Peter Bogdanovich

Peter Bogdanovich ComSE (July 30, 1939 – January 6, 2022) was an American director, writer, actor, producer, critic, and film historian.

One of the "New Hollywood" directors, Bogdanovich started as a film journalist until he got hired to work on Roger Corman's The Wild Angels (1966). After that film's success, he directed his own film Targets (1968), a critical success. He later gained wider popularity for his critically acclaimed drama The Last Picture Show (1971), which earned eight Oscar nominations including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Following The Last Picture Show success, he directed the screwball comedy What's Up, Doc? (1972), which was a major box office success, and another critical and commercial success, Paper Moon (1973), which earned him a Golden Globe Award for Best Director nomination. His following three films were all critical and commercial failures; including Daisy Miller (1974). He took a three-year hiatus before making a comeback with cult films Saint Jack (1979) and They All Laughed (1981). After his girlfriend Dorothy Stratten's murder, he took another four-year hiatus from filmmaking and wrote a memoir on her death titled The Killing of the Unicorn before making a comeback with Mask (1985), a critical and commercial success. He later went on to direct films such as Noises Off (1992), The Thing Called Love (1993), The Cat's Meow (2001), and She's Funny That Way (2014). As an actor, he is known for his roles in HBO series The Sopranos and Orson Welles's last movie The Other Side of the Wind (2018), which he also helped to finish. He received a Grammy Award for Best Music Film for directing the Tom Petty documentary Runnin' Down a Dream (2007).

An accomplished film historian, he directed documentaries such as Directed by John Ford (1971) and The Great Buster: A Celebration (2018), and published over ten books, some of which include in-depth interviews with friends Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock. Bogdanovich's works have been cited as important influences by many major filmmakers.

Early life

Bogdanovich was born in Kingston, New York, the son of Herma (née Robinson; 1918–1979) and Borislav Bogdanovich (1899–1970), a Serbian painter and pianist. His Austrian-born mother was Jewish; his father was a Serbian Orthodox Christian; the two arrived in the U.S. in May 1939 on visitors' visas, along with his mother's immediate family, at the onset of WWII. He graduated from New York City's Collegiate School in 1957 and studied acting at the Stella Adler Conservatory. He was fluent in Serbian, having learned it before English.

Film critic

In the early 1960s, Bogdanovich was known as a film programmer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. An obsessive cinema-goer, seeing up to 400 movies a year in his youth, Bogdanovich showcased the work of American directors such as Orson Welles, John Ford, and Howard Hawks. He later wrote a book about Ford, based on the notes he had produced for the MoMA retrospective of the director. Bogdanovich also brought attention to such forgotten pioneers of American cinema as Allan Dwan. Bogdanovich kept a card file of every film he saw between 1952 and 1970, with complete reviews of every film.

Bogdanovich was influenced by the French critics of the 1950s who wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma, especially critic-turned-director François Truffaut. Before becoming a director himself, he built his reputation as a film writer with articles in Esquire. These articles were collected in Pieces of Time (1973).

Move to Los Angeles and Roger Corman

In 1966, following the example of Cahiers du Cinéma critics Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Éric Rohmer, who had created the Nouvelle Vague ("New Wave") by making their own films, Bogdanovich decided to become a director. With his wife Polly Platt, he headed for Los Angeles, skipping out on the rent in the process.

Intent on breaking into the industry, Bogdanovich would ask publicists for movie premiere and industry party invitations. At one screening, Bogdanovich was viewing a film and director Roger Corman was sitting behind him. The two struck up a conversation when Corman mentioned he liked a cinema piece Bogdanovich wrote for Esquire. Corman offered him a directing job, which Bogdanovich accepted immediately. He worked with Corman on Targets, which starred Boris Karloff, and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, under the pseudonym Derek Thomas. Bogdanovich later said of the Corman school of filmmaking, "I went from getting the laundry to directing the picture in three weeks. Altogether, I worked 22 weeks – preproduction, shooting, second unit, cutting, dubbing – I haven't learned as much since."

