Royal Theater

The Royal was Archer City's movie house on the town square; Cinema Treasures says it was open by 1933. Larry McMurtry grew up in Archer City, and the Handbook of Texas notes that he wrote The Last Picture Show in three weeks in the summer of 1964. Published in 1966, the novel is set in a fictional town drawn from Archer City, and the closing of the Royal Theater is one of its major symbols.

The real theater's run ended first. The AFI Catalog, citing a 1978 New York Times article, says the Royal went out of business in the early 1960s, and the theater's own history says a fire gutted the building in 1965. When Peter Bogdanovich began filming The Last Picture Show in October 1970, he used the Royal's front in Archer City, dressed to look like a working theater, and shot the interior scenes at the West-Tex Theatre in Olney, a few miles south. AFI says Bogdanovich changed the last film shown at the picture show from the novel's The Kid from Texas to Howard Hawks's Red River, wanting something more romantic so the theater would go out with a bang. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won two.

The West-Tex had opened as the Palace on December 23, 1925, and reopened under its new name on July 3, 1936, after a Streamline Moderne remodel by architects Jack Corgan and William Moore. It was razed in January 1986.

The Royal's ruin drew visitors for decades. Abby Abernathy, a fifth-generation resident, bought the property in 1986, according to a 2000 Associated Press story reprinted on Cinema Treasures. Around 1990, a meeting of Archer City leaders kept returning to the idea of rebuilding the theater. Abernathy, then working in entertainment in New York, was asked to come home, and on December 7, 1996, REBURTH, short for Rebuilding the Royal Theater, was launched. It spent two years selling out shows in the vacant White's Auto store before area foundations took notice. Bogdanovich's 1990 sequel Texasville had already propped up the shell again for filming.

The rebuilt Royal opened in August 2000, near the 35th anniversary of the fire, with the stone front, blue and white marquee and Royal sign restored to their look in the film. The plan did not include movies: the site of the original 100-seat house became an open-air amphitheater beside a larger room for bands, plays and dinner theater. The Texasville Opry has played there since the reopening. In 2025 the Archer County Museum & Arts Center took over the theater.