Although he is most famous as a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, McMurtry has worked for decades as a screenwriter. He and his partner, Diana Ossana, won the 2005 Academy Award for the screenplay of Brokeback Mountain. This is the third installment of a trilogy of memoirs dealing with McMurtry's artistic experiences, and it covers more than 40 years of his career interacting with Hollywood figures and the process of turning the written word into celluloid. This is the most intriguing of the three memoirs; it has an oddly detached tone, since McMurtry often writes like a starstruck outsider who fails to realize he has become a Hollywood insider. He asserts that he lacks a passion for the screenwriting craft and the filmmaking process, but he approaches the topic with relish. The memoir is divided into a series of short, often disconnected chapters in which a constant theme is the fact that the vast majority of screenplays, including his own, never become films. In his wanderings, McMurtry ranges from the role of agents to the difficulty of producing westerns to the tedium of attending awards ceremonies. He includes numerous vignettes in which he discusses his relations with various Hollywood personalities, some famous and some obscure. His descriptions are not always charitable, but they are consistently sharp, interesting, and enjoyable.
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