Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger

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Can't figure out readers

AFTER WRITING thousands of "Honolulu Lites" (I know, that's not writing, that's typing), I'm still surprised at what makes readers mad. The things I think might cause discomfort don't, and the things that I think nobody would care about cause some readers to go apoplectic.

When I wrote about how TV and movie westerns have changed, going from the benign, blood-free "Gunsmoke" to the eye-popping violence (and ear-popping dialogue) of "Deadwood" to the graphically gay "Brokeback Mountain," I expected to get a little heat.

For instance, I figured suggesting that Matt Dillon's deputy, Festus, was a little "light in the saddle" and Miss Kitty was a prostitute would bring recriminations from fans of "Gunsmoke." What I neglected to realize was the same thing I neglected to realize when I once included some "Gunsmoke" jokes in a stand-up comedy routine: Hardly anyone alive today ever saw "Gunsmoke."

The name Matt Dillon might ring some faraway bell, but no one knows the other characters, Festus, Miss Kitty, Doc, etc. I could say Festus was a molester of large farm animals, and no one would care. (He was, you know.) And Miss Kitty ran a child slavery ring. Doc Adams was a Scientologist. And Sheriff Matt Dillon wore women's frilly undergarments. (He did, you know.) See? Nobody cares.

I ALSO thought sensitive readers might take exception to me arguing that the gay caballeros in "Brokeback Mountain" were sheepboys, not cowboys. The point being that anyone who went to see "Brokeback Mountain" thinking they were going to see movie about gay cowboys of the 1800s actually saw gay sheepherders from the 1960s.

But readers didn't care. Several were upset that I said one of my favorite writers, Larry McMurtry, wrote the screenplay for "Brokeback Mountain." Reader Paul Nagano -- the most polite of the correspondents -- pointed out, correctly, that McMurtry was a co-writer of the script along with Diana Ossana but that the author of the short story the movie was based on was E. Annie Proulx.

So, the record is straight. But in my defense, writers who sell the screen rights to their work rarely get credit for the original stories. Proulx was lucky that as fine a writer as McMurtry was brought on to do the screenplay. Considering what usually happens in Hollywood, her story could easily have been turned into a movie about a cross-dressing gunslinger who runs a white-slavery ring out of a halfway house for wayward Pony Express riders. Wait. That was a "Gunsmoke" episode.