Back to Archer City

Continuing with Picture This, the documentary set in Archer City introduced two days ago, it was noted that The Last Picture Show was hard to make for many reasons, not least of which was the Cybill Shepherd-Peter Bogdanovich romance. As the latter notes on camera, “Everything was different by the time we left.” His father had a sudden stroke and died. His marriage with Polly Pratt was disintegrating, and they all had to carry on despite their losses. Jeff Bridges had just broken up with a true fine love, Cloris Leachman and Ellen Burstyn were in the middle of simultaneous divorces, and Timothy Bottoms’ parents separated. The latter development led to Timothy's brother Sam’s joining the cast. As Leachman observes: “We brought it all with us and put in all in our work.” No wonder it’s such a poignant picture show!

Timothy Bottoms was particularly disturbed during the production. “Sure, we were acting, but we weren’t,” he notes, seeming still depressed and lost during the shooting of Texasville twenty years later. He fell hard for Cybill Shepherd during a scene in which they kissed, and apparently never recovered. “The future came so quick. . . twenty years went by like a bang,” he says at one point during the production of Texasville. When Shepherd was informed of his feelings for her, she finally chatted with him about it, saying she never knew. “Is it too late?” he asks her on camera. “It’s never too late, baby,” she quips back. Bottoms also projected angry feelings about his father onto Bogdanovich because of his leaving his wife for Shepherd, and it all channeled into his performance. Since 9/11/01, he has played G.W. Bush in three productions.

“All you can say is let’s not make the next twenty years like the last twenty,” Peter Bogdanovich says wistfully, and at another point notes: “Life has a way of getting out of hand when you’re in the fast lane.” His career as a director more or less peaked with The Last Picture Show, when he was only in his early thirties. His marriage dissolved, Sybill broke things off with him, and he became involved with Dorothy Stratten, who was brutally murdered by another man. “Murder is different from somebody just dying. . . some small part of you continues to reverberate” he notes. “People who say they have no regrets, I don’t know what they’re talking about.” Polly Pratt was back for Texasville, and she wondered whether her ex-husband had recovered from the past twenty years. "No," he says, "I think about it every day.”

Picture This: The Times of Peter Bogdanovich in Archer City, Texas is great for fans of any of the people involved with the two Larry McMurtry adaptions. Texasville is elegiac and fun, too. I’ll pick up the Dorothy Stratten story with thoughts about Bob Fosse’s Star 80 (1983), a fictionalized version of her life and death, at some point. Peter Bogdanovich has written many critically acclaimed books, nost notably film criticism. He is now a working member of HBO’s Sopranos team. Does everything about everybody always come back to The Sopranos?

For admirers of the always lovely Cybill Shepherd, she has a website: http://www.cybill.com/

Ciao!