Returning to journalism, Bogdanovich struck up a lifelong friendship with Orson Welles while interviewing him on the set of Mike Nichols's Catch-22 (1970). Bogdanovich played a major role in elucidating Welles and his career with his writings on the actor-director, most notably his book This is Orson Welles (1992). In the early 1970s, when Welles was having financial problems, Bogdanovich let him stay at his Bel Air mansion for a couple of years.

In 1970, Bogdanovich was commissioned by the American Film Institute to direct a documentary about John Ford for their tribute, Directed by John Ford (1971). The resulting film included candid interviews with John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda, and was narrated by Orson Welles. Out of circulation for years due to licensing issues, Bogdanovich and TCM released it in 2006, featuring newer, pristine film clips, and additional interviews with Clint Eastwood, Walter Hill, Harry Carey Jr., Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and others.

Directorial works

Much of the inspiration that led Bogdanovich to his cinematic creations came from early viewings of the film Citizen Kane. In an interview with Robert K. Elder, author of The Film That Changed My Life, Bogdanovich explains his appreciation of Orson Welles's work:

It's just not like any other movie you know. It's the first modern film: fragmented, not told straight ahead, jumping around. It anticipates everything that's being done now, and which is thought to be so modern. It's all become really decadent now, but it was certainly fresh then.

The 32-year-old Bogdanovich was hailed by critics as a "Wellesian" wunderkind when his best-received film, The Last Picture Show, was released in 1971. The film earned eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Director, and won two statues, for Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson in the supporting acting categories. Bogdanovich co-wrote the screenplay with Larry McMurtry, and it won the 1971 BAFTA award for Best Screenplay. Bogdanovich cast the 21-year-old model Cybill Shepherd in a major role in the film and fell in love with her, an affair that eventually led to his divorce from Polly Platt, his longtime artistic collaborator and the mother of his two daughters.

Bogdanovich followed up The Last Picture Show with the popular comedy What's Up, Doc? (1972), starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal, a screwball comedy indebted to Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940). While he relied on homage to bygone cinema, Bogdanovich solidified his status as one of a new breed of A-list directors that included Academy Award winners Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin, with whom he formed The Directors Company. The Directors Company was a generous production deal with Paramount Pictures that essentially gave the directors carte blanche if they kept within budget limitations. It was through this entity that Bogdanovich's Paper Moon (1973) was produced.

Paper Moon, a Depression-era comedy starring Ryan O'Neal that won his 10-year-old daughter Tatum O'Neal an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress, proved the high-water mark of Bogdanovich's career. Forced to share the profits with his fellow directors, Bogdanovich became dissatisfied with the arrangement. The Directors Company subsequently produced only two more pictures, Coppola's The Conversation (1974), which was nominated for Best Picture in 1974 alongside The Godfather Part II, and Bogdanovich's Daisy Miller, which had a lackluster critical reception.

Daisy Miller (1974) was a disappointment at the box office. At Long Last Love (1975), and Nickelodeon (1976) were critical and box office disasters, severely damaging his standing in the film community. Daisy Miller and At Long Last Love featured Cybill Shepherd. Feeling began to turn against Bogdanovich. "I was dumb. I made a lot of mistakes", he said in 1976.

In 1975, he sued Universal for breaching a contract to produce and direct Bugsy.

He took a few years off, then returned to directing with a lower-budgeted film, Saint Jack (1979), which was a critical success, although not a box-office hit. The making of this film marked the end of his romantic relationship with Cybill Shepherd.

Dorothy Stratten and They All Laughed

Bogdanovich's next film was the romantic comedy They All Laughed (1981), which featured Dorothy Stratten, a former model who began a romantic relationship with Bogdanovich. Stratten was murdered by her estranged husband shortly after filming completed.

