The Last Picture Show - Production

Production

Peter Bogdanovich was a 31-year-old stage actor, film essayist 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. One day while waiting in a cashier's line in a drugstore he happened to look at the rack of paperbacks and his eye fell on an interesting title, The Last Picture Show. The back of the book said it was "kids growing up in Texas," and Bogdanovich decided that it did not interest him and put it back. A few weeks later 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." Bogdanovich, McMurtry and some sources suggest an uncredited Polly Platt went through the book and wrote a script that tells the story chronologically.

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 hired him as producer.

After discussing the film with Orson Welles, his houseguest at the time, Bogdanovich decided to shoot the film in black and white.

Larry McMurtry was born in the small North Texas town of Archer City. In writing about his hometown 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's Red River (1948).

After shooting the film, Bogdanovich went back to Los Angeles to edit the film on a Moviola. Bogdanovich has said 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. 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 edit the film further, 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.