a lasting image of a bleak cinematic masterpiece – The Irish Times

No movies have been shown since the fire in the mid-1960s and the brick exterior has completely collapsed, but the Royal, in a town on the plains of North Texas, is still one of the most important movie theaters in America.

Johnny Hudson, owner of the Spur Hotel, the oldest – and now only – hotel in town, shakes his head indulgently when asked if he was here when they hosted The Last Picture Show in Archer City (pop. 1,606) decades ago. ) recordings. ‘I certainly was. I was in the movie!”

He laughs and describes the scene where the school coach tests the woeful basketball team. Johnny was paid $125 a day, a princely sum in rural Texas, and spent a magical few weeks with Jeff Bridges and other cast members.

He was still in school, but he knew Larry McMurtry, the Archer City local who had left his family’s ranching business for the less likely world of book writing. The Last Picture Show was McMurtry’s second novel: an episodic tale of small-town restlessness and disillusionment set against an epic, brutal landscape.

The unsparing gaze and sexual candor so irritated McMurtry’s mother that she stopped reading after 100 pages and put the book away in the vain hope that if she couldn’t see it, maybe the rest of the world wouldn’t either. She nearly got her way: the first print run sold only 900 copies. Unfortunately, one of those fell into the hands of Peter Bogdanovich, a young director full of intensity and ambition.

The ‘story’ behind the 1971 film is still the subject of podcast series and documentaries: it was legendary. Bogdanovich assembled a cast of veterans and future stars. He spent hours driving through the plains and hill areas of Texas, looking for a suitable location with McMurtry before they finally arrived in the author’s hometown.

Bogdanovich was thrilled when he saw Archer City and told McMurtry that this was the place for their fictional Anarene. “That should be it. It’s what I wrote about.”

He seduced John Ford into getting Ben Johnson to play the reluctant Sam ‘the Lion’. Crucially, he followed Orson Welles’ advice and shot the film in black and white. The effects were stunning: every frame looked like a photo of Dorothea Lange.

City officials were shocked by the descriptions of the drinking and going out with other people, and the Archer County News wrote condemning editorials.

The Last Picture Show was nominated for eight Academy Awards and became one of the most important films of American cinema. Here was a new voice delivering an urgent message from an obscure part of the United States, making metropolitans wonder what it must have been like to live way out there—way in there!—when electrification and the movie theater were the biggest changes since the frontier days.

Even now, Archer City is everything and nothing: a geometrically perfect intersection with a four-way traffic light hanging like a medallion in the middle of the wide streets and a low, aching breeze that blows in summer and winter. From Dallas, the road to Archer changes from the intricate arteries of the metropolitan system to major freeways and then, for the final hour, a thin, straight ribbon of road where you rarely see another car. Fields, oil drilling, and a vast, humble sky: it’s stunning in its sparseness.

When I arrived late on a Saturday afternoon, the downtown cafe was closed and it was just hot: degrees of silence, heavy heat and bright sunshine reflecting off the asphalt and that iconic traffic light swaying gently.

“It’s always windy here,” Johnny confirmed. “Probably because there are so few trees.”

At teatime he takes me to the country club for a quick pint. McMurtry’s house is next door. From the club window you can see the reservoir where Sam the Lion goes fishing and gives life advice to the youngsters. Sam the Lion’s pool hall, the savior of the 1950s adolescents, was a hut right across the Spur and has since disappeared, but the town is otherwise unchanged.

And it’s no surprise that Archer City hasn’t traded or defended its place in Hollywood history. There is no explicit reference to The Last Picture Show, other than the surviving Royal Theatre. Johnny took over the Spur a few years ago. The foyer is a splendor, filled with books by McMurtry and other classics of Southern literature.

We talk about life in Archer City through the decades: the vagaries of the oil and cattle industries, the 1964 All-State Wildcats team, and McMurtry, the town’s most famous son who went on to lead an epic writing life, always had a home in Archer City, and loved to walk to the Dairy Queen, where he drank Dr Pepper.

In his later years he opened four bookstores in the city, selling his extraordinary collection: his dream was to transform his off-grid birthplace into a North Texas Haye-on-Wye for book lovers. That worked for a while. But McMurtry died in 2021. The shops were sold as part of his estate and now all four are closed: somewhat sadly, you can look through the windows at the breathtaking collection of books without readers.

As writer Rachel Monroe noted, “McMurtry had, after all, followed the family tradition, chained himself to a dying industry and broken his heart in the process.”

Bogdanovich died in January 2022, and his future celluloid stars—Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Randy Quaid—are all senior citizens. But the dateless star of his bleak masterpiece was always Archer City, with its low winds and the silence broken by the growl of trucks shooting through, and the Spur Hotel, where you could sit on the porch in the deep silence and listen to the tinkling breeze and watch that stoplight, still blinking with eternal patience from green to red, still waiting for something to happen.