Archer City’s Royal Theater Hosts ‘Last Picture Show’ Screening on 60th Anniversary

Sixty years after Larry McMurtry turned his hometown into the fictional Thalia and exposed the loneliness, restlessness and sometimes meanness beneath the surface of small-town Texas, The Last Picture Show came home again.

A large crowd nearly filled Archer City’s Royal Theater on Aug. 1 for a screening of the 1971 film and a discussion marking the 60th anniversary of McMurtry’s 1966 novel. Audience members traveled from around the region — some from as far away as Austin — for an evening that was part film retrospective and part literary discussion.

The old Royal was one of the inspirations for the dying movie theater at the center of McMurtry’s story. In the novel, Archer City became Thalia; director Peter Bogdanovich renamed it Anarene for the film, borrowing the name of a ghost town south of Archer City.

The Larry McMurtry Literary Center organized the event to coincide with publication of a new 60th-anniversary edition of the novel. The evening featured panelists Greg Giddings, an Archer County native and Midwestern State University English professor; screenwriter Paula Goldberg; and LMLC Executive Director George Getschow, with writer Doug King moderating.

For local residents, however, the discussion offered something more intimate: a chance to reconsider a story that did not always sit comfortably with the town that inspired it.

Mr. Getschow noted that McMurtry described the novel as a “spiteful book,” written in part to puncture romantic notions about small-town life. The characters were fictional, he said, but grew from people and circumstances McMurtry knew.

Mr. Giddings recalled that the film created considerable controversy after its release. Some Archer City residents believed the movie had damaged the town’s reputation, and Mr. McMurtry even offered to debate his critics at the American Legion Hall, he said.

Time produced an extraordinary reversal.

The original Royal burned in 1965, a year before Mr. McMurtry’s novel appeared. Decades later, Abby Abernathy helped lead the effort to resurrect the theater — even though his father, Bill Abernathy, had been among those angered by what the book and film had done to Archer City’s image.

On Aug. 1, that resurrected theater was filled with people eager to experience the story again.

The evening continued afterward at Booked Up, the bookstore Mr. McMurtry founded and where Mr. Getschow conducted writing workshops with him for years.

The event drew readers and movie lovers back to the streets, buildings and West Texas landscape Mr. McMurtry transformed into literature.