Bogdanovich turned back to writing as his directorial career sagged, beginning with The Killing of the Unicorn – Dorothy Stratten 1960–1980, a memoir published in 1984. Teresa Carpenter's "Death of a Playmate" article about Dorothy Stratten's murder was published in The Village Voice and won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize, and while Bogdanovich did not criticize Carpenter's article in his book, she had lambasted both Bogdanovich and Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner, claiming that Stratten was a victim of them as much as of her husband, Paul Snider, who killed her and himself. Carpenter's article served as the basis of Bob Fosse's film Star 80 (1983), in which Bogdanovich, for legal reasons, was portrayed as the fictional director "Aram Nicholas", a sympathetic but possibly misguided and naive character.

Bogdanovich took over distribution of They All Laughed himself. He later blamed this for why he had to file for bankruptcy in 1985. He declared he had a monthly income of $75,000 and monthly expenses of $200,000.

On December 30, 1988, the 49-year-old Bogdanovich married 20-year-old Louise Stratten, Dorothy's younger sister. The couple divorced in 2001.

Mask and Texasville

In the early 1980s, Bogdanovich wanted to make I'll Remember April with John Cassavetes and The Lady in the Moon written with Larry McMurtry. He made the film Mask instead, released in 1985.

Then Bogdanovich's 1990 sequel to The Last Picture Show, Texasville, was a critical and box office disappointment.

Both films occasioned major disputes between Bogdanovich, who still demanded a measure of control over his films, and the studios, which controlled the financing and final cut of both films. Mask was released with a song score by Bob Seger against Bogdanovich's wishes (he favored Bruce Springsteen), and Bogdanovich often complained that the version of Texasville that was released was not the film he had intended. A director's cut of Mask, slightly longer and with Springsteen's songs, was belatedly released on DVD in 2006. A director's cut of Texasville was released on LaserDisc, and the theatrical cut was released on DVD by MGM in 2005. Around the time of the release of Texasville, Bogdanovich also revisited his earliest success, The Last Picture Show, and produced a slightly modified director's cut. Since that time, his recut has been the only available version of the film.

Bogdanovich directed two more theatrical films in 1992 and 1993, but their failure kept him off the big screen for several years. One, Noises Off, based on the Michael Frayn play, has subsequently developed a strong cult following, while the other, The Thing Called Love, is better known as one of River Phoenix's last roles before his untimely death.

In 1997 he declared bankruptcy again.

Bogdanovich, drawing from his encyclopedic knowledge of film history, authored several critically lauded books, including Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week, which offered the lifelong cinephile's commentary on 52 of his favorite films, and Who The Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors and Who the Hell's in It: Conversations with Hollywood's Legendary Actors, both based on interviews with directors and actors.

Later career

In 1998, the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress named The Last Picture Show to the National Film Registry, an honor awarded only to "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films".

In 2001, Bogdanovich resurfaced with The Cat's Meow. Returning once again to a reworking of the past, this time the supposed murder of director Thomas Ince by Orson Welles's bête noire William Randolph Hearst, The Cat's Meow was a modest critical success but made little money at the box office. Bogdanovich said that he was told the story of the alleged Ince murder by Welles, who in turn said he heard it from writer Charles Lederer.

In addition to directing some television work, Bogdanovich returned to acting with a recurring guest role on the cable television series The Sopranos, playing Dr. Melfi's psychotherapist, also later directing a fifth-season episode. He also voiced the analyst of Bart Simpson's therapist in an episode of The Simpsons, and appeared as himself in the "Robots Versus Wrestlers" episode of How I Met Your Mother along with Arianna Huffington and Will Shortz. Quentin Tarantino cast Bogdanovich as a disc jockey in Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Kill Bill: Volume 2. "Quentin knows, because he's such a movie buff, that when you hear a disc jockey's voice in my pictures, it's always me, sometimes doing different voices", said Bogdanovich. "So he called me and he said, 'I stole your voice from The Last Picture Show for the rough cut, but I need you to come down and do that voice again for my picture ... '"

Bogdanovich hosted The Essentials on Turner Classic Movies, but was replaced in May 2006 by TCM host Robert Osborne and film critic Molly Haskell. Bogdanovich hosted introductions to movies on Criterion Collection DVDs, and had a supporting role as a fictional version of himself in the Showtime comedy series Out of Order.

