The Last Picture Show is a 1971 film drama directed by Peter Bogdanovich, adapted from a semi-autobiographical 1966 novel of the same name by Larry McMurtry.
Set in a small town in west Texas during the year November 1951 - October 1952, it is about the coming of age of two friends, Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges). The ensemble cast includes Cybill Shepherd in her film debut, Ben Johnson, Eileen Brennan, Ellen Burstyn, Cloris Leachman, Clu Gulager, Randy Quaid in his film debut and John Hillerman. It was one of the first films to have a pop-only soundtrack and unusually for its time was, for aesthetic and technical reasons, shot in black and white.
Synopsis
Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) is a high-school senior, co-captain of the school's football team but sanguine about how bad they are. He is sensitive and caring, has a girlfriend he does not love and a friend in Duane (Jeff Bridges) with whom he shares a battered old pickup truck. Duane is also a high-school senior and on the football team. Good looking, amusing and popular, he is dating Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd), the prettiest girl in town.
Sonny breaks up with Charlene (Sharon Ullrick as Sharon Taggart) because he would rather not ruin any more anniversaries for her, and stumbles into an affair with Ruth Popper (Cloris Leachman), the depressed middle-aged wife of his high-school basketball coach. Meanwhile, Jacy is invited by Lester Marlow (Randy Quaid) to a naked-swim party at the home of Bobby Sheen (Gary Brockette,) a boy with rich parents, who seems to offer better prospects than Duane. The trouble is that Bobby won't look at her until she is no longer a virgin, so she has to get someone to deflower her first. Duane and Sonny go on a road trip to Mexico — which happens entirely off-screen — and return to discover that Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson), their mentor and father-figure in town, has died, leaving a weird will that bequeathes the town's movie theatre to the woman who ran the concession stand, the pool hall to Sonny, and the cafe to its waitress.
Jacy invites Duane to a motel for what he imagines is some lovemaking but he has brought back from Mexico something other than tequila and is unable to satisfy his girl. However, with her friends waiting outside the motel room, she persuades him to pretend they did. Later, and less publicly than before, they succeed. Having got what she wants from Duane, she breaks up with him by phone, and he joins the Army. When Bobby elopes with his girlfriend Annie-Annie, Jacy is alone again, and out of boredom makes love with Abilene (Clu Gulager), her mother's lover. When Jacy hears of Sonny's affair with Ruth, she decides and manages to seduce Sonny who gets the bad end of a broken bottle from Duane for his trouble, because of Duane's sense of betrayal by Sonny due to his own feelings for Jacy. Jacy pretends to be impressed that Sonny would fight over her and encourages him to elope with her and get married. Brought back from Oklahoma by state troopers because Jacy left a note telling her parents where she had gone, their "wedding" is annulled by her dad.
Duane finishes his Army training and is off to war but goes back home to say goodbye to everyone in time to see the theatre close because the new manager knows less about theatre management than Sam did. The boys make up and go to one last picture show together then after Duane leaves on the Trailways bus to Korea, Sonny gets back with Ruth who was upset by Sonny's abandonment, but glad to see him nonetheless.
Production
Peter Bogdanovich was a 31 year-old stage actor, film writer (by which is meant he wrote about film rather than writing films) and critic with two small films — Targets (1968) (also known as Before I Die) and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968) — to his directorial credit when one day while waiting in line in a drugstore buying some toothpaste he happened to look at the rack of paperbacks and browsed the novels on display and picked up the one with what seemed to him to be an interesting title, "The Last Picture Show". Reading the back of the book he learned it was "kids growing up in Texas," and decided that it didn't interest him and put it back. A few weeks later the actor Sal Mineo handed Bogdanovich a copy of the book, "I always wanted to be in this", he said, "but I'm a little too old now," and recommended that Bogdanovich make it into a film. At the time Bogdanovich was married to Polly Platt and he asked her to read it, and her response was, "I don't know how you make it into a picture, but it's a good book."[1] Bogdanovich, McMurtry and some sources suggest[2] an uncredited Polly Platt went through the book and wrote a script which tells the story in linear fashion, always moving forward through time with no flashbacks or time slips, though there is one notable reminiscence.
