Larry Mcmurtry

In 1983, John Mellencamp started talking about making a movie. He began working with author Larry McMurtry ("Lonesome Dove"), although Mellencamp cautioned, "I don't know when it'll be finished. It could take some time."He was right. Almost nine years later, "Falling from Grace," the film McMurtry wrote for Mellencamp to star in and direct, will open in select cities."It's a character study," says Mellencamp, who plays Buddy Parks, a country singer who leaves his small-town home to make it big and then returns with his wife and child after several years of living in Los Angeles.

You think of the characters in Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "Lonesome Dove," and imagine not especially Gus McCrae and W. F. Call, but Robert Duvall and Tommie Lee Jones, the actors who played them in the memorable TV miniseries. "Terms of Endearment" brings to mind actresses Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger, but not the characters of Aurora and Emma Greenway. The dominant images of "The Last Picture Show" are of Cybill Shepherd, Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman, rather than Jacy Farrow, Sam the Lion and Ruth Popper.

Buffalo Girls.Larry McMurtry.Simon & Schuster.351 pages. $19.95.In his fourth novel since the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Lonesome Dove," Larry McMurtry once again seeks to lay bare the harsh realities that served as fodder for the mythology of the Old West, continuing work he performed most recently in "Anything for Billy" (1988), a retelling of the story of Billy the Kid.According to Mr. McMurtry, the process that turned the denizens of the West into pageant heroes -- jazzing them up for the purposes of popular entertainment -- obscured the pain of their actual lives.