The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982) on Netflix
Miss Mona Stangley runs the Chicken Ranch, a brothel outside Gilbert, Texas. Sheriff Ed Earl Dodd, her lover, protects it until television watchdog Melvin P. Thorpe plans an exposé.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb6.2/1014,335 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes48%
Trailer
Plot summary
The Chicken Ranch has stood outside the town of Gilbert in Lanville County, Texas since 1910, and Miss Mona Stangley keeps it running on the same rules her predecessor, Miss Wulla Jean, laid down. Local authorities have always given the place their unofficial blessing, and Sheriff Ed Earl Dodd has been Miss Mona's lover and protector for twelve years. That arrangement is threatened when Melvin P. Thorpe, a consumer advocate with a weekly television program, announces that he will turn his cameras on the ranch. A Thanksgiving party for the winning college football team sits ahead on the calendar, and the Governor of Texas has never taken a position that the polls did not give him first.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas opened in 1,400 theaters on July 23, 1982 and earned $11,874,268 in its opening weekend, dethroning E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial after its six-week run at the top of the box office. It was the biggest weekend for a musical film ever.
- In 1982 the word "whorehouse" was considered obscene in parts of the United States, so the film was renamed The Best Little Cathouse in Texas in some print ads and television ads were banned or censored; on WXYZ-TV in Detroit the announcer merely clicked his tongue to eliminate the word.
- Burt Reynolds talked Colin Higgins into casting Charles Durning rather than Mickey Rooney: "Mickey Rooney is a wonderful actor, but everyone knows that. You won't get any credit. Charles Durning can sing and dance and no one knows it, so you'll get all the credit."
- When Dolly Parton was cast, Willie Nelson was suggested as a co-star and Universal executives met with him, but in the end Burt Reynolds was cast. Reynolds was paid $3.5 million and Parton $1.5 million.
- Dolly Parton contrasted the shoot with Nine to Five, which she likened to a first lover, "sweetly seductive before and gentle and caring during our lovemaking", and wrote of this film: "Whorehouse, then, was a rapist."
- Shooting took place in the Texas State Capitol, the first feature film to do so, and at the Texas Governor's Mansion.
- Higgins prepared for directing the musical by watching old George Cukor films and Dr Pepper commercials, saying of the soda advertisements: "They have a lot of wonderful movement."
