Behind the Scenes 
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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The Movie
Bogdanovich: The reason I wanted to shoot it in black and white is because I thought we would get a sense of the period better and more quickly. Period pictures in color are always troublesome, particularly if they’re color at a time when there were movies. It’s different if you’re doing Gone With the Wind, ’cause there were no movies in that period. But when you’re doing movies in a period that was essentially a black-and-white period, they’re more realistic. Everything does seem more realistic in black and white, strange enough, even though it’s an abstraction; it’s one of those peculiarities. Also, I thought that the performances would resonate better. Orson Welles and I were talking about that, and I was telling him that I was trying to get something of what he did in terms of the depth of field in Citizen Kane or [The Magnificent] Ambersons or Touch of Evil and so on, and he said, “You’ll never get it in color.” And I said, “Well, what am I gonna do?” He said, “Shoot it in black and white.” I said, “I don’t think they’ll let me.” And he said, “Well, why don’t you ask ’em?”
Leachman: I remember feeling that this picture, The Last Picture Show, it was as if—you’ve seen those books where you open the pages and the pages pop up and form things. That’s what this seemed like; it just seemed like it just put itself up on the screen.
Platt: I think there are two huge, important things about that film. One is what we call the “environment,” the atmosphere of the picture. The other was the fabulous nature of the material—great script, great land.
Bogdanovich: We had a hard time figuring out who was going to play Sam the Lion; we couldn’t decide, and at one point people thought, well, what about Jimmy Stewart? We sort of thought about it, but I said, no, we really can’t go all the way down there to the little town and end up with a movie star. And then Orson made a suggestion. He said, “How ’bout going down to Nashville; maybe you’ll find some older, aging country singer that just might be perfect.” So I did go to Nashville for that express reason, and while I was in Nashville I used the time to kind of do some research about country music of that period and found, to my amazement, that songs that I knew, like “Cold, Cold Heart,” which I’d known as Tony Bennett’s song, turned out to be originally a Hank Williams song. And I did a lot of research about the country hits during that period. The book is rather general about what years, it’s very general in terms of the fifties. But I decided to be very specific, so the picture, as far as I was concerned, began in October 1951 and ended in October 1952, so I was very careful with that. A hit song in October 1951 on all the charts was Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart.” At the same time, Tony Bennett’s version was popular in the north. So I decided to use mainly country music for the picture and the pop stuff more for Jacy, figuring that she was snobbish and didn’t really like country music because it was too square as far as she was concerned.
Shepherd: One of my happiest memories was, oddly enough, getting up before light and riding out to work—to Archer City—and seeing that light. The light is so extraordinary! And that flat landscape makes the sky enormous. And I was just so thrilled to be going out, you know, and I think the whole crew—we all rode together—that was really fun. That’s a more adventurous type of moviemaking than I’ve experienced since then.
Bridges: It was a very exciting time. Just making movies back in those days was very different. The movie was produced by a group of guys who had this company, BBS. BBS stood for Bert, Bob, and Steve. Any company that would give their first names as the company lets you know how loose creatively the company was. They produced Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens and The Last Picture Show and some wonderful movies.
Brennan: To me it is a delicious, delicious memory. Camaraderie and all of that—and the time. Ten weeks. You know what they do now? Three. We would never be able to do that in three weeks. It’s budgets.
Shepherd: When I got back to New York and I went back into modeling, I said, “I just had this incredible experience, making what I think could be a great movie.” And everybody goes, “Well, who’s in it?” And I listed the people, and nobody had ever heard of anyone in the film. I could see ’em click off—like, “Oh, yeah. Right.”
S. Bottoms: If you ask my honest opinion, Tim’s the movie. It’s all coming from Sonny. I think Larry is Sonny. He doesn’t want to admit it. Larry’s Sonny, in an introverted, sort of twisted way. Shy.
Bogdanovich: I think Picture Show certainly had a tremendous impact and continues to have an impact. When you do something so meticulously within the period, you’re dating it as you’re making it. You’re putting it in a time capsule. The ambience, the songs—everything is very much of that moment.
Bridges: I can recall after the first week of shooting, sitting around a table with Cloris Leachman and Ellen Burstyn and Cybill Shepherd, Eileen Brennan, and Tim was probably there, just the whole group of us, and we were having some breakfast together and we were all talking about—this is feeling very special, there’s something kind of magical about this. So I remember having those feelings early on in the shooting, and I still have them today. I think The Last Picture Show really kind of stands alone. I can’t think of any movie that it’s like or is like it; it kinda sits there by itself.
GENTLE BEN
In 1992, four years before he died, Ben Johnson gave an interview to Ronald L. Davis, the director of Southern Methodist University’s Oral History Program on the Performing Arts. Here are excerpts from that interview:
ON HIS ROLE IN THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
Well, I turned it down for, I don’t know, three or four months because of the dialogue. There was a lot of four-letter words in my part, and I don’t do that on the screen. I’m liable to do anything in front of us old boys, but I don’t talk very bad in front of women and kids. So I turned it down. So Pete [Bogdanovich], he kept after me all the time to do it. They offered me ten percent of the picture and I don’t know what all, a good salary and everything, and I didn’t take it.…One morning about seven o’clock the phone rang and it was John Ford, and he said, “Ben, would you do me a favor?” I said, “Yes, sir.” I didn’t even ask him what it was. He said, “I want you to do Bogdanovich’s picture.” So I called Pete up and I told him, “I’ll do the picture for a salary if you let me pick up the script and rewrite my part.” He said, “I’ll do it.”…And I won the American Academy award, the English Academy award, the Golden Globe award, and the New York Film Critics award, all for that one show. To me that shows that you don’t have to say dirty words to get noticed in the movies.
ON HIS BIG SCENE AT THE STOCK TANK
I’ll tell you why that was pretty easy for me: My growing up on those old ranches. I have seen those old cowboys outgrow their usefulness, get old and try to retire and move to town. Well, it never works. And in my growing up I had seen two or three of those old guys who was worn out and wanted to retire but just couldn’t. So that’s the way I created my character.…But what made that scene work, [was that] this storm came in and the waves on this lake kept coming up and finally they white-capped. And the eerie background in that scene, I think is what made it work as well as it did.
[Bogdanovich] got out of the car, and he came over there to me and said, “Ben, do you know your dialogue?” I said, “Yes, sir.” He said, “Do you mind running it?”…We ran it one time, and he told the camera guy, “Set the camera up right there.” And here’s this storm, it’s rolling in all the time, and a drop of rain once in a while, and the wind ablowing and the waves coming up. We sat down there on that log and we got it the first rattle out of the box.
ON HIS TALENT
No, I’m not that good an actor. I can play the hell out of Ben Johnson, and that’s about all I need to do at this point. I don’t need to subject myself to a lot of—I see some of these new actors go bump their heads on the wall and do all those kind of things to get ready for a scene. I’m so glad I don’t have to do that. I don’t think that’s real.…I’m so fortunate to have people accept my characters. Everybody in town is a better actor than me, but nobody can play Ben Johnson as good as I can.
Read an excerpt of Duane’s Depressed by Larry McMurtry.
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