After discussing some scenes in the film with Orson Welles, who was staying with Bogdanovich at the time, a decision was made to shoot the film in black and white.[1]
Larry McMurtry was born in a small North Texas town called Archer City. In writing about his home town he renamed it "Thalia" and in order to film "Thalia" Bogdanovich went back to Archer City. But for the film he renamed it Anarene, a name chosen to provide correspondence to the cow-town of Abilene in Howard Hawks' Red River (1948),[3] and to emphasise the point, in Bogdanovich's film there is also a character called Abilene.
After shooting the film, Bogdanovich went back to Los Angeles to edit the film on a Moviola. Bogdanovich has said[1] he edited the entire film himself, but refused to credit himself as editor, reasoning that director and co-writer was enough. When informed that the Motion Picture Editors Guild required an editor credit, he suggested Donn Cambern who had been editing another film, Drive, He Said (1971) in the next office and had helped Bogdanovich with some purchasing paperwork concerning the film's opticals.[1] Cambern disputes this, stating that Bogdanovich did do an edit of the film, which he screened for a selection of guests, including Jack Nicholson, Bob Rafelson and himself. The consensus was the film was going to be great but needed further editing to achieve its full potential. Bogdanovich invited Cambern to further edit the film, and Cambern made significant contributions to the film's final form.
In 1973, largely because of the skinny-dipping party scene, the film was banned in Phoenix, Arizona when the city attorney notified a drive-in theater manager that the film violated a state obscenity statute. Eventually, a federal court decided that the film was not obscene.[4][5]
Cast and crew selection
Bogdanovich was at this time good friends with Orson Welles, who lived with Bogdanovich for a time in the seventies, and just as Welles had done with Citizen Kane, Bogdanovich chose a largely unknown cast peppered with some experienced character actors. Cybill Shepherd was a model who Bogdanovich spotted on the cover of an issue of Glamour magazine (probably June 1970). "There was something about her expression that was very piquant," he said. He arranged to meet her with her agent in a hotel in New York. She turned up wearing blue jeans, a blue jeans jacket and a white shirt. She was, Bogdanovich later said, interested in going through college and not particularly interested in being in movies, but she liked the script and thought it was an interesting part. She sat on the floor while they talked and was playing with a rose on the table, and Bogdanovich kept expecting the rose to keel over and collapse, and he recognised in that gesture the way Jacy Farrow plays with guys in the movie, which convinced him he had found Jacy. Bert Schneider, the producer, found a screen test Shepherd had done with Roger Vadim about a year before in which she was playing scenes from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with no sound, and dancing silently to the Rolling Stones song Brown Sugar. After filming had finished Bogdanovich admitted to Shepherd that the only time he ever doubted his decision was when he saw that screen test.[1]
Shepherd went to Los Angeles and read with John Ritter, and with Robert Mitchum's son as well as Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms. Bogdanovich later recalled that John Ritter was considered for the part of Sonny and he brought his father Tex Ritter along to play the part of Sam "The Lion", and Tex Ritter came close to playing that part but Bogdanovich had his heart set on Ben Johnson. But Johnson wasn't keen on the part and Eileen Brennan recalled him saying he would rather ride his horse a "thousand miles than say any of these God damn words." He hated to talk, she said. Johnson had been discovered by the director John Ford, so Bogdanovich called Ford, who he knew well having previously completed a documentary on the director, and Ford intervened with Johnson. But Johnson kept coming up with excuses not to do the film and finally Bogdanovich told him, "You, in this role, are going to get an Academy Award," and finally Johnson accepted, "all right, I'll do the damn thing."[1]
Bogdanovich liked Timothy Bottoms for his sad eyes, and recalled that Bottoms was being highly touted at the time by his agent who said he had the lead in a Dalton Trumbo movie Johnny Got His Gun (1971), and "I guess that's what convinced me" he said.[1] Timothy Bottoms did indeed have the lead in Johnny Got His Gun, a part in which he played a quadriplegic and terribly mutilated World War I soldier who could not see, hear, move or speak.
