HOLLYWOOD—AS OPPOSED TO movies, its principal product—entered my life almost simultaneously with my son, James McMurtry, who arrived in March 1962, at which time I was teaching world literature—all of it, from the Ramayana to Dylan Thomas—at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. To the farm and oil patch kids I was teaching, literature—or at least my mandated selection of it—held little appeal. In desperation I began to challenge these reluctant students to Ping-Pong matches, a game at which I was then quite good. If a student won, he or she got an A; if they lost they got a C.
That may seem a little unorthodox, but then five classes is a lot of classes. Between matches I was able to make friends with two writers, John Graves and Dave Hickey, both still alive and both still friends.
Then one day a man from Paramount Studios called, taking me by surprise. He turned out to be a location scout—that night he took me to dinner at what was probably the best restaurant in Fort Worth. Though, by this time, I had lived in both Houston and San Francisco, I knew nothing of fine dining. The man wore a pin-striped suit which bespoke a standard of eloquence far beyond my own. Though the suit was probably just normal Brooks Brothers, I remember it to this day; and I also remember the news he brought me, which was that Paramount had just bought the film rights to my slight first novel, Horseman, Pass By, and planned to film it in the Panhandle of Texas, starting almost immediately, with Paul Newman to star. The sum they planned to pay me, $10,000, meant, to me, farewell forever to the Ramayana and to table tennis as a grading system as well.
The nice man wondered if I had any relatives in the Panhandle, folks who might help them with the locations. In fact the Panhandle was then chock-full of McMurtrys, and I sent the gentleman to the most able of the bunch, my cousin Alfred McMurtry, then living in Clarendon. Paramount promptly rented not only a lot of Alfred’s land, but also his cattle herd and a good number of his cowboys.
Thanks to all these rentals Alfred McMurtry made a lot of money out of what became a movie called Hud, but I didn’t begrudge him his good fortune, since he did have to put up for a while with the considerable aggravation of a movie production, whereas I did not. I was safe in Fort Worth, with a living and lively child.
I also had to finish my semester at TCU, which I had wrongly supposed would be my farewell to teaching school: in a little more than a year I was a lecturer at Rice, where I taught for almost nine years.
The moviemaking in the Panhandle began about the time I finished with TCU. Eventually I was asked to visit the set; the invitation, when it came, was issued without enthusiasm. It was as if the director, Martin Ritt, and the screenwriters, Harriet Frank and Irving Ravetch, had jointly decided to do the right thing, which, in their world, meant inviting the author to the set, though in fact the author of the film they were filming was more or less the last person they wanted to see, novelists being, after all, famously difficult about movies made from their work. They were apt to detect bruises on their text where none were intended by the filmmakers.
In my case Martin Ritt and the Ravetches need not have worried. I was there only for an afternoon, and spoke only a few words, and would hardly have been inclined to protest even if I had known what was going on, which of course I didn’t. These were the people who had freed me from the Ramayana, which counted for much more than any blemishes in the film.
I spent most of that afternoon parked in a line of cars on a Panhandle dirt road, waiting for a man with a walkie-talkie to let us approach the set. I saw Paul Newman at a distance, but didn’t actually meet him until thirty years later.
Patricia Neal, whom I really did want to meet, wasn’t working that week; her too I met thirty years later, in the check-in line at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. We later had a pleasant visit.
Unhappily I arrived on the day when the buzzards misbehaved: I have told this story fully in a book called In a Narrow Grave and don’t wish to repeat it here, though the fact of buzzard misbehavior probably cost Paramount about $60,000, which put everyone in a really bad mood and dashed whatever hopes there might have been for social plans with me.
Several members of the crew seemed stunned by the fact that they weren’t getting anywhere with the buzzard scene. Martin Ritt, a nice man, was so depressed by the day’s output that he made no effort at all to make contact with me. Years later I met him in Austin.
At the end of the day the famous cinematographer James Wong Howe took a few beauty shots of my cousin Alfred’s beautiful (to grass lovers) wavy grass, and the whole lot of us trickled back to Amarillo.
I was not invited to watch the dailies (raw footage, usually) but I didn’t then know that dailies existed and did not feel insulted. In the next fifty years I watched more than my share of dailies. In weak moments I like to think I discovered Jennifer Garner, but that was from an audition tape, not a daily.
The Ravetches and I only spoke a few words; they were nice words but even then I heard the first faint whispers of something I was to suspect many times: the desire on the part of filmmakers that the author whose book they were filming did not exist. Ideally there should be no book and no author: if not, then the film would be all theirs, something that can never be the case if there is a book and an author.
Most filmmakers instinctively believe that authors are always proprietary about their books, and many are: many, but not all. I wasn’t, for example, possessive, either on Hud or the other films made from my books. Mainly one hopes that a film of one’s books will be good, but, hey, there’s the money. The author gets money! On Hud, Martin Ritt was so burdened with budgetary concerns that he didn’t care whether I was there or not, or whether it was my book or not, and that is the condition of most directors on most films.
They have their day to make—shooting the scenes they were supposed to get, and the kindest thing an author can do is stay out of the way and not slow them down.
I did have one authentic thrill while visiting the set of Hud. The little Panhandle town of Claude, Texas, was substituting for my own mythical small town, Thalia. I’ve used Thalia as a setting for several books, including all of the Last Picture Show quintet.
Driving through Claude the next morning, on my way back to my wife and young child, I noticed that the water tower in Claude didn’t say Claude anymore: it said Thalia. That my invention had caused a small town in North Texas to change the name on its water tower—even temporarily—was thrill enough to me: and Hollywood provided it!