Hitch Your Wagon . . .

At some point fairly early in the process, Geoffrion married the trail-drive story to another that intrigued him, one that was "part of my endless search for useless information."

It was the sadly neglected chronicle of Chinese girls -- thousands of them -- who were brought to America throughout the 19th century and forced into prostitution across the West.

From his reading, Geoffrion discovered that the young women had been ripped from their families in China and lived an average of five years in America before succumbing to suicide, violence or disease.

Geoffrion works out of a spare bedroom at a ceiling-high mahogany desk with doors, drawers and fold-up sections that are perfect for hiding his messiness at the end of the day. He keeps books, articles, oral histories and other items of research scattered haphazardly on a single bed behind him.

As he labored over "Broken Trail," he would get calls from Duvall, sometimes twice a day: "Hey bud, what's up?"

"Not too much, Bobby," he would answer, then maybe read the actor what he had written that day.

Duvall would offer a critique, and then he would start spinning out some new possible story element. Often his suggestions reflected their mutual effort to capture the intricate fabric of the West. Although Duvall grew up the son of a Navy officer in San Diego and Annapolis, he and his brothers spent several summers on an uncle's ranch in the Sweet Grass Hills of northern Montana. He recalled that many of his uncle's cowhands were Swedish immigrants, that his best cowboy was a Scotsman.

Even though the main character in "Broken Trail" resembles earlier Duvall characters, notably Gus McCrae in "Lonesome Dove" and Boss Spearman in "Open Range," Geoffrion insists he wasn't writing the character with Duvall in mind as the story transformed from novel to screenplay (and eventually back again). He was simply trying to create a fully realized individual.

"Wilford Brimley, Richard Farnsworth if he were still alive -- any number of actors could have played him," he says.

"You have to make him as real as General Lee's eyeballs," he added, "because Bobby has a truth detector on him. You wouldn't be able to get away with it."

Duvall also passed along the script to industry pals, including the venerable Texas writer Horton Foote, a friend for nearly half a century and an Oscar winner for his adaptation of "To Kill a Mockingbird" (in which Duvall played Boo Radley).

"I was very lucky," Geoffrion says. "It was wonderful. I told Horton Foote I had no training at all in writing scripts. 'Oh, that's great!' he said."