Aaron Latham Urban Cowboy (1980)
Aaron Latham (October 3, 1943 – July 23, 2022) co-wrote the screenplay for Urban Cowboy (1980) with director James Bridges, adapted from his own Esquire article "The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy." Latham was thirty-six when the picture opened.
Latham was a magazine writer who came home to Spur, Texas for the piece
Latham was born in Spur, Texas — Bud Davis's literal home town — and educated at Amherst (B.A.) and Princeton (Ph.D.). He spent the 1970s as a Washington Post and Esquire contributor and a Texas Monthly regular, writing features on the New Hollywood (his book Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, 1971), country music, and Texas. The Esquire assignment that became Urban Cowboy sent him back to Texas to write about the Houston-area refinery culture orbiting Mickey Gilley's Pasadena honky-tonk.
"I went home to Spur for Christmas in 1977 and my cousin took me to Gilley's. I had never seen the place. I walked in and I knew there was a story. I called Esquire the next morning." — Aaron Latham, Texas Monthly (2018)
The piece was reportage built around Dew Westbrook and Betty
The article centered on a real young refinery worker, Dew Westbrook, and his bull-riding girlfriend Betty. Latham hung around Gilley's for several weeks in early 1978, riding home with Dew after shifts, eating breakfast at the truck stops the refinery crews used. The piece ran in Esquire on September 12, 1978 under the title "The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy: America's Search for True Grit." It was eight thousand words; the photographs by Annie Leibovitz made the cover.
"Dew was Bud. Betty was Sissy. Wes was a real ex-con on parole from the prison rodeo program. Almost everything in the picture happened. We compressed it and we changed the names." — Aaron Latham, Vanity Fair (2010)
Latham co-wrote the screenplay with Bridges
Robert Evans optioned the article for Paramount in 1978. Bridges and Latham wrote the screenplay together over six months in 1978–79, with Bridges shaping structure and Latham bringing the world. The two had not worked together before; Latham was new to screenwriting and has said in interviews that Bridges essentially apprenticed him on the script.
"Jim Bridges taught me what a screenplay was. I was a magazine writer. I knew sentences. I didn't know scenes. He taught me scenes." — Aaron Latham, Texas Monthly (2018)
After Urban Cowboy
Latham wrote the screenplay for Perfect (1985) — the Travolta-and-Jamie-Lee-Curtis health-club picture, also adapted from a Latham Rolling Stone article — and worked as a magazine writer for Manhattan, inc., Vanity Fair, and Texas Monthly for the next three decades. He wrote three novels (Code of the West, The Ballad of Gussie & Clyde, The Cowboy with the Tiffany Gun). He died in 2022 at seventy-eight.
The 1978 Esquire article remains his best-known piece (see The Latham Source Article). The phrase "urban cowboy" — the title of the article, then the picture, then the Reagan-era cultural moment the picture crystallized — entered the language because of him.