In 2006, Bogdanovich joined forces with ClickStar, where he hosted a classic film channel, Peter Bogdanovich's Golden Age of Movies. Bogdanovich also wrote a blog for the site. In 2003 he appeared in the BBC documentary Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, and in 2006 he appeared in the documentary Wanderlust.

In 2007, Bogdanovich was presented with an award for outstanding contribution to film preservation by the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) at the Toronto International Film Festival.

In 2010, Bogdanovich joined the directing faculty at the School of Filmmaking at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. On April 17, 2010, he was awarded the Master of Cinema Award at the 12th Annual RiverRun International Film Festival. In 2011, he was given the Auteur Award by the International Press Academy, which is awarded to filmmakers whose singular vision and unique artistic control over the elements of production give a personal and signature style to their films.

In 2012, Bogdanovich made news with an essay in The Hollywood Reporter, published in the aftermath of the Aurora, Colorado, theater shooting, in which he argued against excessive violence in the movies:

Today, there's a general numbing of the audience. There's too much murder and killing. You make people insensitive by showing it all the time. The body count in pictures is huge. It numbs the audience into thinking it's not so terrible. Back in the '70s, I asked Orson Welles what he thought was happening to pictures, and he said, "We're brutalizing the audience. We're going to end up like the Roman circus, live at the Coliseum." The respect for human life seems to be eroding.

Bogdanovich's last narrative film, She's Funny That Way, was released in theaters and on demand in 2014, followed by the documentary The Great Buster: A Celebration in 2018.

He collaborated with Turner Classic Movies, and TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, to create a documentary podcast about his life, which premiered in 2020.

Death and legacy

Bogdanovich died from natural causes at his home in Los Angeles, on January 6, 2022, at the age of 82.

Bogdanovich's works have been cited as influences by filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino, Rian Johnson, David Fincher, Edgar Wright, the Safdie brothers, David O. Russell, Andy Muschietti, Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, and Noah Baumbach.

Directing credits

Film

Documentary films

• Directed by John Ford (1971)
• Runnin' Down a Dream (2007)
• The Great Buster: A Celebration (2018)

Television

TV series

TV movies

• To Sir, with Love II (1996)
• The Price of Heaven (1997)
• Rescuers: Stories of Courage: Two Women (1997)
• Naked City: A Killer Christmas (1998)
• A Saintly Switch (1999)
• The Mystery of Natalie Wood (2004)
• Hustle (2004)

Acting credits

• Great Performances – episode – James Stewart: A Wonderful Life – Himself (1987)
• Great Performances – episode – Bacall on Bogart – Himself (1988)
• John Wayne Standing Tall – TV Movie – Himself (1989)
• Ben Johnson: Third Cowboy on the Right – Documentary – Himself (1996)
• Howard Hawks: American Artist – TV Movie documentary – Himself (1997)
• Warner Bros. 75th Anniversary: No Guts, No Glory – TV Movie documentary – Himself (1998)
• John Ford Goes to War – Documentary – Himself (2002)
• Karloff and Me – Documentary – Himself (2006)
• American Masters – episode – John Ford/John Wayne: The Filmmaker and the Legend – Himself (2006)
• Stagecoach: A Story of Redemption – Video Documentary – Himself (2006)
• Commemoration: Howard Hawks' "Rio Bravo" – Video short – Himself (2007)
• The Size of Legends, The Soul of Myth: 7 Part Documentary (2009)
• Ride, Boldly Ride: The Journey to El Dorado: 7 Part Documentary (2009)
• Dreaming the Quiet Man – Documentary – Himself (2010)
• Peter Bogdanovich – Stagecoach Criterion Collection Edition Special Feature (2010)
• A Film of Firsts: Peter Bogdanovich on Red River – Red River Criterion Collection Edition Special Feature (2014)
• Hawks and Bogdanovich – Red River Criterion Collection Edition Audio excerpts Special Feature (2014)

