Aaron Latham
De Leon, The Heart of Texas
Along with William S. White, De Leon can also make claim to another writer: screenwriter and novelist Aaron Latham. Latham only spent a few years in De Leon, but they were his formative years; he left De Leon after the fourth grade. The Texan lifestyle has left an indelible mark on his writing. In a piece for Texas Monthly, Latham wrote, "My dad was a high school football coach, and every time he had a winning season, we moved to a bigger place. I lived in Spur, Munday, De Leon, Abilene. I was a football player until I got hurt during my freshman year. At one practice I ended up at the bottom of a pile, and I had to have my left kidney removed."
Latham’s family moved to De Leon in 1947 so Latham’s father could become the coach of De Leon’s beloved football team, the Bearcats. Latham’s mother was an elementary school teacher. The family eventually moved to Abilene in 1954. Latham was hired by the Washington Post after graduate school. While Latham was covering the Watergate Hearings for New York magazine, he met Lesley Stahl at CBS while doing research. The two eventually sparked up a romance and got married.
Latham’s most famous work is the screenplay of the hit movie Urban Cowboy. The movie was inspired by an Esquire magazine article Aaron Latham wrote about Dew Westbrook, a mechanical bullrider at Gilley’s Nightclub, a legendary honky tonk bar in Pasadena, Texas (a suburb of Houston). Latham wrote that he was drawn to the subject because "it was a chance to get back to my mesquite-and-tumbleweed roots. In the movie, Bud comes from Spur which happened to be the town where I was born." Described as country music’s "Saturday Night Fever," Urban Cowboy went on to gross $54 million and launched a country music craze.
Latham also wrote several other films, including Perfect and The Program, which were also based on magazine articles. He also wrote pieces for Rolling Stone, Talk, and The New York Times. Latham is the author of two western-themed novels, Riding with John Wayne and The Cowboy with the Tiffany Gun.