There's a general rule of thumb that any sequel worth making is generally made within four or five years of the original film. Naturally, there are exceptions to this rule, but they're few and far between. Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles, anyone? It's best for sequel makers to strike while the iron is hot, not merely from a business point of view, but also to build on the goodwill of the original. Yet the cinematic landscape is littered with sequels that arrived well past their franchise's expiration date. For every Before Sunset, there's a dozen Oliver's Storys, standing on the dusty highway of cinema history, angrily shaking a tire iron at the pop-culture bus as it passes them by.
1990 brought us three notable examples of this phenomenon, all follow-ups to canonical classics of 1970s Hollywood cinema. The most famous of the bunch was, of course, The Godfather, Part III, an admittedly unnecessary film that's still mostly better than its rep. Then there's The Two Jakes, the Jack Nicholson-directed sequel to Chinatown that's a mess but boasts a fine Harvey Keitel performance. The worst of the lot is easily Peter Bogdanovich's Texasville.
Some of you might not remember this, but Peter Bogdanovich was once known primarily as a fine filmmaker, rather than for playing Dr. Melfi's shrink on The Sopranos or as the boring dude who keeps turning up on DVD commentaries. But in his salad days as a filmmaker, he made a number of excellent films, with his 1971 film The Last Picture Show enduring as a honest-to-goodness masterpiece. But after his career cooled off — a cooling due in no small part to 1975's disastrous At Long Last Love — Bogdanovich had much more trouble getting films made, so he finally decided to make a Last Picture Show sequel, adapting the second Anarene novel by Larry McMurtry and reuniting the lion's share of the original cast.
Some sequels exist to build on and deepen the story of the originals, while others are more about catching up with characters we've gotten to know and love some years down the line. In theory, Texasville should fall into the latter category, but this can be a tricky thing to pull off, especially in a setting like Anarene where everyone knows each other and not a whole lot changes over the years. So instead of exploring how many of these old relationships have played out since the last film, Bogdanovich tightens his focus to Duane Jackson (played in both films by Jeff Bridges), the former football captain who now primarily exists to be picked on by his wife, children, and life in general.
Part of the problem with Texasville, and a major reason why it can't even come within spitting distance of The Last Picture Show, is because Bogdanovich is no longer the young tyro he was in the seventies. That's apparent from the film's opening shot, where we see the Texas landscape in lifelike color, whereas Last Picture Show was in beautiful black and white. But the new color scheme is the least of Texasville's issues. The original film was a realistic fifties-era slice of life about a town so small that there was little to do but go to the movies and fool around as each day brought you a little closer to death. It was a world so desolate that the movie theatre ended up closing.
Texasville is also founded upon the same conception of the town, but it's hard to reconcile the two worlds. The original film's roads and houses were almost always empty, but the more modern version of Anarene is a flurry of activity. Yes, the characters still screw around, but it's played almost as a joke rather than the sad reality we saw in the original film. It's as though Bogdanovich no longer had the nerve to play the story as tragedy anymore, so he settled instead on farce.
Making Duane the central character in the film was probably a mistake as well, although I suppose it's as much McMurtry's fault as anyone's. But regardless of who's to blame, Duane wasn't a character we especially cared about in The Last Picture Show, and while Bridges is a fine actor, even he can't distract us from the fact that we're too busy wondering what happened to the more interesting folks. Honestly, did McMurtry and Bogdanovich really think audiences had waited nineteen years to find out what would happen if Jacy (Cybill Shepherd) came back into his life? Or that he now has a son who can't keep it in his pants, just like his daddy was back in high school?
Texasville is almost perverse in the way it avoids rekindling the old feelings that were originally summoned up by The Last Picture Show. Consider the original film's protagonist Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), who's now relegated to a supporting part in the story. Aside from the dearly departed Sam the Lion (played in the original by Ben Johnson), the heart of The Last Picture Show was Sonny's relationship with Ruth Popper, played in both films by Cloris Leachman.
Yet Texasville gives the two almost no screen time together. The film practically forgets Sonny altogether at several points, returning to him every so often to show him getting steadily crazier, as when he visits the abandoned (after thirty years!) Royal Theatre to "watch movies in the sky.” Even when Sonny moves in with Ruth after a nervous breakdown, we never see them together as we did in the first film. Does Bogdanovich even care? Surely he could have found some tender moments between Sonny and Ruth had he not devoted so much time to, say, an awful scene in which Sonny's troublemaking twins spearhead a mass egging of the town's centennial festivities.
While Texasville isn't the all-time worst sequel to a great film, it may be the most disheartening. To see Bogdanovich so colossally misjudge what made The Last Picture Show so great makes me wonder whether he ever knew in the first place. In a way, the fate of the Royal Theatre sums up the difference between these two movies. In the original film, it played a central role in the town, and brought joy and goodwill into the lives of its residents. In Texasville, it's a ruin, an eyesore, a pale shadow of what it once was, and you pretty much have to be crazy to go there.
