The Surreal Picture Show — Crawford Audience Polite To ‘Crawford’

To David Modigliani, it was a relief.

To me, it was just too damn spooky.

“It” is the experience of watching Modigliani’s documentary Crawford for the first time on a big screen in Crawford last Sunday night.

The feeling, I can only imagine, must have been as weird as watching The Last Picture Show with the screenwriter in his hometown movie theatre in 1971.

Well, except Modigliani is from Boston, Mass., not Crawford, and Larry McMurtry is from Archer City, Texas.

But trade Sam the Lion’s demise for the deaths of two of the Crawford stars, leave out all of Show‘s sexual escapades, add the ghostly presence of a powerful American (p)resident and his political circus, and you’ve got Crawford.

The first tip off to strangeness, though, was that the inflatable screen used to display the picture was the same that showed Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 in Crawford back in the summer of 2004.

The good folks at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema traveling road show provided the equipment and labor for both screenings. The Crawford Peace House, which sponsored Moore’s screening, supplied most of the folding chairs for the Crawford audience.

The second red flag was that the Crawford screening was held on the 50-yard line of Pirate Stadium.

Almost eight years to the day, then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush stood on the very spot to give the commencement address to Crawford High’s graduating class of 2000.

But Moore’s anti-Bush diatribe was shown in the parking lot of the Class 2A pitch.

The third signal was the Crawford audience’s lack of extreme enthusiasm for Modigliani’s film either way, unlike audiences at Austin’s SXSW film festival who loved it immediately.

For instance, in Crawford,there was just as much silence to the opinions of Lone Star Iconoclast publisher W. Leon Smith as there was to former souvenir shop owner Norma Nelson-Crow.

In the film, Smith referred to Crawfordites as being “brainwashed” Bush supporters; Crow said she thought the media had an agenda to harm the president.

The shop owners in Crawford still refuse to carry Smith’s weekly newspaper four years after his editorial board endorsed Sen. John Kerry for president.

However, the scene of Ricky Smith’s outrageous antics on horseback in protest of the media’s coverage of Cindy Sheehan drew the most laughs