A little while ago Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson assembled a few thoughts about the late L.M. Kit Carson and sent them along: “We met Kit twenty years ago. Kit and Cynthia had come back to Texas to put Kit’s biological son Hunter through school there, and we submitted ourselves to be his adopted ones, hoping to become his latest discoveries. (We weren’t the first as Kit was a natural guru.) He was the only person we’d ever met who actually worked in the movie business, and we had never come across someone who so automatically and instinctively turned any idea or experience or suggestion into a story — a pitch. Sometimes it was only at the end of the story that you realized “this has a purpose, he’s advising us, these are ‘notes.'”

“Kit had a rustic glamor, like a sort of a cowboy-screenwriter. He never told us much about his childhood except that the L. was for Louis and the M. was for Minor, two old men he was named after. What we heard about was guerilla filmmaking and gonzo film journalism and Dennis Hopper in Taos and Peru. We loved Kit in David Holzman’s Diary which we saw with him in Dallas, and we had already loved his work in Breathless and Paris, Texas. He had longish, stringy, sandy hair, and he clomped through the house in hiking boots all year round. He gave us a one-on-one tutorial in script-writing and short-film-editing (and, also, a lesson in how to hustle a project into existence). [Kit’s wife] Cynthia said to us that of all the people who were lucky to have known Kit, we were the luckiest. It certainly feels that way to us. He introduced us to the rest of our lives.

“We drifted apart over the years, but we’ve missed him, and we’ll keep missing him. He was a good guru.”

Wells note: I think Wes and Owen actually met Carson in ’93 because the Bottle Rocket short, on which they slightly collaborated, was shown at Sundance in January ’94.