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Back in the aughts when the Blogosphere was ramping up, there was plenty of discussion among the Bay Area bloggers about the perils of digital disruption and the loss of repertory theaters in one neighborhood after the other in San Francisco and environs, but that was more of an urban complaint about many becoming fewer. The Last Picture Shows shifts focus to rural, smaller communities were the brick-and-mortar movie house is often the one and only. The loss, therefore, is much more critical and as poignant as dusk when the allure of their neon marquees begin to gleam.
It was during discussions of the loss of repertory houses in the Bay Area that I first turned on to Cinema Treasures, which at the time was still in its infancy. A quarter of a century later and it’s sensible that Cinema Treasures co-founder Ross Melnick surfaces as the documentary’s “expert” talking head, reserving remaining interview time for the owners and staff members (the “thoughtful caretakers”) of beleaguered independent movie theaters who recount their valiant efforts to stay afloat in competition with multiplexes and streaming services.
The Last Picture Shows’ audience is structured into its cautionary message. Why would urbanites care? Why would stay-at-home streamers care? But as community building, let alone community retention, strengthens in our post-COVID, post safety-in-place, world, the notion that we need community and a shared communal experience past NO KINGS protest rallies becomes a consistent refrain in Thompson’s documentary narrative. Which is to say that this documentary will primarily speak to those who really care. Thompson’s preach is to the theme’s choir.
For an essay film, I appreciated Thompson’s atmospheric catalog of movie house marquees and street fronts, their origin dates, some of which have been abandoned and forgotten as they fall into disrepair, some of which have been salvaged as they struggle to survive and—in some heartening examples—some which even thrive. Folks will, of course, shout out to their own. Bay Area audiences will be invested in the Monte Rio theater on the Russian River; but, here in Boise, Idaho, I gave a thrilled shout-out to the Parma Motor-Vu Drive-In in Parma, Idaho (which kicked into gear the same year I did: 1953). Thompson’s nostalgic tribute to drive-in theaters resonated warmly as I remembered how as a child it would thrill me to drive by a drive-in theater and see a cinematic image projected large against an evening sky. Better yet was to sneak into a drive-in theater, a giggle of kids hidden in the trunk, tumbling out once the car was parked on its slope with the speakers hooked onto the rolled-down windows.
Thompson’s footage of these movie houses and drive-in theaters are nearly photographic, more than filmic. They’re often planimetric, leaning into my love for ghost signs, harkening back to the redolent commercial era of the fifties. Utilizing postcard aesthetics, and reconstructing memories of certain moviehouses with inserted black and white photographs into current captures, The Last Picture Shows is clever and resilient in how it breaks up its focus with these textured stylistic flourishes.
Hopefully, its passion will prove contagious as The Last Picture Shows opens today in the Bay Area.
