4/28/2023 0 Comments Cybil city girl lifeThe film, with its nudity and frank depiction of teenage sexuality-including Cybill Shepherd’s first and only topless scene-absolutely scandalized upright, moral Americans all over the country. “Larry, honey,” she said to him, he revealed in his 2002 travel memoir Paradise, “is this what we’re sending you to Rice for? Those awful words!” McMurtry’s own mother, Hazel, once said that after reading the first 100 pages she hid the book in the closet and called her son that night. The Last Picture Show turned this particular and peculiar town into art.īoth the novel and movie contain language that was considered lewd at the time. But it was Bogdanovich’s film that truly introduced the entire world, in utterly unromanticized fashion, to the intense, sweeping sagas of everyday life in Archer City. The novel, which McMurtry called a “spiteful” book intended to “lance some of the poisons of small-town life,” received critical acclaim when it was published. But rest assured, both places are Archer City: the looming courthouse, the blinking stoplight, and the Royal Theater, where so many of the most dramatic moments of The Last Picture Show take place. In the movie, directed by Peter Bogdanovich and released in 1971, it’s called Anarene-a name taken from an abandoned town 8 miles away. In Larry McMurtry’s book, published in 1966, the town is called Thalia. ![]() It’s the setting of both the novel and film versions of The Last Picture Show, a coming-of-age story rendered in black and white that earned eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay), Best Directing, and Best Picture. This isn’t just any small town in Texas, though. There’s also a small café (Murn’s), a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it police station, a few antiques stores, and a single four-way stoplight swaying in the breeze like an apparition. Anchoring the town is the imposing three-story Romanesque Revival county courthouse, with stone archways and provincial peaks. ![]() Weathered barns and rusted oil pumps dot the landscape. Without the storied theater, this could be any small town in Texas. The theater-or what’s left of it anyway-peers out from the northeast corner of the town square. The theater was a dark, cool respite from the blazing sun, a still escape from the whipping winds of the North Central Plains, a glimpse of entertainment from the outside world. Taking in the cerulean marquee, the painted red fringe around the box office, the vertical ROYAL sign jutting into the afternoon sky-it’s easy to imagine why the denizens of Archer County flocked here for decades. Staring at the front of the Royal Theater, I feel as though I’m looking backward through time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |