Quanah Parker Looks Promising

Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry and his writing partner Diana Ossana have their plates full with a number of new Western-themed movies in the planning stages.

One of the most promising is an adaptation of S.C. Gwynne’s 2010 bestseller, Empire of the Summer Moon, a history of Quanah Parker and the Comanches. The project is being spearheaded by Director/Producer Ridley Scott who was most recently responsible for the underrated Russell Crowe take on Robin Hood, and who was among the producers of The Assassination of Jesse James. Empire looks like it will be helmed by Crazy Heart Director Scott Cooper.

Cooper will also be producing and directing McMurtry and Ossana’s adaptation of Paulette Jile’s 2009 book The Color of Lightning, which is the story of Britt Johnson, a freed slave whose son was killed and wife and daughters abducted by Kiowas and Comanches in 1865. Johnson’s pursuit to find his family undoubtedly inspired much of the novel and 1956 film The Searchers and perhaps some of Budd Boetticher’s 1960 Western Comanche Station as well. Jiles is a poet as well as a novelist, and she wrote the 2007 Civil War-era novel Enemy Women and 1988’s The Jesse James Poems.