Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
Larry McMurtry has passed
CellarDweller:
Larry McMurtry carved out a legend from the moment his teenage uncle gave him his books
By Michael Granberry - Mar 28, 2021
In December 1971, I was staying with a friend in New York City. On a chilly Friday night, a new movie was making its Manhattan debut. We sat mesmerized as the black-and-white classic The Last Picture Show flickered on the screen. It later won two Oscars, and most of all, it introduced a wide audience to the writing of Larry McMurtry. Before long, I read everything I could get my hands on that McMurtry had written. I read his first novel, Horseman, Pass By, which became Hud, another Oscar-winning movie starring Paul Newman. I marveled that McMurtry was only 25 when his debut book was published.
My mentor at Southern Methodist University, the late, great Jay Milner, told me that he and McMurtry were friends. Milner’s most memorable insight into McMurtry was how gifted he was at writing about women. As a fellow novelist, Milner called it a talent he envied — most male writers, he said, didn’t have a clue how to write about women. But McMurtry did. That was evident in his book Terms of Endearment, the last in an incredible trilogy peopled by women, whose emotions McMurtry understood better than any male writer I’ve ever read. Terms also became an Oscar-winning movie, for which Shirley MacLaine won best actress.
https://www.dallasnews.com/arts-entertainment/books/2021/03/28/larry-mcmurtry-carved-out-a-legend-from-the-moment-his-teenage-uncle-gave-him-some-books/
CellarDweller:
How Larry McMurtry’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’ Writing Partner Diana Ossana Saved Him from Despair
Anne Thompson - 03/27/2021
Diana Ossana is flat on her back, wracked with grief. She’s just lost her best friend and writing partner, Larry McMurtry, a man she nursed through open heart surgery in 1991 and a couple of other heart attacks, who after three years of battling congestive heart failure, finally succumbed Thursday in his home in Archer City, Texas. He was 84. “Larry through stubbornness and brilliance kept going,” said Ossana. “He kept going. I feel like one of my limbs is cut off. We’re all pretty crushed.”
Ossana picked up the phone to talk about her writing partner of 28 years, with whom she shared the 2006 Screenplay Oscar for adapting Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain.” “We were each other’s best friend,” she said. “Larry would tell people to call me in the last 10 years or so: ‘Ask Diana, she knows me better than I do myself.’ From the beginning of our friendship, it felt symbiotic, maybe the way twins feel. I’m not a twin. But we would finish each other’s sentences.”
https://www.indiewire.com/2021/03/larry-mcmurtry-diana-ossana-brokeback-mountain-oscar-1234626324/
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[*] Previous page
Go to full version