THE LAST PICTURE SHOW was written in response to a family crisis, of a sort that could happen to almost any family, in almost any small town. The fact that small-towners everywhere could see themselves or their neighbors in it probably accounts for its immediate popularity.
I wrote it very hastily, in about a month, and published it in 1965.
The success of Hud still resonated in the marketplace and there was interest in Picture Show, but it was, to be fair, a pretty grim story, and the interest did not immediately rise to the level of a movie deal; and when interest did arrive it appeared in an unlikely source: a New York lawyer, whom I had met through an acquaintance in the music business. Stephen Friedman, the lawyer-turned-producer, is now dead, and I don’t want to speak ill of of him, but as a producer he was, to say the least, pesky. I met Steve by accident on Third Avenue; I was in the company of a very attractive young woman and, to be polite, introduced her to Steve, who soon hit on her, as he was to do with every woman I introduced him to. In time I stopped introducing him to anyone.
Finally, with no opposition from the big players in Hollywood, Steve Friedman optioned The Last Picture Show for $7,500. The check bounced, but was somehow hastily made right. For the next couple of years I heard nothing more from anyone about The Last Picture Show.
Then, eventually, I got a script in the mail, from a writer whose name I didn’t recognize and have now forgotten. It was a terrible script that somehow contrived to give this grim story a happy ending. (Later, Peter Bogdanovich and I struggled with the producer Bert Schneider over which of three deeply unhappy endings the film should actually end with.)
Though still pretty much a newcomer to Hollywood I knew that the script I received in the mail would never be produced. I had moved to northern Virginia by then, with my son, James, and was running a rare book business in Georgetown with my partner, Marcia Carter, who ran the Georgetown shop for thirty-two years.
I got the occasional call from Hollywood, though, and, from time to time, wrote a script. I knew that in Hollywood the order of battle was constantly changing with new heroes arriving now and then, and old heroes ceasing to be heroes and finally slipping under.
At the end of the 60s a small film called Easy Rider got made by a small company run by the aforementioned Bert Schneider, whose family happened to be a power at Columbia. Easy Rider cost not much and made a lot, besides which it also made Jack Nicholson a movie star, which he has been ever since. It was one of those highly watchable cheap movies without stars that convince the studios that it is at last possible to do away with the star system, a method of financing films that started at least as early as Chaplin, Pickford, and Fairbanks, a system that operates virtually unaltered to this day. Frankly, the most reliable way to get people to go to movies is to put people in the movie that people already know they want to see: Charlie Chaplin might be the perfect example.
I liked Easy Rider but I didn’t expect it to be the dawn of a new day, where filmmaking was concerned. Nonetheless, the folks at BBS Productions (which included Nicholson himself for a while) rightly concluded that they could make at least one more picture along Easy Rider lines, and that picture turned out to be The Last Picture Show.
Had Spawn of Evil happened I might have done a lot more script work than I did, and might not have been free to do Picture Show. But Spawn didn’t spawn and one of the more interesting things I did instead was an adaptation of John Barth’s excellent first novel, The Floating Opera, which didn’t spawn either, though I still like the book and wish I had been experienced enough to get the picture made.
Until The Last Picture Show showed up I was a try-anything screenwriter of mushroom growth. What I mainly got out of those lost projects was a little cash and many free trips to the bookshops of L.A.