Bogdanovich talked once about a remake

As rumor has it (actually I was following the news in papers and magazines and TV shows at the time and probably still have some of those magazines in my library) Bogdonavich had finished doing the John Ford documentary special with Duke and Fonda and Jimmy Stewart and talked about remaking The Texas Rangers/Streets of Laredo with Larry McMurtry writing the story for Bogdonavich as he had written The Last Picture Show years before. As the story goes, the movie would have been the final salute to the western as an artform in both film and written word as all three actors/characters would be as over the hill cowboys/outlaws/rangers as the genre was. Instead, all three actors turned it down, didn't like the message of the movie, thought the western still had life to it. McMurtry while penning Lonesome Dove actually did it under the working title of Streets of Laredo, so...... Duke Wayne would have been the Jim Dawkins/Woodrow Call character, Jimmy Stewart would have been Wahoo Jones/Augustus McCrae, and Henry Fonda would have been the Sam McGee-Lorn Reming/Jake Spoon character. As the western gave way to the "buddy" movie (same concept, different era), there were still places for films like Silverado, Tombstone, Dances With Wolves, Open Range, Wyatt Earp, Tom Selleck's Quigley Down Under and various TNT westerns, and Unforgiven. The "old boys" were right, and what better proof than Lonesome Dove, its sequels and prequels and series. Duke doing Tom Dunson/Ethan Edwards, Fonda stepping out of a spaghetti western, and Jimmy just doing Jimmy, for one last western hurrah? Now that's a fantasy movie made in heaven!

I think we're talking about two different works here. The 1949 film with Holden was a Paramount remake of the 1936 Fred MacMurray Western THE TEXAS RANGERS, directed and written by King Vidor. Just the title (taken from a popular cowboy song) was later borrowed by author McMurty, and as noted Bogdanovich wanted to direct in the early 1970s with the three icons. When that fell through, it sat on the shelf until resurrected as the TV mini-series "Lonesome Dove" in the late 1980s.

Any similarities to the lead characters from RANGERS/LAREDO to DOVE are really superficial. While the Texas Ranger link is there, there's not much to compare story or Jim-Lorn-Wahoo to Gus-Woodrow-Jake.

"Howdy, Bub"

[deleted]

There seems a lot of confusion on this point. I used to know McMurty when he owned a used and rare bookstore in Georgetown. He told me he had written a western for Wayne, Stewart and Fonda about three old cowboys who got out for one last adventure. At least one of them doesn't come back.

McMurtry told me all three initially turned it down because they dinn't want to play old men, but finally Stewart and Fonda realized it was a very good script with good roles for them. Wayne still refused to do it.

McMurtry said you could do it with other actors, but it would be the same. My theory, since confirmed elsewhere, was he turned it into LONESOME DOVE. i saw Robert Duvall a few years ago at George Washington U in DC but didn't get to ask him about the origins of LD. He said his personal favorite films were LD and THE GODFATHER.