“I thought you might want to go to the picture show. Miss Mosey is having to close it. Tonight’s the last night.” – Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms)
How is it that nobody has done a modern version of The Last Picture Show? I realize that Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film, based on the novel by Larry McMurtry, is about much more than Miss Mosey having to close down the movie theater due to dwindling business and the rise of television, but let’s face it: the death of the Royal Theater in a small town, circa 1952, serves as a larger emblem of the many chapters in life that open and close for the characters of Anarene, Texas. It does so in ways that are understandable for anyone going through adolescence, their mid-life, and even death. Still: so much is implied by the four simple words of the title that it’s no surprise the book caught the eye of someone like Bogdanovich.
Before delving deeper into its black-and-white charms (a format suggested to Bogdanovich by Orson Welles), I want to be clear about this: in my opening sentence I was not suggesting a reboot or remake be made of The Last Picture Show. Instead, I am suggesting that the recent transition of our cinematic landscape from film to digital has been colossal. It’s been a huge “end of an era” event, and I’m stunned at the dearth of current movies to use this paradigm shift as a major backdrop to whatever story they’re putting up on the same screens so radically transformed by that self-same change. Where are The Last Picture Cinema Paradiso Shows of today? Surely they are out there and I, in my all-too-limited