Most of the sex in the picture is really funny rather than erotic – as teenage love often is. We should do it.’ They encouraged me to add bad language and all of that, and I somewhat reluctantly embraced that – if I was going to do this story about teenage lust and love, we’d better tell it honestly. Are you sure we should do the picture?’ Bob said, ‘Look, we’ve got enough crazies around.

Later on I was told that Bob and Bert had a bit of a disagreement about doing the picture with me after they had dinner with me and my wife at the time, Polly Platt, because we were not into grass or cocaine or anything. They liked it very much, and said to me that if there was anything I wanted to make, I should bring it to them.

Henry saw Targets, and brought it to the attention of Bert and Bob. What happened was that Henry Jaglom was friendly with Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, because he’d helped them edit Easy Rider. You’re never fully aware you’re part of something when you’re in the middle of it, but I did dimly recognise that we were moving into a new era. The Last Picture Show was made for Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider’s legendary BBS, who were the vanguard of the New Hollywood at the start of the 1970s. The film is an elegy at once for a period in history, for a time in one’s life, for small-town America – and for the kind of studio-produced cinema that Bogdanovich loved, but that was ironically being supplanted by the energies of his peers.

But it was immediately embraced as a modern classic – Newsweek wrote that it was ‘the most important work by a young American director since Citizen Kane’ – propelling Bogdanovich at a stroke into the front rank of US filmmakers.Īdapted from a novel by Larry McMurtry, the film takes place in a small Texas town over the course of a year (from October 1951 to October 1952), following the relationships and entanglements of its inhabitants, both school kids on the cusp of graduation – played by then newcomers Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Randy Quaid and Timothy Bottoms – and their elders, played by Ellen Burstyn, Ben Johnson and Eileen Brennan. With its black-and-white photography, gentle pace, period setting and formal classicism, it was closer to the work of critic and film historian Bogdanovich’s mentors John Ford and Howard Hawks than it was to that of his New Wave-inspired peers at the BBS production company. Released in 1971 amidst the dope-fuelled rush of the New Hollywood, Peter Bogdanovich’s second feature The Last Picture Show was in many ways an out-of-time anomaly. SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot.

The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry