Picture This

Picture This investigates the effect which making The Last Picture Show (1970) — in Hickenlooper’s opinion one of the best ten films ever made — had on the members of the cast and crew and on inhabitants of the village where it was shot. For his (partly) historic portrait, George Hickenlooper shot film during the filming of the sequel Texasville. In Picture This Hickenlooper interviews the participants, most of whom have not been seen since, and also the inhabitants of the town, who were not always unreservedly pleased.Director Peter Bogdanovich had, with his wife and production designer Polly Platt, decided to shoot the film in Archer City, the small Baptist town in Texas where author Larry McMurtry had grown up. During the shooting of The Last Picture Show, Bogdanovich had a much publicised affair with leading lady Cybill Shepherd, at the cost of his marriage. Other young actors (among them Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cloris Leachman and Randy Quaid, making their debuts) can’t have been able to distinguish fact from fiction. Halfway through the production, the lives of director and actors were in pieces, according to Hickenlooper. These elements may have partly been fundamental in the (critical) acclaim which greeted the `Picture Show’. That was probably why Texasville was not based by McMurtry on his own book, but on events twenty years ago.îAmy Dawes, Daily Variety: `A fascinating glimpse of the emotional electricity that fuelled the elegiac outcome of The Last Picture Show.’