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74 DGA QUARTERLY SCREENPULLS: SONY PICTURES HOME ENTERTAINMENT H E R E I S N O R O O M F O R W A S T E in a film," says Tom Ford. This is a healthy working philosophy made visible and even gorgeous in the two films Ford has directed• A Single Man (2009) and this year's Nocturnal Animals•but today he offers it in praise of Peter Bog- danovich as we watch his 1971 landmark The Last Pic- ture Show, based on the novel by Larry McMurtry. "I would've probably seen it as a boy, in the early '70s. I was 10 years old, and my parents used to take me out to see a lot of things I probably shouldn't have gone to." Such adventurous child-rearing left an amusingly deep mark. As a Texas native growing up from age 11 in New Mexico•where to this day he owns a 20,000-acre cattle ranch•Ford was born as part of this picture's target audience. His own films argue this point. A Sin- gle Man, from the novel by Christopher Isherwood, maps a single day for its hero•quite possibly his last. Nocturnal Animals traces a more symphonic storyline. The woman (Amy Adams) at the center of the film, based on the Austin Wright novel Tony and Susan, is treading water inside a dead marriage when she re- ceives an urgent, poetic message from the other hus- band she betrayed long ago (Jake Gyllenhaal). He has written a novel in her honor. This violent fantasy bears no outward resemblance to their bygone relationship, but she is mesmerized and even consumed by it. Of The Last Picture Show, Ford says, "Every single thing is deliberate." As the film begins it fades up on a desolate movie palace, already run-down in 1951 and pans to the left to take in the main street of a dusty Texas town. "This will also be the end shot, except in reverse." Billy, a simple-minded boy sweeping the street's endless dust, is glimpsed through a hole in a passing windshield: "And how does he die, at the end of the film? Hit by a car•and our first sight of him is framed by broken glass." Similarly, says Ford, when Duane (Jeff Bridges) gives Jacy (Cybill Shepherd) a wristwatch at Christmas, "She goes to a swim party, and jumps in the pool. The watch stops." She slaps her wrist. "As she's listening, her eye is caught by the rich Watching The Last Picture Show with Tom Ford T BY F. X . F E E N E Y [ S C R E E N I N G R O O M ]