Picture Perfect
Almost thirty years ago, tiny Archer City was invaded by Hollywood: Peter Bogdanovich and company came to town to film Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show. Here, Bogdanovich, Cybill Shepherd, Jeff Bridges, and others in the cast and crew look back at the moviemaking experience that changed them—and us—forever.
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Bogdanovich: When they voted at the school council on whether or not they’d let us shoot in there, we only got permission by one vote; it was that close. And they weren’t happy with us at all when we shot that scene with the two dogs on the lawn of the school—we almost got thrown out of town for that one. Well, you can imagine what they thought—it’s hard to imagine—but the camera was actually on the inside for that shot. You couldn’t see the camera, you couldn’t see anything except two huge lights outside lighting up these two dogs that are going at it. Just a few seconds; you don’t actually see them do anything. You just see them sniffing around and the audience gets the idea; it gets a big laugh. But people driving by were horrified.
Chason: The propman had a long-standing relationship with Pabst Brewery, so the beer that the actors were going to drink in the movie was going to be Pabst Blue Ribbon. I said no way, and the propman was so pissed at me. I said, man, nobody in 1951 drank Pabst Blue Ribbon; it was unheard of here. It’s gotta be Pearl and Lone Star; it can’t be anything else. And so we’re calling Pearl and Lone Star and getting labels and shit like that. You’ll notice, though, we didn’t have ’em in time for the big fight with Sonny and Duane over Jacy, when Duane hits him with the beer bottle. Jeff Bridges covered up the label because we didn’t have the proper period labels yet.
Bogdanovich: One of those happy little accidents was Coca-Cola. There were several lines in the picture, “You wanna Coke?” And Columbia sent the script to the Coca-Cola Company—this was before Coke bought Columbia—and Coca-Cola said they didn’t want to give us any product because they thought it was a dirty movie. That irritated me so much that I decided to remove not only any references to Coke but any casual shot in the background where you might see a Coke machine. And when I was down there researching, you know, getting ready, I noticed that a lot of people drank Dr Pepper. So I tried it—this was a regional drink; at the time, Dr Pepper was not known in the north—and I said, well, I’ll just use Dr Pepper, and we changed the line to Dr Pepper; I thought it had more of an unusual sound anyway.
Chason: The town’s name in the book is Thalia, but there was this town that had disappeared, called Anarene, and Peter thought that that sounded good, and so he wanted to name it Anarene. And we needed a school song because there’s a time when they’re driving in a car, in Jacy’s convertible, and they sing it from beginning to end, at least in the director’s cut. We needed lyrics, and so I ended up writing the lyrics to the school song.
Bogdanovich: There’s one very nice scene that Larry always regretted wasn’t in the original, which is early on in the picture when the three principal kids—Cybill, Tim, and Jeff—they get out of school and they jump into her car, and they’re going to the place where they have the french fries. And before they get there, there’s a scene where they’re riding and Jeff imitates the coach and kind of spits like the coach, and kind of sarcastically they start to sing the school song. And they’re sitting in the front seat, all of them singing the school song. I always regretted that we cut that. So that was one of the things we put back.
Chason: At the big graduation ceremony, for the state song they were gonna have “The Eyes of Texas.” No, no, no, folks, “The Eyes of Texas” is the University of Texas song. The state song is called “Texas, Our Texas.” I told Bogdanovich, and once he found out, he wanted authenticity, he wanted it to be real, so “Texas, Our Texas” is in the movie.
Bogdanovich: In the book, you know, [the last picture show] was quite different. In the book it was a rather poor Audie Murphy movie, and I thought that the picture show ought to go out with a little bit more of a bang. You know, being a bit more romantic about the movies than Larry, who hates movies. He does. So I wanted to have a movie that had an adventure to it, some kind of movement, a trek of some kind. And there were really only two movies that I like—that fell within the range of directors that I like—and one was Red River and the other was John Ford’s Wagonmaster. But because Red River is a Texas story—it starts in Texas and then they go north—and it was John Wayne, I thought it was more theatrical and more appropriate to the story, a bigger contrast between the adventurous past and the mundane present.
Life
Bogdanovich: Life did intrude; my father passed away while we were shooting. Suddenly, of a stroke. And my marriage ended. And it couldn’t have been more traumatic on a personal level. And yet, that’s what movies are like. You just kind of keep going. So the present definitely intruded personally on our lives during the making of the film, but it was an obsessive—movies are an obsessive thing.
Shepherd: We were in Olney, Texas, and we were sitting in the theater—you know, ’cause the picture show in Archer City had burned down, we used the interior of Olney and the exterior we used in Archer City. So Peter and I are sitting in that theater, and we’re talking and stuff, and I guess he knew that I was kinda having an affair with Jeff Bridges. And he said something—“Well, I guess you’re lonely tonight”—and I said, “Oh, I’m lonely every night.” And he said to me, “I can’t decide who I’d rather sleep with, you or Jacy.” I was very attracted to Peter. I knew he was a married man; I think I didn’t have much of a conscience. I would try not to be involved with married men; I didn’t think it was a great idea. It was very uncomfortable for all of us. But you know, looking back on it, would I do it differently? That’s another question.
Platt: I was jealous, of course, wildly. I did Cybill’s hair every day. I cut her hair, you know. I was tempted, but Cybill was irresistible. I thought about it—I thought if I was a man and a beautiful girl like that was making a pass at me, I don’t know what I would do. I could see why Peter was so head over heels in love with her.
Brennan: I knew nothing of that. I had no idea it was going on. When we got home, I called Peter and said, “I want you and Polly to come to dinner.” And he said, “Well, she won’t be coming with me; better ask Polly separately.” That’s how I found out.
T. Bottoms: After work nobody really wanted to see anybody. Except Peter. He wanted to see what’s-her-name. I think we all wanted to see her. Naked. I never saw her naked. I think Peter may have.
Bridges: The scenes with Cybill were very exciting to me; you use what’s going on in your life. I was probably a little older than Duane was supposed to be, but all that—that young kind of feeling of sexual oats and all that stuff. Sure could call on that.
S. Bottoms: I was a youngster, so everybody kind of looked after me. I didn’t get involved in a whole lot of the other stuff that was going on. I would actually have liked to. I didn’t have a girlfriend then, but I was interested in what was going on after hours. It was pretty frustrating to a fifteen-year-old.
T. Bottoms: I really enjoyed Peter and Polly in the beginning, before we started shooting. But I know when Peter left Polly—she had just had a baby, I mean, a brand-new baby—and I don’t know, I watched this beautiful marriage just destroyed. I watched it come apart, and it broke my heart, because at home my mom and dad were coming apart, so it was very personal, it just really hurt me, and I think that got reflected in my acting. Things just don’t last—that’s probably the worst feeling, a hopeless feeling, kind of like Sonny Crawford: hopeless despair.
S. Bottoms: It was painful to see all of this other stuff going on with all of these other people, in their lives. For me it was sort of a validation that everybody else’s lives were pretty screwed up too and I wasn’t the only one coming from a screwed-up background.
Bridges: We kind of had our own small town going; you know, you get very tight making a movie. It was almost like little incarnations, little lifetimes, and so there was like a bit of our own soap opera going there, and that was kind of like the life going on in the story.
My Library
