The Town Where The Last Picture Show Was Filmed Absolutely Hated It

Larry McMurtry’s 1966 coming-of-age novel The Last Picture Show was adapted into a film with a screenplay written by McMurtry and director Peter Bogdanovich. The book was filmed in Archer City, Texas, McMurtry’s hometown. The residents took issue with the way the town was represented in the film.

Like many artists with uneven careers, Peter Bogdanovich learned to keep his distance from reviews, especially bad reviews. “My analogy is, if somebody’s shooting at you, you don’t really want to raise your head to see what kind of gun they’re using,” he explained. But Picture Show was always an exception, and he could quote from the reviews, accurately, fifty years later. It’s possible that the movie received better notices than any American film between Gone with the Wind and The Godfather. As Pauline Kael observed in The New Yorker, “Bogdanovich has made a film for everybody—not just the Airport audience but the youth audience and the educated older audience, too.”

The review Peter would take with him to his grave appeared in Newsweek: “The Last Picture Show is a masterpiece. It is not merely the best American movie of a rather dreary year; it is the most impressive work by a young American director since Citizen Kane.”

To be compared to his idol, his mentor, his friend, in whose own movie Peter was at the moment playing a role, with the character based on Peter himself—a career, a life, doesn’t get any better than this. In February 1972, the movie opened in the big Texas cities as well as Wichita Falls. The battle lines were quickly drawn. “It doesn’t matter to me what people in Archer City think about it,” Larry said, speaking of the town where the movie was shot. He added that he didn’t have many fans there. Gene Bynum, minister of the First Baptist Church in Archer City, told a reporter he had not seen the movie and did not plan to, “but several people have told me about the lewdness, nude scenes and that it is filled from one end to the other with curse words.”

John R. Adams was probably the most upset about the movie. He was the principal of the high school, and he felt properly hoodwinked when the movie appeared with a coarser script than the one Peter had used to gain admittance to the classrooms. “The producers of the film told everybody in town The Last Picture Show was going to be a family movie about small town life,” Adams fumed. “They said they would not be filming the dirty parts of the book, that the picture’s worst possible rating would be GP,” which basically meant suitable for everyone except little kids. In fact, for a while it was supposed to get an X rating, which would have severely limited its commercial viability. The tentative decision was appealed, and the movie got an R instead.

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