FOR A FEW months in 1971 the fate of The Last Picture Show hung in the balance. Little script changes were suggested from time to time, and, usually, I made them. I was more interested in our new bookshop than anything else. I had never particularly liked Picture Show as a novel and did not get too keyed up about its ups and downs in the studio world.
So when Peter called and told me that Picture Show had in fact been given a green light, I was happier for him and Polly than for myself.
By the time production started I had taken a lectureship at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia, where I taught creative writing—to my surprise a good many of the story manuscripts that I received in that class were not at all vaguely S & M.
Because of my teaching duties, and the pleasures of the book business, I was on the set of The Last Picture Show only slightly longer than when I visited Hud. There was the usual morass of cameras, cables, and idle people, all chilled by the usual lacerating midwinter wind.
What I saw was a small crew working desperately to make a short deadline: in this case, Christmas. I had only a few words with Polly and Peter and was yet to meet Cybill. I made two short visits and encountered Cybill only on the second, by which time Peter had left Polly for her.
At this point in Hollywood history, long films were doing badly at the box office. For that reason the producers of Picture Show had decided that Picture Show should come in at exactly two hours, not a frame more.
To ensure that this demand was in force, the footage was timed by various arcane methods of film timing. Normally a page of script is considered to produce a minute of screen time but nobody who has actually worked in film believes that to be the case. Some writers and actors just somehow play slow, and my own scenes—I can’t say why—play particularly slow.
By the time Picture Show had been in production a week it was—to the horror of everyone—timing out to be a three-hour movie, not the two-hour one that had been mandated.
This was calamity; back in Virginia my phone began to ring and ring. In essence what we needed to do was cut a full third of the script and do it while the movie was in daily production.
And this we did!
Not only did we do it, but it turned out not to be as hard a task as one might expect.
First we eliminated all scenes that involved bringing cast and crew to distant places.
We had at once to eliminate such temptations as San Francisco, Colorado Springs, or Matamoros, to all of which we had once hoped to go. In moviemaking the oldest truism is that money translates directly into time. So many dollars means so many days.
In Brokeback Mountain, for example, if Ang Lee, the director, could have had even $15,000 or $20,000 more we could have sent a second unit crew down into Wyoming for one day and got some beauty shots of the locale where the story was actually set.
He wasn’t allowed the extra money, and neither was Peter Bogdanovich allowed any extra money as the filming of Picture Show neared its end. Money trumped talent, and, in the movie business, that is usually the case.
Anyway, Peter and I stayed on the phone for about a week and cut Picture Show by about a third, while filming went on apace. Some of the substitute scenes were better than what had been there to begin with, such as the brilliant impotence-graduation-seduction sequence. Others were, at least, no worse than the original. The film wrapped on time, and came in, initially, at about two hours and two minutes. To make that length, Peter had to cut a scene he much loved, in the café, between Eileen Brennan and Tim Bottoms. Doggedly, over the next twenty years, Peter chipped away at studio resistance until the café scene was finally put back into the release print. Since by then the picture was widely reckoned to be a classic, for once the powers-that-be relented.