ONE QUALITY GREAT moviemakers must have is tenacity. Warren Beatty plugged on for ten years, putting together the deals that finally got Reds made. Diana spent about nine on Brokeback Mountain. Development time for the films made from my books averages about eight years. It’s not quick work. Diana brings a real avidity and passion to her film work, whereas I mostly don’t.
I sometimes think my lassitude in relation to film is—weirdly—from doing too much reviewing as a young literary man of all work. I reviewed so much fiction that I lost my passion for it, and the same might be said for movies. I once saw more than a dozen on a single weekend in Times Square. But it was writing scripts—good, bad, and indifferent—that dulled the edge of my attraction to movies. Best not to professionalize a passion, as lovers the world over have discovered when they marry and notice a cooling.
When, as the heart trauma began to recede at least a bit, I was beginning to need money, so I turned to my own most popular book, Lonesome Dove, and produced one sequel, Streets of Laredo, and two prequels (Dead Man’s Walk and Comanche Moon), all of which were written as fast as I could type, as if these ghosts out of the West were faxed to me from the other me, the one who had either gone ahead or stayed behind, depending on their mood.