What is Lonesome Dove based on? McMurtry wrote it first as a movie for John Wayne
Before it was a Pulitzer-winning novel or the celebrated 1989 CBS miniseries, Lonesome Dove was a movie script sitting in a drawer at Warner Bros. — one with the biggest cast in Western history attached. And it died because one man said no.
The short answer
Lonesome Dove is based on Larry McMurtry's 1985 novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1986. But the novel itself grew out of a 1972 screenplay called Streets of Laredo, written by McMurtry with director Peter Bogdanovich — fresh off The Last Picture Show — as a big-screen Western for John Wayne.
The dream cast that almost was
The plan united three legends of the genre in one film:
- John Wayne as Woodrow Call — the stoic former Texas Ranger later played by Tommy Lee Jones.
- James Stewart as Gus McCrae — the talkative charmer that became Robert Duvall's favorite role of his entire career.
- Henry Fonda as Jake Spoon — the doomed drifter eventually played by Robert Urich.
Stewart and Fonda signed on. Wayne read the script and passed — reportedly on the advice of his mentor John Ford. Bogdanovich framed the picture as a farewell to the Western, and Wayne, per University of Texas professor Don Graham in Texas Monthly, wasn't about to critique the genre that built him:
"He wasn't going to make Blazing Saddles," Graham said.
Without the Duke, the studio lost faith and the deal collapsed.
From dead script to great American novel
The screenplay sat on a shelf for roughly 15 years. Then McMurtry spotted an old bus with "Lonesome Dove Baptist Church" painted on its side, took the name home, and reworked his abandoned script into a sprawling novel — drawing on the real cattle drives of Texas ranchers Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving. The book landed in 1985, the Pulitzer followed in 1986, and the four-part CBS miniseries arrived in February 1989, earning 18 Emmy nominations and winning seven.
Where did the old title go?
McMurtry recycled it. Streets of Laredo became the name of his 1993 sequel novel, adapted into its own miniseries in 1995 — a full 21 years after John Wayne killed the original movie.