My gamble paid off: Suddenly I was both writer and executive producer. Then again, that’s not nearly as impressive as it sounds. The script, of course, became the property of the network, and from that point on it was my job to turn it into whatever they wanted it to be. Producers are rarely as influential as most of them would like others to believe. When the creative executives at the network say “Frog,” you jump. You do exactly what the bosses say, when they say it. Within days there were a great many notes for revisions, some of which I found helpful and some that made me want to tear out my hair and caused me to wonder if I could ever create something that would satisfy both myself and the studio—feelings that most screenwriters know all too well.
But it didn’t matter—we were off and running.
By early February we were in Australia, where the Queensland coast would double for the Borneo rain forest. The next few weeks were a whirlwind of location scouting, local casting, and more rewrites—some by myself, some by the director, and even more of them by anyone with the political clout to insist on a change…typical for a movie production, but confusing and disheartening for a first-time screenwriter.
One of the exciting aspects of doing “The Diamond of Jeru” in northern Australia was that we ended up making a lot of things ourselves; costumes, props, and buildings were all constructed from scratch. Previously, I had worked only around Los Angeles, where a phone call to a rental house was all it took to make the most exotic items show up within hours. This was definitely like Hollywood in its early years.
All films are an exercise in compromise: what you want balanced against what you need. The last-minute rewriting and restaging of scenes that have only existed in your mind is part of both the excitement and the disappointment. One big advantage to having worked on a number of other films was that I was well aware that we were not there to shoot the script; we were there to make a movie. The work is a constant process of change and adaptation, and often what had seemed easy back in L.A., or on paper, became impossible under actual circumstances.
Not having the budget to travel to a large enough river or to shoot a particular stunt required a significant change to the opening. Having only two days to shoot Jeru’s fight with Kardec meant rewriting and recasting the Dyak as a much larger, younger man. We did not have enough time to shoot the details of the fight that would demonstrate that, even as an older guy, Jeru was very good at fighting with a parang, the Indonesian version of a machete. You confront a problem and make an adjustment. No plan of battle ever survives contact with the enemy.
For this writer, one of the wonderful aspects of making the film was the way parts of 1950s Sarawak came to life. Locations that I had half imagined, and props and costumes that I had never thought of, all took on a sense of concrete reality, if only for the few days that we were working on a certain scene. After the construction crew had gone home I could sit quietly in Kardec’s bungalow, walk the streets of Marudi (re-created in a nineteenth-century railroad carriage factory), or relax on the verandah of the District Officer’s Residence (the old parliament building now surrounded by the campus of the Queensland University of Technology).
I had a chance to live in a tropical rain forest, deal with mosquitoes so thick you could hardly breathe without getting a mouthful, and trust that the crocodiles wouldn’t attack until they became used to your presence (at least that’s what we were told!). Though it seemed too late in the process to really take advantage of it, these details helped to make the fictional time and place of the story real to me…or at least to bolster my imaginary version of it all.
In the years that followed I discovered I was feeling nostalgic for my re-creation of 1950s Marudi, a place that had never really existed. My father loved to travel back to the locations he had written about in his books, and I was just beginning to discover why.
By midsummer, we were nearly finished editing the film and I was moving on to other projects. I had rewritten the original short story and then written and produced the movie; it seemed like I was finally finished with “The Diamond of Jeru.”
After wrapping up the Son of a Wanted Man audio, a process nearly as complicated as making a film, I visited a Random House sales conference in Fort Myers, Florida. One afternoon the executive in charge of the audio division asked me if I had any plans to follow up with another long-form dramatized audio. I was happily surprised, because Son of a Wanted Man had taken a long time to produce and, given its cast of over twenty actors, it had been fairly expensive. I wasn’t the least bit sure that they’d ever want to do another!
Thinking about the situation, I decided that after being involved in fifty or so Western audio dramas, I really wanted to try something completely different. Whatever it was, however, it had to be something that had its own distinct soundscape, and something that existed in a very particular and identifiable time and place.
