The Last Picture Show dressed a burned-out theater in Archer City and shot the inside of it 30 miles away.
Updated: Oct 4
If you are looking for where The Last Picture Show was filmed, the answer is Archer City, Texas, the town Larry McMurtry grew up in. The Texas Film Commission’s filmography lists four towns: Archer City, Holliday, Olney and Wichita Falls. The American Film Institute records principal photography beginning October 19, 1970.
The detail most people miss is that the theater is two buildings. The Royal’s exterior is in Archer City. Its interior is the Westex Theatre in Olney, about 30 miles southwest. Peter Bogdanovich put it to Texas Monthly in six words: “the interior of Olney and the exterior we used in Archer City.”
The Royal was already a ruin when they got there.
The Royal burned in August 1965. The fire took the balcony, the projection room and the roof, and it never showed a film again. Dear Brigitte was the last picture show there, and per the Archer County Museum and Arts Center the fire came after the Tuesday night screening. By October 1970 the building was a shell.
So the production built the front of it. Crews dressed the facade to read as an operating theater, and it stood until 1982. A new one went up for Texasville in 1989 and came down afterward.
A film about a dying movie house, shot on a movie house that had already died, with its marquee rebuilt by the art department to look alive. The thing on screen is a set.
One naming point, since both circulate. McMurtry’s 1966 novel calls the town Thalia. The film calls it Anarene, after a real ghost town eight miles south of Archer City. McMurtry himself was born in Wichita Falls and raised in Archer City.
No stages, no soundstage work, two arc lights.
Robert Surtees shot it, and his account in American Cinematographer is the best technical record of the shoot. “We were shooting in all real interiors and on a very small budget.”
Not a set on a stage anywhere in the picture. Two arc lights and one 28mm lens for the whole production. Every interior is a rented, dressed Archer City business or house.
Surtees on the schedule: “Eight weeks, which is like working at the speed of a quickie compared to the expensive features.” Texas Monthly puts it at ten weeks and says they started in October aiming to finish before Christmas because of the weather. Eight to ten weeks is the honest range. The only confirmed work outside Texas is post.
What the production did to a town of 1,700.
Archer City’s 1970 census count was 1,722, down almost thirteen percent from 1960. The company spent $150,000 in town, a figure from Fred McDaniels, a former Texas Ranger and Archer County sheriff, quoted in David Streitfeld’s 2026 McMurtry biography Western Star. In 1970 dollars, in a town that size, that is real money arriving at once.
The cast and crew slept in Wichita Falls, about 30 miles north. That is the production reality worth naming. A town of 1,700 could absorb a shoot but not house one, so the per diem economy landed in the county seat up the road. Still true of most small Texas towns, and still the first thing that breaks a rural budget.
Local hire was real. Townspeople filled bit parts and crowds, including the Archer City High School Band, and McMurtry’s mother Hazel appears. Loyd Catlett, a local, was hired both to act as Leroy and to coach dialect for the imported young cast, and he became Jeff Bridges’s stand-in for decades.
And the town did not want them there. AFI records that “the citizens of Archer City were displeased by McMurtry’s fictionalized depiction of the town and were hostile toward him and the filmmakers when the picture was produced there.” The Los Angeles Times ran it as “Movie Riles Town It Depicts.” Bogdanovich, to Texas Monthly: “They were not happy that we were there. They did not like the book; the town was hostile to the book.” The objections were to the novel, and the loudest came from people who had not seen the film.
Nineteen years later he came back for Texasville, and Texas Monthly describes a starstruck town welcoming the money into an oil-slump economy, residents lining up to be extras. A location town’s posture is not fixed, and it is usually about something that happened before you arrived.
Who made it.
Bogdanovich directed. He had made Targets in 1968 for Roger Corman, the film that gave Boris Karloff his last major role, and the AFI documentary Directed by John Ford in 1971. What’s Up, Doc? followed in 1972 and Paper Moon in 1973.
McMurtry and Bogdanovich wrote the screenplay, McMurtry’s first. He had published Horseman, Pass By in 1961, which became Hud in 1963. Terms of Endearment followed in 1975 and reaches this list as a film at number eleven, and Lonesome Dove in 1985.
Stephen J. Friedman produced, Bert Schneider was executive producer, and the picture is a BBS production released by Columbia. Polly Platt did the production design with Walter Scott Herndon.
The cast, most of them at the beginning.
