“Everyone Stayed Home to Watch Gus Die”
A conversation with Lonesome Dove director Simon Wincer.
By: Henry Cabot Beck 09/25/2009
Sex also separated Lonesome Dove from its TV predecessors.
Yeah, it was all there in the book. We were able to push the boundaries as far as we were allowed, but it was all done pretty tastefully. “How about a poke?” People still react to that. That’s very Australian. “Did you have a good poke last night?” we refer to it here.
It’s all done with a twinkle, and that was the beauty of Gus’s character, he always had a twinkle in his eye. He just loved life. People latched on to that. By the time night four came along, which is still one of the highest-rated dramas ever—the last night rated 54! It’s staggering!—restaurants went empty because everyone stayed home to watch Gus die.
I should tell you one story.... Bill [Wittliff], Dyson Lovell, Suzanne De Passe and I went to CBS, on Beverly Boulevard there, and sat in the boardroom, right next to reception. In clomped all the various executives for a 10 a.m. screening. We were going to show them the first two hours, and then we were going to have lunch, and then come back and show them the next two hours. Then two days later we were going to show them the last four hours....
It starts, not a word is said. The lights come up, end of night one, and not a word is uttered. Not a word. We all go off to lunch, thinking “Holy s---! What’s this about?” Not having had even one reaction from anybody except, “Thank you very much.”
We come back at 2:00. Everybody clomps back in again, and we all sit down. I go to switch on the next two hours and one of the executives says, “Oh, I just want to say something.”
Then he began to say how proud they were of the first two hours they’d seen. What a fantastic job we’d all done. What brilliant television it was. And if no one even watched it, they wouldn’t care, because it was so bloody good. They were just thrilled with it.
The four of us breathed a sigh of relief.... Two days later they asked, “How’s the running time?” We said, “We wanted to talk to you about that. Do you want a nine-hour miniseries?” [Laughs.]
At that time the miniseries was dead, the Western was dead. They’d had a disaster with, I think it was, War and Remembrance, which had been pulled before they’d finished screening the series. So this was a huge risk.
When Lonesome Dove aired, they still hadn’t sold all the advertising. Yet within a few months, it aired a second time and then a third time on network television, which hadn’t ever happened.
So you cut out an hour of footage from the miniseries that aired on TV?
There’s a wonderful scene where Gus is in search of Lorena. He’s going across the open plains, and there’s an old man collecting buffalo bones and piling them into pyramids. An old guy he’d once had a shoot-out with. They’re yelling at each other as he rides past.
Great stuff with the cowboys when they first taste Po Campo’s cooking.... A lot of stuff with Call and the hell bitch, when hell bitch is continually throwing him off at the most inappropriate times.
Not stuff you miss, but it would have been lovely to be able to reissue it all in a new edition. It would have sold like hotcakes. Finding the stuff would be hard, because I think the company that made the film has gone under, but it has been talked about.
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