IN THE SUMMER of 1964 a family crisis erupted in Archer City. If the Panhandle chicken-fried steak was no different from thousands of others, likewise my family crisis. All over the world family crises of just that nature happen, one after another, all the families allowing themselves to be taken completely by surprise by some of the most often repeated actions humans are capable of.
The effect of this crisis was to make me even more wary of Archer City than I already had been. Simply put, it’s not a nice town. But the bright flare of crisis prompted me to write a bleak novel called The Last Picture Show , describing not the crisis but the culture that caused the crisis to erupt in the way that it did. That book, written in three weeks, eventually, over forty-five years, became a quintet, the fifth volume of which, Rhino Ranch , has recently appeared.
Like Horseman, Pass By, The Last Picture Show was also snapped up by the movies, Columbia Studios securing it very quickly, though it did not, like the earlier book, achieve rapid passage to the screen—in this case there was no star raring to do it. It took about seven years to find its way to the screen. A first script was done, not by me, giving this bleak tale a happy ending. Then it came loose from the first option and got made with a cast of small names—but the complicated making of The Last Picture Show is a story for the third Hollywood volume of these memoirs.
From a technical, writerly point of view, the interesting thing about The Last Picture Show is literally the book’s point of view. I had written two novels told in the first person (and was, in time, to write several more). But I felt the time had come to stretch a little, which meant trying to write something in the third person. The first person came easily for me—I imagine it comes easy for most of those who employ it. So easy was it for me that, in fact, I wrote the first draft of Picture Show in the old, familiar first person and then laboriously translated it into third.
Once I learned how to do the third person I have mostly stuck with it, only rarely—as in Somebody’s Darling , retreating to first.
Probably that one aspect of fiction—point of view—has provoked more critical prose than any other element. Billions of words have been spoken about it in zillions of the creative writing classes that dot the academic globe. The reason the first person is so seductive, as a point of view, is who shows the reader what seems to be going on. Only make them See! Conrad famously said, when asked about his guiding principles as a future writer. I believe the one gift I had that led me to a career in fiction was the ability to make up characters that readers connect with. My characters move them, which is also why those same characters move them when they meet them on the screen.