Jeff Bridges got the part of Duane Jackson because in the book he is not a particularly likeable character, and Bogdanovich thought that Bridges' naturally fun personality would give the character extra depth and warmth, and make him less disagreeable.[1]
According to Bogdanovich, the roles of the three middle-aged women were more difficult to cast. Bob Rafelson was one of the producers and he put together a list of about twenty possibilities and Bogdanovich saw all twenty. Ellen Burstyn was asked to read for the part of the waitress but she liked the part of Lois Farrow and asked if she could read for that and ended up reading for all three parts, including Coach Popper's wife. Bogdanovich thought she would be good as any one of them and decided he wanted her in the picture so let her choose, and she chose to be Jacy's mother because she thought the part interesting.[1]
Cloris Leachman wanted to be Coach Popper's wife and Bogdanovich was impressed with her read-through and so she got the part she wanted, and won an Oscar for it.
Bogdanovich had seen Eileen Brennan on the stage in a play called Little Mary Sunshine in the 1960s and thought she had the perfect face for the waitress, Genevieive. When she read the script, Brennan thought it so powerful she wanted very much to be a part of the film and gladly accepted the part.[1]
Randy Quaid was asked to read for the part of Bobby, the rich kid from Wichita Falls, but Bogdanovich thought he would be better as Lester Marlowe, so Quaid got his first movie.[1]
Timothy Bottoms's younger brother Sam came along to stay with his brother for a few days as rehearsals started in Archer City, and Bogdanovich saw him sitting on some stairs and asked him if he could act. Bottoms, who had appeared in productions of Santa Barbara Youth Theatre since he was 10 years-old, shrugged, and despite having previously cast the part to an actor from Dallas, Bogdanovich asked him to play Billy in the movie.[1][6]
At first, Bogdanovich wanted to use the country singer Jimmy Dean to play the part of Abilene, but his producers didn't like that idea so his next choice was Clu Gulager, whom he had seen give a great performance in Don Siegel's The Killers, a 1964 adaptation that included Ronald Reagan in his last film role. Gulager played hitman Lee with what Bogdanovich described as, "good regional quality."[1]
Frank Marshall had been a production manager on Bogdanovich's earlier film, Targets, and they had such fun working together that Bogdanovich had promised him something on his next film. He came along as assistant production manager working with Polly Platt on location scouting and played a small part as a football player in a scene near the end.[1]
Stephen Friedman was a lawyer with Columbia pictures but keen to break into film production and he had bought the film rights to the book, so Bogdanovich brought him on board as producer.[7]
Accolades
The Last Picture Show won Academy Awards for Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Ben Johnson) and Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Leachman). It was also nominated in the categories for Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Bridges), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Burstyn), Best Cinematography (Surtees), Best Director, Best Picture and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.
In 1998, The Last Picture Show was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. It also ranked number 19 on Entertainment Weekly's list of the 50 Best High School Movies.[8] In 2007, the film was ranked #95 on the American Film Institute's 10th Anniversary Edition of the 100 greatest American films of all time.
Characters
- Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson)
- owns the town's cafe, movie theater and pool hall. He bets on the football team even though they are terrible. Sam symbolizes the town's conscience, punishing the kids, for example, when they treat a developmentally disabled kid poorly. ('winner of the Oscar')
- Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges)
- one of the popular kids in the school, dates Jacy at the beginning of the book
- Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms)
- Duane's buddy, who starts the novel with a girlfriend he doesn't like and ends up in an affair with Ruth
- Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd)
- a pretty and popular girl who learns about life through her experiments with sexual attraction
- Lois Farrow (Ellen Burstyn)
- Jacy's mother, who criticizes her for dating Duane. In her younger days, she dated Sam. Has off-and-on love affair with Abilene
- Abilene (Clu Gulager)
- the same age as Sam, but in many ways Sam's opposite. He bets against the town's football team, sleeps with both Jacy and Lois
- Ruth Popper (Cloris Leachman)
- the wife of Coach Popper, has a romantic affair with Sonny. ('winner of the Oscar')
- Coach Popper (Bill Thurman)
- the high school's athletic coach, implied to be homosexual, and confirmed to be in the director's commentary.
Sequel
The Last Picture Show is followed by the sequel Texasville (1990) based on McMurtry's 1987 novel. The film was also directed by Peter Bogdanovich (who also wrote the screenplay without McMurtry this time). The film reunites actors Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Randy Quaid, Timothy Bottoms and much of the original cast.
References
Book: McMurtry, Larry. The Last Picture Show: A Novel. New York, Dial Press, 1966. (Simon and Schuster reprint) ISBN 0-684-85386-8
External links
