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.
Plus: A few words from the late Ben Johnson, and an exclusive excerpt from Larry McMurtry’s new novel Duane’s Depressed.
In the fall of 1970 the magic of Hollywood descended on Archer City, Texas, population 1,722. Director Peter Bogdanovich, 31, arrived with the cast and crew to begin shooting Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, a bittersweet, no-holds-barred story about growing up in Texas in the fifties. Tongue firmly in cheek, McMurtry had “lovingly dedicated” the novel to his hometown, and many of its citizens had not forgotten. Ministers railed and townspeople arched their brows at the sinfulness of this “dirty” book, which McMurtry’s mother was said to have hidden in the closet. And then, adding insult to injury, they were making a moving picture to go with it. One letter to the local newspaper spoke of both the end of an era and the wayward day dawning on the horizon, where wicked larger towns like Wichita Falls loomed: “I, for one, feel that Archer City will come out of this with a sickness in it’s [sic] stomach and a certain misgiving about the support the City is lending to the further degradation and decay of the morals and attitudes we foist upon our youth in this County…”
Undeterred, Bogdanovich and company persevered, and after ten weeks of production and a year of cutting by the director, their joint effort yielded an American masterpiece. (In 1991 Bogdanovich restored seven minutes of footage cut from the original film—three scenes in all—for a laserdisc letterbox edition, but this “director’s cut” version is no longer available.) The Last Picture Show won eight Academy award nominations and garnered Oscars for Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman (best supporting actor and actress). The film also won three British Academy awards, one Golden Globe award, seven New York Film Critics awards, and one National Society of Film Critics award. In 1998 the Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry.
Nineteen years after making The Last Picture Show, Bogdanovich and most of the original cast returned to Archer City to film its sequel, Texasville. This time a starstruck town embraced the celebrities and welcomed the influx of fresh money into an oil-slump-depressed economy. Several of the performers who had been young, unknown actors were now established figures: Cybill Shepherd, Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms, Randy Quaid. The production had the air of a high school reunion.
McMurtry’s latest fictional visit to Archer City, Duane’s Depressed, has just been published, taking up the stories of several characters from the two earlier novels (an excerpt appears on page 81), and so it seems a fitting time to revisit the making of The Last Picture Show, in the days before the Texas Film Commission, the Third Coast, and the current lively motion picture scene in Texas.
A film is the result of a vast collaboration over time, and what happens off camera can have a crucial impact on what happens on-screen. On the set of The Last Picture Show, the private lives of the actors intersected with those of the characters they depicted; passions swirled around the picture with the same force as the winds that blew through the empty streets of the little Texas town. How the movie was made is a story best told by the participants: Peter Bogdanovich (director), Cybill Shepherd (Jacy Farrow), Timothy Bottoms (Sonny Crawford), Jeff Bridges (Duane Jackson), Cloris Leachman (Ruth Popper), Eileen Brennan (Genevieve), Sam Bottoms (Billy), Polly Platt (production designer), and Gary Chason (assistant to the director).
THE PLACE
Bogdanovich: Well, the truth is that Archer City sort of picked us. We went down to look at locations, and Larry had volunteered to take us around Texas—he loves to drive around—so he drove me and the production designer, Polly Platt [Bogdanovich’s wife at the time], around. He met us at the Dallas airport, and he said, “Where you wanna go? You wanna go north or south? You wanna go to Archer City?” And I said, “Well, let’s go there last. Let’s see everything else that there is,” thinking that probably Archer City wouldn’t even be right. I thought, “That’d be his hometown. Why would that be right?” So we spent a couple of days driving around Texas, more than a couple of days, and we said, “Let’s fly back to Dallas and drive up to Archer City.” And the minute we drove into town, the minute I could see that stoplight blinking at me, and it was kinda getting a little late as we drove in, I said, “This is it.” And Larry of course said, “Well, it oughta be. It’s the town I wrote about.”
Platt: I was asleep in the back seat listening to Larry and Peter in the front talking about the movie, and I would sort of go to sleep and wake up and listen to their murmuring voices. It was very, very special. And we got into the town—it was a stormy, rainy, sleety March—and the town was as gray and ugly as you’ve ever seen. There were tumbleweeds blowing through the town; it was closed down. And we saw that it had the tank dam, it had the lake, it had the high school, it had the square—and even though the main square needed a lot of work, we decided to do it. We decided to do it there.
Bridges: It’s funny. When you’re making a movie like that, the place you’re shooting almost seems like a set. That whole town, we used that whole town as a big set, basically. It was wonderful coming back for Texasville, because the town hadn’t changed really that much at all. I think the only difference was this black glass bank that was stuck in the middle of all this other stuff.
Brennan: Shooting in the town did a lot of the work for the actors because the town is extremely bleak. Bogdanovich They were not happy that we were there. They did not like the book; the town was hostile to the book, which by the way had not been a successful book. I don’t believe it sold more than about six thousand copies in hardcover. So the success of the picture and Larry’s subsequent success made Archer City like us a lot better when we went back for Texasville.
Platt: I remember we went into the McMurtry house, and Jeff McMurtry, Larry’s father, instead of saying hello to Larry—Larry said, “This is Polly and Peter,” and Hazel [his mother] was all friendly and everything, and she gave us a pecan pie—Jeff McMurtry just came right over to me and was looking at Larry, and instead of saying “How do you do?” or “Nice to meet you” or the usual Texas thing, he said, “You know what?”—he was looking at Larry—“You pour kerosene on him, and I’ll light the match.”
Leachman: This is a very hard-bitten place; you felt the lives, living there. It’s so painful. I mean it’s so, what do they call it? Quiet desperation. Everybody knows everybody. I don’t know if you can really share when you have to protect your pride. I think that’s why it can be awfully lonely if you feel you can’t share, like my character. Ruth had nobody to share with, nor did she even think she had the right to feel she was suffering at all; that was her lot in life.
Chason: Since The Last Picture Show and McMurtry’s work are so rooted in the land, so site-specific, I felt that it was very important, as did Peter Bogdanovich, that the regional accents be accurate. Peter loved to talk to Orson Welles on the phone as often as possible, and Orson advised him to get a dialect coach. I had strong reservations about anybody from Los Angeles coming to Texas and creating an authentic Texas accent. My fear was that for one thing it would be too broad and secondly that it would be Southern and not Texan. Most of the Californians or New Yorkers that I’ve met could not distinguish between a Texas regional accent and a Southern one. The only one who struggled was Timothy Bottoms. And he was the only one that I think f—ed it up. Early in the movie, when he’s making out with Charlene Duggs in the pickup truck, he’s supposed to say, “Let’s do somethin’ different.” And he refused to do that after many, many coaching sessions to tell him to say “somethin’”; he had to say “somethang.” “Let’s do somethang different.” And it’s in the movie, “somethang.” It was one of those days I couldn’t be on the set, and it snuck by me. And Peter didn’t know the difference.
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