A Brief Biography
Childhood and Young Adulthood
Beau L'Amour was born in Los Angeles, California. His father was Louis L'Amour, a well known author of magazine and paperback fiction. His mother was Katherine Adams, the daughter of a silent movie actress and a southern California real estate developer.
Throughout a good deal of his youth Beau lived in West Hollywood, an unincorporated section of Los Angeles county, known as a center of counter-culture and beatnik life. He grew up surrounded by his parents eclectic and eccentric group of friends; Austrian philosophers, American Indians, FBI agents, members of the Hollywood Ten, Eastern European refugees, Thai aristocracy, mysteriously talented dealers in primitive art and a wide array of writers, from Ray Bradbury to Jim Thompson.
Beau attended West Hollywood Elementary School. In 1973 his family moved to West Los Angeles where he attended Emerson Junior High and University High School. After a year at Santa Monica College he went on to earn his BFA at California Institute of the Arts under the mentorship of director Alexander Mackendrick and illustrator and pioneering digital animator Ed Emshwiller. He also studied acting with Janet Alhanti and Harry Mastergeorge, and directing at UCLA with Ted Post.
Early Career
Before he left college Beau began working entry level jobs in the motion picture industry; driving trucks, synching dailies, breaking down sound tracks, and as a production assistant. Eventually, he moved on to work as a story analyst, assistant producer, and landed a job in the art department on a series of Volvo commercials. He also occasionally worked as an actor and extra. By the end of his freelance career most of his work was in motion picture sound and post production. He also was briefly involved with a home video distribution company and, as an art director, received an honorable mention from the American Society of Illustrators for his work designing the Monument Entertainment Corporate Identity with artist Greg Manchess.
Audio Publishing
Although he had spent his childhood around many of the great names in the world of literature, Beau began in publishing by bringing his expertise in sound recording to a new effort of his father's . . . audio books. At the time Bantam was embarking on a program of Louis L'Amour "books on tape" that was entirely made up of recordings produced like the radio dramas of the 1930s through the 1950s. In most cases he oversaw the script writing process and worked as a producer but he also wrote parts of many of the programs he supervised as well as writing complete scripts, directing, and acting. Forming a partnership with a distributor, Beau built up a radio syndicate to broadcast the dramatized programs of Louis L'Amour Theater that totaled over 250 stations. The series also appeared on World Space Satellite and Armed Forces Radio.
The Diamond of JeruBeau wrote and directed this production of the short story. In addition, he was instrumental in the recording and creation of all of the custom sound effects used to create the jungles of Borneo.
Motion Picture Production
Along with Bernadette Caulfield (Carnivale, Game of Thrones), Leonard Hill (a resume so long it hard to pick examples), Joel Fields (Ugly Betty, The Americans), Vern Nobles (The Shadow Riders), Beau was producer of a pilot for CBS called Shaughnessy which was scripted by Roots screenwriter Bill Blinn. The pilot starred Matthew Settle, Linda Koslowski, Sarah Paulson, John Hawkes, Bo Hopkins, Michael Jai White and John Carroll Lynch. The TV series was not picked up.
Several years later he was the screenwriter and co-executive producer with Michael Joyce (SiFi's Battlestar Galactica) of the USA Cable movie, The Diamond of Jeru. The film starred Billy Zane, Paris Jefferson, and Keith Carradine.
ShaughnessyThis is Beau and Matt Settle on the location of Shaughnessy The Iron Marshall
The Diamond of JeruProducer Mike Joyce, Director Dick Lowery and Writer/Producer Beau L'AmourBook Publishing
Beau's earliest work in the book business was doing back-country exploration and research for his father in the early 1980s. From there he moved into editing and art direction and has been responsible for over 250 video, book, and Audio Book covers, working with award winning artists like Greg Manchess, Gordon Crabbe, Thomas Yeates, Mike Grell, and Richard Tuschman. He has created marketing campaigns, most notably a program that has given away over a million books to the US armed services and he was co-owner with Dell Magazines of the Louis L'Amour Western Magazine, a periodical that presented the best new writers in the Western genre. Over the years Beau has edited 20 collections of short stories, occasionally rewriting or completing unfinished material. Two of these collections were New York Times bestsellers.
Bringing art and literature together, in 2013 Beau wrote and produced a graphic novel based on one of his father's short stories, "Law of the Desert Born." Co-written with Katherine Nolan, adapted by Charles Santino, and illustrated by veteran Thomas Yeates, the book won numerous awards and notices, among them a nomination for a Will Eisner award, inclusion on the Village Voice's best of 2013 list, and features in The Wall Street Journal, Cowboys and Indians, Publisher's Weekly, and Library Journal.
More recently, Beau has authored Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures Volumes One and Two, along with a series of postscripts and essays intended to bring to light the story behind much of the unknown aspects of his father's career. He has also completed Louis L'Amour's unfinished first novel, No Traveller Returns, which will be published in the Fall of 2018.
Beau and Greg ManchessThese two have colaborated on many of Louis'
book covers and other art projects.
