Seeking a perfect home for writer's final work

You must drink.

You can't talk about the movie business.

These were the two nonnegotiable rules pugnacious TV and film writer William Kelley ("Witness") laid down for aspiring scribe Tim Casey when Casey asked to join Kelley at a restaurant during a break at an Aspen screenwriting seminar in the late '80s.

Casey, a Colorado Springs firefighter, eagerly obliged (despite the clock face reading 9:30 a.m.), and a deep friendship developed over the next 15 years. So when Kelley died in 2003, Casey tracked down the only copy of the last feature screenplay Kelley wrote, a comedic western called "Strayhorn," which had been abandoned in a storage closet at USC.

Now Casey and Skip Press, an L.A.-based author and screenwriting teacher, are trying to find a home for the irreverent western about a charming, hot-tempered former U.S. Cavalry sergeant named Cletus Strayhorn, who wanders west in 1882 in search of gold, his young love and every kind of trouble. Robert Duvall and George Clooney (who had been looking for a western to do with his buddy Brad Pitt a few years ago) have read it, but thus far no one has taken on the material.

Kelley was a former Air Force boxer who became a novelist and TV writer on shows such as "Gunsmoke" and "Kung Fu" in the '70s. In 1986, he won a screenwriting Oscar for his only produced feature, "Witness," which had begun as an unused teleplay for "Gunsmoke" (note the classic western structure of the Peter Weir-directed film) that he revamped with former TV writing colleague Earl W. Wallace. Kelley, who idolized Hemingway, had a reputation for expressing a little too much unvarnished honesty in studio meetings and even sat whittling a spear with a huge knife during one of them.

"Strayhorn" is a throwback written with real joy for the traditions of the genre, which is precisely why it's a tough sell in today's marketplace. Most westerns are now relegated to television miniseries (Duvall's "Broken Trail" did very well on AMC last year), and to many cineastes, David Webb Peoples' Oscar-nominated script for "Unforgiven," released at the time Kelley wrote "Strayhorn" in 1992, played like the definitive eulogy for the genre.

But Casey, who holds the option on "Strayhorn," remains undeterred.

"It's a passion piece for me," Casey says, maintaining that he wants it produced with Kelley's words unchanged. "I just want to see it be a movie, and I want it to be something to honor Bill. In my fantasy world it would win another Academy Award for Bill posthumously."