Larry McMurtry’s First Picture Show

In homage to the late Larry McMurtry, chronicler of the American West in all its complexity, I’ve been watching movies made from his work. There’s a whole slew of those, including Oscar winners Terms of Endearment and Brokeback Mountain. The very first was Hud (1963), adapted from a McMurtry novel. But The Last Picture Show (1971) was the first film (though not the last) for which McMurtry provided a screenplay, working with director Peter Bogdanovich to transform his own prose fiction for the screen.

 By the time he made The Last Picture Show, Bogdanovich was a veteran of Roger Corman’s B-movie world, responsible for the macabre thriller, Targets. But The Last Picture Show was his leap into the bigtime, and he made the most of it, turning out a moody tribute to a dying Texas town and its lonely, love-starved denizens. The opportunity to participate must have thrilled McMurtry, who was known to lament in later years that “Movies have largely lost interest in character. It is not without significance that two of the most publicized characters in the cinema have been a shark and a mechanical ape.”

 The Last Picture Show, filmed in evocative black & white, mostly in the tiny Texas town where McMurtry grew up, is all about character. In contrast to the year’s big Oscar winner, The French Connection, it moves forward slowly, exploring the intricate relationships of the town’s citizens, who are played by some of Hollywood’s finest actors. Cloris Leachman won an Oscar for her poignant role as a neglected housewife; other acting nominees for this film included a young Jeff Bridges (as the hero’s laid-back buddy) and Ellen Burstyn as a mother who sees her daughter’s character flaws—and her own—with all too much clarity. For Randy Quaid, in the small but sharply observed role of a well-to-do high school kid, it was the start of a major Hollywood career. 

 And of course The Last Picture Show marked the cinematic debut of model Cybill Shepherd, who plays Jacy Squires. Shepherd’s blonde beauty is electric on screen, and in one sense the entire town is shown to revolve around her haughty sense of sexual entitlement. But there’s a sad footnote to her presence in the film. Bogdanovich was apparently as bedazzled as his cast of characters. By the end of the shoot, he and Shepherd were together, leaving his wife and longtime artistic partner Polly Platt out in the cold. The multi-talented Polly, whom I was fortunate to interview at length in 2008, eventually recouped and went on to have a major Hollywood career of her own. But this film marked the end of the strong husband-and-wife collaboration that had seen them through their Corman years.

 The Last Picture Show was nominated for a total of eight Oscars, including Best Picture. Aside from Leachman’s win, the only other Oscar for the film was taken home by Ben Johnson, in the small but commanding role of the town’s moral conscience, known as Sam the Lion. The story is that he had to be persuaded by his mentor, John Ford, to accept the part. He was sought after by Bogdanovich, a true student of cinema history, partly because of his association (as stuntman and actor) with Ford and John Wayne, whose sidekick he often played. The Last Picture Show draws to a close with a final screening at the town’s one cinema. The movie on the screen is the 1948 classic western, Red River. This film, as well as Ben Johnson’s casting, represents a fond look back at the glory days of the silver screen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hell or High Water: Bleak is Beautiful

One of my screenwriting students in UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program wanted to know if I’d seen Hell or High Water. She wrote, “To me, it was the quintessential demonstration of how to write implicit dialogue: subtext delivers exposition. Scene after scene. Wow.”  Naturally, with that kind of endorsement from a student of the craft, I had to check it out for myself. And yes – wow!

Hell or High Water is a tough little indie, set mostly in Texas, about some roughnecks who set out to rob banks, but whose motives are more complicated than they might first appear. This is not exactly brand-new territory (in terms of either the plot or the landscape). Bonnie and Clyde, for one, traveled through much of the same physical and psychological terrain. But unlike Bonnie and Clyde, which featured a pair of real-life Depression era outlaws, Hell or High Water reflects life as we know it today.  Though midland Texas, as shown in this film, is still cowboy country, the social anxieties we see on screen could easily be ripped from tomorrow’s headlines.

It’s a beautiful film to look at and to listen to. I’m not exactly a fan of western music, but the score of Hell or High Water is augmented by haunting tunes that enhance the wide open spaces we see on screen. And those parched landscapes, dotted with dying little towns, pumping oil wells, and double-wide trailers, have their own eerie beauty. The cinematography is the work of the very talented Giles Nuttgens. His name wasn’t familiar to me, but I was pleased to discover he was responsible for another marvelous indie with water in its title: Deepa Mehta’s gorgeous glimpse of widowhood in the holy Indian city of Varanasi. Mehta’s Water revels in its liquid beauty. In Hell or High Water, there’s in fact a lot less water than oil.  Or beer. But this is a visually stunning movie, all the same.

Now . . . about the screenwriting elements that so impressed my student. The script is the work of Taylor Sheridan, who also wrote the much-admired Sicario, another film with a Southwestern setting. It’s probably because Sheridan is a working actor that he so keenly grasps how to delineate character with the tiniest scraps of dialogue. By the end of the film, we truly know these people through their behavioral quirks and bad jokes. When we first meet the film’s two bankrobbing brothers (played to a fare-thee-well by Ben Foster and the mesmerizing Chris Pine), their faces are covered by ski masks and we’re not really sure which is which. It’s not long, however, before we come to respect the gaping differences between them, differences that will help shape the plot. Then there’s their opposite number, the retirement-age Texas Ranger played by the always convincing Jeff Bridges. Though L.A.-born, Bridges has long been identified with the Southwest, from his breakthrough appearance in The Last Picture Show (1971) to his Oscar-winning turn in Crazy Heart (2009). He has a genius for playing lived-in characters, and this is one of his very best.

One aspect of Sheridan’s writing (aided by the direction of David Mackenzie) that struck me as paticularly savvy is its tendency to withhold information from the audience as long as possible. As the film moves forward, we get only small hints about the rationale behind these particular robberies. The payoff, when it comes, is that much more provocative because we’ve put most of the pieces together ourselves. It helps us appreciate what a man will do when he’s stuck between hell and high water.