It was no accident that Texas State University officials brought Taylor Sheridan to see the Lonesome Dove exhibition at The Wittliff Collections when he was on campus to receive an honorary doctorate last May.
Sheridan—the writer, creator, director, and executive producer of Yellowstone, Landman, and several other wildly popular shows—first read Larry McMurtry’s seminal Western novel when he was a Fort Worth teenager in 1989. He watched the epic miniseries, which was adapted and produced by Bill Wittliff, co-founder of The Wittliff Collections, only months later.
Sheridan immediately reopened the novel, eager to compare his imagination to the adaptation. “This is easily the most formative event in my life,” Sheridan wrote in the foreword of the 40th anniversary edition of the Lonesome Dove novel, published last summer.
Now, Sheridan’s own creative archive will live alongside the Lonesome Dove keepsakes with the recent announcement that Sheridan has agreed to donate scripts from his movies and TV shows to The Wittliff.
“There’s hardly another American writer whose work would be more at home here,” says Carrie Fountain, The Wittliff’s literary curator. “To acquire the papers of such a preeminent writer making work at the very top of his game will provide endless inspiration and insight to generations of creatives and researchers.”
By his own count, Sheridan has read Lonesome Dove several dozen times. He named his son Gus for the unforgettable Augustus McCrae, a retired Texas Ranger played by Robert Duvall, and he hired Lonesome Dove production designer Cary White to helm the same position for his breakout Western drama Yellowstone and the prequels 1883 and 1923. Sheridan has referred to 1883, about a family’s wagon journey to Montana, as his tribute to Lonesome Dove.
“We already knew he was a huge fan,” says David Coleman, former director of The Wittliff Collections, which features a vast repository of Lonesome Dove artifacts in its exhibition space on the seventh floor of Alkek Library. “Walking into that space, it was immediately clear how genuine his passion was. He knew everything there, knew tons of lines, knew all the characters and the actors who played them.”
Sheridan took in such artifacts as the weather-beaten costumes worn by Captain McCrae and his taciturn partner, Woodrow Call. The exhibition also displays set designs, screenplay drafts, and photos, plus manuscript drafts and uncorrected proofs of McMurtry’s novel.
“He was like a kid in a candy store,” Coleman says of Sheridan.
Then Coleman and TXST President Kelly Damphousse heard the question they’d been hoping for.
“I have a lot of this stuff,” Sheridan said, as recalled by Coleman. “Do you want any of that?”
Damphousse’s eyes lit up. “I’ve never seen our president smile so big, he was so excited,” Coleman says.
Upon formally agreeing to donate his creative archive to The Wittliff, Sheridan made his first donation over the summer: 11 scripts, including multiple drafts of his early films Sicario, Wind River, and Hell or High Water, which received an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay; plus the scripts for pilot episodes of Yellowstone and its prequels.
While perusing the documents, Fountain was struck by the confidence and writerly tone of Sheridan’s voice on the page, especially in his terse yet evocative scene descriptions. He also reveals an uncanny ability to start in media res—in the middle of the action—and his screenplays don’t seem to change dramatically from draft to draft.
“He just has a knack for storytelling,” Fountain says. “He’s so good at writing for film and television that I would love to see what a novel in his voice would look like.”
The Wittliff Collections won’t distribute the scripts digitally. Instead, hard copies of the scripts will be made available in the reading room for students, scholars, and aspiring writers to study for craft and inspiration.
Sheridan was a theater major at TXST in the early 1990s but left after his junior year to pursue acting. He famously made his career transition to screenwriting around the age of 40 and promptly found the success that had eluded him as an actor. Sheridan keeps extremely busy, churning out hit TV shows at an astonishing clip, but Fountain and Coleman say they’re excited for papers, props, and other materials to arrive in stages.
Christian Wallace, a 2010 TXST graduate and former Texas Monthly senior editor who co-created the breakout TV hit Landman with Sheridan, had been hoping for a while that Sheridan would donate his archives to The Wittliff.
“This is going to be really important,” Wallace says. “While people like Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry are giants, you need to continue to introduce these huge names who have such huge cultural impact. Yes, students should be reading McCarthy, but they’re also watching these Taylor Sheridan shows. To have someone who is so current and so important across the cultural landscape, donating his archives is a positive across the board.”