Comanche Moon
A sneak peek at McMurtry-Ossana's literary collaboration, on the set of Comanche Moon.
Categories: In the Works
By: Allen Barra 07/01/2007
Successful literary collaborations are rare. A few exceptions can be found, such as Mark Twain & Charles Dudley Warner (The Gilded Age), Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall (Mutiny on the Bounty), Lou Abbott & Bud Costello (“Who’s On First?”), Randy Roberts & James Olson (A Line in the Sand), and they usually involve just a single genre. Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana have mastered two mediums—fiction (the novels Pretty Boy Floyd and Zeke and Ned) and film (their Academy award-winning screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, adapted from Annie Proulx’s short story).
While working on the set for the upcoming CBS miniseries, Comanche Moon (which they’ve adapted from McMurtry’s novel, a prequel to the hugely successful Lonesome Dove), they granted True West this interview—McMurtry’s first in more than a decade.
TW: Diana, your short story, “White Line Fever,” is set in the contemporary West and shows a remarkable empathy with a pregnant girl who strikes out on her own to make a new life in Arizona. On the novels and screenplays you’ve collaborated on with Larry, do you look immediately to the female characters involved or are you drawn to the males, as well?
Diana: Larry seems to feel I have an affinity for the male characters in projects we cowrite, but I think that’s because he feels more for women characters. When I create fiction, I can’t recall that I feel more drawn to the men; what I do feel is that I am the character I happen to be writing. I feel whatever it is they’re feeling, as if I am the man or the woman or the child, whatever sex or age the character happens to be.
Trying to explain where fiction comes from is difficult, if not impossible. It comes from some obscure place in one’s imagination. I just know that when I’m engaged in the act of fiction writing, the world I’m creating is as real to me—sometimes more real—than the world around me.
TW: When do the two of you decide to work on projects together? What decisions are involved? Do both of you get an equal vote as to what works and what doesn’t?
Larry: It’s a totally democratic process. In essence, for us, it’s meant taking what comes our way. About the only job we’re turned down was The Return of Rin Tin Tin, and if it should come around again, which it might, we’d probably take it.
Screenwriting jobs don’t grow on trees, no matter how popular you’re considered to be. We avoid purely speculative jobs that are not likely to be movies no matter how good the script—but we consider ourselves lucky to have been offered projects that we can execute effectively as screenwriters—and see them get made.
Diana: Ditto as to most of what Larry said, except we don’t take everything that comes our way. There have been several projects I wanted to do that he simply batted away ... except for Brokeback Mountain. I insisted he read the short story, although he doesn’t read short fiction (because he says he can’t write it).
When Larry writes alone, he is much more elaborative in his prose. When he writes with me, however, it’s much more skeletal. I take his pages (usually five a day) and fill them in, delete, add pages, add narrative ... then print my pages, which he gets in the evening and has for his morning writing. We do that, every day, until we have a first draft.
Most of the time, it’s totally democratic, but we’ve had some Olympic-sized arguments about specific things—like the ending for Pretty Boy Floyd. Larry says he has no memory of that, but I think it’s because he lost that one.
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