Several different stories were considered, but none of them had the right mixture of characters, and the amount of time it would have taken to get a completely new script together was too great. I especially wanted to have an interesting leading lady. Since I had already written the movie script for “The Diamond of Jeru,” I figured that could become the foundation for an audio play just as easily as the unproduced movie script to Son of a Wanted Man had become the basis of that audio production. Sarawak of the 1950s would surely have its own wonderfully exotic environment, the sense of the time period conveyed by the dialogue would be as distinct as in a Western, and the sound of mid-twentieth-century technology seemed to be rapidly becoming as out of date as that of the nineteenth! In many ways, the script was perfect.
While the film script for “The Diamond of Jeru” was a tight eighty-nine minutes, the finished Random House audio was required to run around twice as long. That difference would allow a lot more room to expand the story yet again and I could play with several themes and aspects of the plot that would add greater breadth and depth to the characters. Also, all the experiences I’d had working on the film became fodder for new details and scenes, ideas I never would have had prior to going to Australia and re-creating Sarawak. Eventually, I got in touch with USA Network and we came to an agreement that would let me use the film’s script as the basis for an audio dramatization.
As I started lengthening the script, it was amazing how different aspects of the story came to life in completely new ways. While the film had expanded to cover John and Helen’s side of the story, the audio was able to give more time to the world of the Borneo natives. I found ways to wrap the history of Sarawak into the plot, creating more of a backstory for Jeru and allowing Raj to become significantly more than a sidekick for Mike Kardec. Without the expense of sets or locations to worry about, the audio could also “go places” and “do things” that would never be possible in a reasonably budgeted movie. As wonderful a place to shoot as Australia was, it didn’t have vast cave networks or thirteen-thousand-foot mountains. The beautiful thing about an audio drama is that making something sound right is an awful lot cheaper than making it look right!
In the end, the audio play ended up being just as much an adaptation of the film script as the film script had been an adaptation of the novella, and as the novella had been an adaptation of Dad’s original short story. Each was a completely separate beast, and with every telling the story both gained and lost various qualities. I’d be hard pressed to say which one I like the best; each is its own example of its medium and moment in history.
Production of “The Diamond of Jeru” audio commenced in October 2007, using the core crew from the Son of a Wanted Man audio: myself as writer and director, Paul O’Dell as producer and editor, Phil Shenale as composer, and Howard Gale and Ken Goerres as engineers and audio consultants.
One of the most demanding aspects of producing “The Diamond of Jeru” audio was the casting. We had characters who were American, Malaysian, British, Australian, Indian, Chinese, and Korean. When we first advertised on the various casting we
bsites we got over two thousand responses, and we had to whittle those down to a number we could actually manage. As it was, we took about six weeks to audition some four hundred actors. The process was exhausting and a bit like being in the hotel business: You had to always be “on,” efficient, hyperalert, and hospitable.
While we spent just over a week in the studio recording the actors’ voices, the entire production period—which included cutting the dialogue, creating and editing the sound effects, refining the scenes, composing and editing the music, and then mixing it all down—took around 450 working days. Because of our other responsibilities, like producing the graphic novel of Law of the Desert Born, we ended up working on an extremely drawn-out schedule. Regardless, it was a very fun and creative time and I’m quite proud of all we were able to accomplish. Anyone interested can go to thediamondofjeruaudio.com for a great deal more information, photos, and videos.
In hindsight, if there is anything I regret about the production of the audio it is that I didn’t get things off to as clean and clear a start as I did with the film or novella adaptations. Dad was always good about getting into the meat of a story right away, and you can see that his original short story did that very efficiently. As the versions I worked on added complexity and detail from novella to film to audio, they took longer and longer to get going. Looking back on the audio script, I actually believe that immediacy and complexity could both have been achieved. But, as Dad well knew, there comes a moment when you have to just move on and tell the next story, and more than enough ink has been spilled on “The Diamond of Jeru”!
