THAT STRANGE SCOUTING trip occurred early in 1971. During that year the script was many times rewritten. On one visit to L.A., I was idling around in Bert Schneider’s office and noticed that on his desk was a small bowl of variously flavored douces. Later I saw Bert in D.C., at one of the many anti–Vietnam War protests; and, later still, I encountered him in Vevey, Switzerland, where he had traveled with Candice Bergen, and had hoped to beguile the aged Charlie Chaplin into making a film of some kind with him.
I scarcely knew Bert Schneider but I was present at the violent debate between Bert and Peter over the ending of The Last Picture Show. Bert didn’t like the final scene, in which Cloris Leachman, the neglected wife of the local football coach, has a violent fit and then forgives Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) his near-infidelity with Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd). Bert wanted the movie to end two scenes earlier, when Billy (Sam Bottoms), the local retarded boy, gets killed by a cattle truck while sweeping the street in a sandstorm.
Failing that, Bert wanted to end the film one scene earlier, when Sonny, in his grief, drives wildly off into the emptiness.
Peter won the argument and the movie ends with Cloris and her forgiveness. But the film is not quite over: following the Cloris–Tim Bottoms scene is a long reprise, in which all the characters in the story are pictured briefly at their sunniest and most winning moment.
Without that reprise The Last Picture Show would have been almost unwatchably depressing. I first saw it in a rough cut, without the reprise, and found it too sad to sit through.
Much later, as a stooge for the U.S. Information Agency, I toured the Southern Cone of South America with that film: thirty-two showings in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and Colombia (this last not of course in the Southern Cone). I didn’t watch the film thirty-two times, or any times, but I did answer questions about it after every showing and I always made a point of mentioning the reprise.
The other thing that made the film so appealing was the casting: the best casting that Peter Bogdanovich, with or without Polly Platt’s assistance, ever achieved. He was not an obsessive moviegoer for nothing. He was the perfect young director to be allowed to direct (and cast) a movie whose producers knew in advance that they couldn’t afford stars. He had a sure sense of which actors and actresses could rise to this bait, and which couldn’t.
Ironically, but not surprisingly, when Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman won Oscars for their performances, they decided that, by God, they were stars, and acted like stars from then on.
The first thing they did, as stars in their own heads, was price themselves out of the market, which, Oscar or not, assessed them rather more modestly than they assessed themselves.