdanovich accompanied Cybill Shepherd (who had formed a relationship with Bogdanovich during the filming of The Last Picture Show) to Miami for the filming of the Elaine May masterpiece The Heartbreak Kid.
to pay him and McMurtry to develop the would-be feature film. Likely, as a student of film history, a Western appealed to Bogdanovich, so he convinced Warner Bros. As carefully detailed in a Texas Monthly oral history, after The Last Picture Show Bogdanovich recruited Larry McMurtry to write a script with him for a Western.
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