- When he was fifteen, he tried to sneak into a sold-out Elvis Presley concert in San Antonio by climbing a tree and attempting to get into the auditorium through a second-floor window. It turned out to be a window in Presley's dressing room. Presley, who was then at the dawn of his career, was so charmed by Wittliff that he wrote a note on a napkin telling the security guards to let Wittliff and his buddies into the auditorium.
- Perhaps his biggest claim to fame during his university days was the horseshoe-shaped bar he built in his room at the Kappa Sigma fraternity house. At night, he and his roommate would turn the room into a gambling den, where Wittliff won most of the poker games and sold cheap Scotch that he had poured into empty Chivas Regal bottles. Among the regular visitors to his gambling den, he says, was Frank Erwin, who was the fraternity's legal adviser and later became the chairman of UT's board of regents.
- Bill Wittliff wrote one movie based on his mother's life as a telephone operator ( Raggedy Man, starring Sissy Spacek), another about the life of country musicians on the road ( Honeysuckle Rose, again starring Willie Nelson), and a third about a family nearly losing its farm ( Country, starring Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard).
- Using poker winnings as seed money, Wittliff and Sally ran the Encino Press out of their Austin home. Although the company barely got by, its books, almost all of them about Texas, were well received. Wittliff used Encino as his calling card to meet the region's best writers, including Larry McMurtry, who agreed to let Encino publish a collection of his essays that became the highly praised In a Narrow Grave.
- Bill Wittliff wrote the screenplay for Lonesome Dove and suddenly found himself on Hollywood's rarefied A-list, being offered eyeball-popping amounts of money to move to Los Angeles and work on movies or television series. Yet he refused to leave Texas.
- Wittliff started sending ideas to the best television dramas of that era- Kraft Television Theatre, Playhouse 90, Robert Montgomery Presents.
- Bill Wittliff had never seen a screenplay when he sat down in the early seventies to start writing a movie based on a story his grandfather had told him years before. He didn't use an outline; he simply wrote down whatever came to him next. Within a month he had a screenplay. Bud Shrake saw it sitting on Wittliff's desk, read it, and asked if he could show it to his agent. The script eventually was given to the producers of The French Connection, who loved it, and a few years later it appeared as Barbarosa. Starring Willie Nelson as a onetime outlaw hunted down by a vengeful family, it was highly praised.
- One Christmas when he was in high school, Wittliff received a present from his aunt who lived in Houston. It was J. Frank Dobie's Tales of Old-Time Texas, a folklore collection. In the book was a story titled "The Wild Woman of the Navidad," about a runaway slave whose footprints were often seen in the settlements along the river. Wittliff realized that this was the same story he had heard the hardware store owner tell years before. "The book absolutely set me on fire," he says.
- Wittliff submitted an article for its column My Most Unforgettable Character. The story, entirely invented by Wittliff, was about his close relationship with Lyndon Johnson, then a U.S. senator, who had a ranch near Blanco. When that article was rejected, he sent several made-up quotes-which he claimed he had heard LBJ say-to the Quotable Quotes section. Reader's Digest turned him down again.
- Wittliff spent his high school years in the Central Texas town of Blanco, where the family had moved when his mother married a rancher. He was the quarterback of the high school football team, a starter on the basketball team, and the class cutup who always had a funny story or a joke to tell.
- Graduate of the University of Texas.
- In 1964 he founded, along with his wife, The Encino Press which specialized in tales about Texas and the Southwest.
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