Matt Dillon sips from a Benson Bubbler right before he rips off a pharmacy on Northwest Glisan Street. That’s our opening for Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant’s 1989 directorial breakthrough ...

He wrote his only published novel, "Drugstore Cowboy," in six weeks while serving a 20-year prison term for a pharmacy robbery in southwest Washington. Van Sant and Yost wrote the screenplay.