Timothy Bottoms is Sonny Crawford and carries the film. Jeff Bridges is Duane Jackson. Cybill Shepherd is Jacy Farrow, billed as an introduction, cast after Bogdanovich saw her on a Glamour cover. Ben Johnson is Sam the Lion, Cloris Leachman is Ruth Popper, and Ellen Burstyn is Lois Farrow, a part she chose after reading for all three of the older women. Eileen Brennan is Genevieve, Clu Gulager is Abilene, Randy Quaid is Lester Marlow and Sam Bottoms is Billy. Frank Marshall, later one of the biggest producers in the business, plays Tommy Logan.
Three real debuts: Shepherd, Randy Quaid, and Sam Bottoms, who got the part by turning up to watch his brother’s first day. Jeff Bridges is often called a debut here and it is not quite right. He had already made Halls of Anger in 1970. This was his breakthrough and his first Oscar nomination.
Eight nominations, two wins, and two actors who lost to a castmate.
At the 44th Academy Awards on April 10, 1972, the film took eight nominations: Best Picture, Directing, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, and two slots each in Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress.
Ben Johnson won Supporting Actor over Jeff Bridges. Cloris Leachman won Supporting Actress over Ellen Burstyn. The film held half of each supporting category, so two of its four nominees in those races had no path.
The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 1998, and it sits at number 95 on AFI’s 100 Years 100 Movies, 10th Anniversary Edition from 2007. It is not on the original 1998 AFI list.
The money, and why the numbers do not match.
The period figure is $13.1 million in domestic rentals, reported by Variety in its all time rental champs table on January 7, 1976. Rentals are the distributor’s share back from exhibitors, roughly 40 to 50 percent of ticket sales in that era, and rentals are what the trades published in the 1970s.
Gross is a different measurement, and the modern reconstructions of it disagree badly. The Numbers estimates $20,505,085 domestic. Box Office Mojo estimates $29,146,255 lifetime worldwide. That is a gap of about 42 percent between two databases, neither of which cites a source. This series ranks on Box Office Mojo throughout, so the film sits at forty three on the $29.1 million figure, and the only number with a period citation behind it is the $13.1 million in rentals.
The budget is usually given as $1.3 million. I could not trace it to a primary source. It sits in Wikipedia’s infobox with no citation attached and appears in no other record I checked. Surtees’s “a very small budget” is the only sourced statement about the cost.
Why people love it.
People of that era and that part of the country feel seen by it. Everyone else gets a look into a familiar time in a pocket of the country they have never been to.
Roger Ebert gave it four stars and called it the best film of 1971. On what Bogdanovich pulled off: “Using period songs and decor to create nostalgia is familiar enough, but to tunnel down to the visual level and get that right, too, is one hell of a directing accomplishment.” Thirty three years later he added it to his Great Movies list and wrote that “the film has an unadorned honesty that came as a jolt after the pyrotechnics of the late 1960s.”
Gene Siskel gave it four stars in the Chicago Tribune that December: “Like few films in recent years, Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show ends with us wanting to see more of the people who occupy the small town world that is Anarene, Tex. in 1951.” Newsweek called it “the most impressive work by a young American director since Citizen Kane.”
My read.
It is the movie lover’s delight, and the thing it is about is a theater closing. Great use of locations and local flair, and a true time capsule of the era.
It is also a powerhouse cast caught before their breaks. Cybill Shepherd is incredible in her role and could not be more alluring in it. Jeff Bridges shows glimpses of the greatness that was coming. Bottoms is the star and really shines as the lead.
The producing lesson is that this film had no stage, no built sets, two lights and one lens, and it got eight Academy Award nominations. What it had instead was a town, a schedule long enough to use it properly, and a director who knew the place because his writer grew up there. Location access is not a line item. It is the thing the film is made of.
Who actually saved the theater.
One correction to a story that gets told loosely. The Royal was not rebuilt because of the film. A campaign called REBIRTH launched on December 7, 1996 under the Archer Community Foundation, led by Abby Abernathy, with money from the Meadows, Priddy and Bridwell foundations and the Thomas family. The restoration cost about $400,000, and it reopened on August 24, 2000, deliberately on the thirty fifth anniversary of the day it burned.
It is not a cinema now. It is a live performing arts venue run by the Archer County Museum and Arts Center. The film is why anyone outside Archer County knew the building existed. A local foundation is why it is standing.
The previous entry in this countdown is number 44, Shorts, and the other small town Texas shoot on the list so far is number 48, Leap of Faith. The full countdown lives here. If you are scoping a rural Texas shoot and want the honest version of what it takes, start here.
Next in the countdown: number 42.
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