Beau L’Amour
October 2018
Bantam Books by Louis L’Amour
NOVELS
Bendigo Shafter
Borden Chantry
Brionne
The Broken Gun
The Burning Hills
The Californios
Callaghen
Catlow
Chancy
The Cherokee Trail
Comstock Lode
Conagher
Crossfire Trail
Dark Canyon
Down the Long Hills
The Empty Land
Fair Blows the Wind
Fallon
The Ferguson Rifle
The First Fast Draw
Flint
Guns of the Timberlands
Hanging Woman Creek
The Haunted Mesa
Heller with a Gun
The High Graders
High Lonesome
Hondo
How the West Was Won
The Iron Marshal
The Key-Lock Man
Kid Rodelo
Kilkenny
Killoe
Kilrone
Kiowa Trail
Last of the Breed
Last Stand at Papago Wells
The Lonesome Gods
The Man Called Noon
The Man from Skibbereen
The Man from the Broken Hills
Matagorda
Milo Talon
The Mountain Valley War
North to the Rails
Over on the Dry Side
Passin’ Through
The Proving Trail
The Quick and the Dead
Radigan
Reilly’s Luck
The Rider of Lost Creek
Rivers West
The Shadow Riders
Shalako
Showdown at Yellow Butte
Silver Canyon
Sitka
Son of a Wanted Man
Taggart
The Tall Stranger
To Tame a Land
Tucker
Under the Sweetwater Rim
Utah Blaine
The Walking Drum
Westward the Tide
Where the Long Grass Blows
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Beyond the Great Snow Mountains
Bowdrie
Bowdrie’s Law
Buckskin Run
The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour (vols. 1–7)
Dutchman’s Flat
End of the Drive
From the Listening Hills
The Hills of Homicide
Law of the Desert Born
Long Ride Home
Lonigan
May There Be a Road
Monument Rock
Night Over the Solomons
Off the Mangrove Coast
The Outlaws of Mesquite
The Rider of the Ruby Hills
Riding for the Brand
The Strong Shall Live
The Trail to Crazy Man
Valley of the Sun
War Party
West from Singapore
West of Dodge
With These Hands
Yondering
SACKETT TITLES
Sackett’s Land
To the Far Blue Mountains
The Warrior’s Path
Jubal Sackett
Ride the River
The Daybreakers
Sackett
Lando
Mojave Crossing
Mustang Man
The Lonely Men
Galloway
Treasure Mountain
Lonely on the Mountain
Ride the Dark Trail
The Sackett Brand
The Sky-Liners
THE HOPALONG CASSIDY NOVELS
The Riders of High Rock
The Rustlers of West Fork
The Trail to Seven Pines
Trouble Shooter
NONFICTION
Education of a Wandering Man
Frontier
The Sackett Companion: A Personal Guide to the Sackett Novels
A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour, compiled by Angelique L’Amour
POETRY
Smoke from This Altar
LOST TREASURES
Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1
No Traveller Returns
ABOUT LOUIS L’AMOUR
“I think of myself in the oral tradition—as a troubadour, a village tale-teller, the man in the shadows of the campfire. That’s the way I’d like to be remembered—as a storyteller. A good storyteller.”
IT IS DOUBTFUL that any author could be as at home in the world re-created in his novels as Louis Dearborn L’Amour. Not only could he physically fill the boots of the rugged characters he wrote about, but he literally “walked the land my characters walk.” His personal experiences as well as his lifelong devotion to historical research combined to give Mr. L’Amour the unique knowledge and understanding of people, events, and the challenge of the American frontier that became the hallmarks of his popularity.
As a boy growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota, he absorbed all he could about his family’s frontier heritage, including the story of his great-grandfather who was scalped by Sioux warriors.
Spurred by an eager curiosity and desire to broaden his horizons, Mr. L’Amour left home at the age of fifteen and enjoyed a wide variety of jobs including seaman, lumberjack, elephant handler, skinner of dead cattle, miner, and an officer in the transportation corps during World War II. He was a voracious reader and collector of books. His personal library contained 17,000 volumes.
Mr. L’Amour “wanted to write almost from the time I could talk.” After developing a widespread following for his many frontier and adventure stories written for fiction magazines, Mr. L’Amour published his first full-length novel, Hondo, in the United States in 1953. Every one of his more than 120 books is in print; there are nearly 300 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the bestselling authors in modern literary history. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and more than forty-five of his novels and stories have been made into feature films and television movies.
His hardcover bestsellers include The Lonesome Gods, The Walking Drum (his twelfth-century historical novel), Jubal Sackett, Last
of the Breed, and The Haunted Mesa. His memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, was a leading bestseller in 1989. Audio dramatizations and adaptations of many L’Amour stories are available from Random House Audio Publishing.
The recipient of many great honors and awards, in 1983 Mr. L’Amour became the first novelist ever to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress in honor of his life’s work. In 1984 he was also awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Reagan.
Louis L’Amour died on June 10, 1988.