William D. Bill Wittliff, a writer, filmmaker and photographer who co-wrote the screenplay for the award-winning television miniseries Lonesome…
William D. «Bill» Wittliff, a writer, filmmaker and photographer who co-wrote the screenplay for the award-winning television miniseries Lonesome Dove, and who founded a popular public archive at Texas State University that bears his name, died Sunday. He was 79.
Wittliff shared writing credits for the TV adaptation of Lonesome Dove with Larry McMurtry, who won the Pulitzer Prize for having written the novel. In 1990, the TV version of Lonesome Dove won two Golden Globe awards, including best miniseries or motion picture made for television.
The TV version starred Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, the St. Mark’s School of Texas graduate, who helped make it a monster hit on the small screen.
Wittliff’s ties to Texas were deeply ingrained in his writing career. Before the 1989 release of Lonesome Dove, he wrote and directed Red Headed Stranger, a 1986 film co-starring Willie Nelson and Dallas’ own Morgan Fairchild, who on Monday described him as a «sweet and talented man.»
The website Austin360.com on Monday quoted a public letter released by Texas State University president Denise Truth, whose school houses The Wittliff Collections. The papers of the late Robert Compton, the longtime books editor of The Dallas Morning News, who died in April, are part of The Wittliff Collections at Texas State in San Marcos.