Unmade films

• The Criminals (1966) – a World War II film for Roger Corman
• Lonesome Dove (1972) – a Western from a script by Larry McMurtry who turned it into the best selling novel
• The Apple Tree (early 1970s) from a script by Gavin Lambert based on the story by John Galsworthy
• The Girl with the Silver Eyes (1974) based on a short story by Dashiell Hammett
• Twelve's a Crowd (early 1980s) with Keith Carradine and Colleen Camp
• I'll Remember April with Colleen Camp, John Cassavetes and Charles Aznavour
• remake of Detour (1945)
• remake of Brewster's Millions (early 1980s) with John Ritter
• The Lady in the Moon (early 1980s) from a script by Larry McMurtry
• Private Lives with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton from the play by Noël Coward (early 1980s – they later appeared in it on stage)
• Paradise Road (late 1980s) from a novel by David Scott Milton to star Frank Sinatra set in Las Vegas
• Turn of the Century (2013) based on Kurt Anderson novel

Bogdanovich was also fired off Duck, You Sucker! (1971) and Another You (1991), the latter while during filming. He turned down directing A Glimpse of Tiger, The Getaway (1972), King of the Gypsies (1978), Heaven Can Wait (1978), Hurricane (1979) and Popeye (1980). He also turned down the role played by Dabney Coleman in Tootsie (1982). He also directed a scene in the John Cassavetes film Love Streams (1984) at the director's insistence.

Books by Peter Bogdanovich:

• 1961: The Cinema of Orson Welles. New York: Museum of Modern Art Film Library. OCLC 982198898.
• 1962: The Cinema of Howard Hawks. New York: Museum of Modern Art Film Library. OCLC 868410545.
• 1963: The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Museum of Modern Art Film Library. OCLC 937577000.
• 1967: John Ford. London: Studio Vista. OCLC 868409009. Expanded edition: Berkeley: University of California, 1978. ISBN 9780520034983.
• 1967: Fritz Lang in America. London: Studio Vista. OCLC 469498600; New York: Praeger. OCLC 841184600.
• 1970: Allan Dwan: The Last Pioneer. Inglaterra: Studio Vista. OCLC 777766501.
• 1973: Pieces of Time. New York: Arbor House. OCLC 982199356. Expanded edition, 1985: Pieces of Time: Peter Bogdanovich on the Movies, 1961–1985. ISBN 9780877956969.
• 1984: The Killing of the Unicorn – Dorothy Stratten 1960–1980. William Morrow and Company. ISBN 0-688-01611-1.
• 1992: This is Orson Welles. HarperPerennial. ISBN 0-06-092439-X.
• 1995: A Moment with Miss Gish. Santa Barbara: Santa Teresa Press. OCLC 34316185.
• 1997: Who The Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors. Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-679-44706-7.
• 1999: Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week. New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 9780345432056.
• 2004: Who the Hell's in It: Conversations with Hollywood's Legendary Actors. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-375-40010-9.

Director's commentaries

• Targets
• The Last Picture Show (one solo commentary, and one with actors Cybill Shepherd, Randy Quaid, Cloris Leachman and Frank Marshall)
• The Sopranos (TV series) (episode "Sentimental Education")
• What's Up, Doc?
• Paper Moon
• Daisy Miller
• Nickelodeon
• Saint Jack
• They All Laughed
• Mask
• The Thing Called Love
• The Cat's Meow
• She's Funny That Way (with co-writer/producer Louise Stratten)

Scholarly commentaries

• Bringing Up Baby
• Citizen Kane
• Clash by Night, with audio interview excerpts of director Fritz Lang
• El Dorado
• Fury, with audio interview excerpts of director Fritz Lang
• The Lady from Shanghai
• Land of the Pharaohs, with audio interview excerpts of director Howard Hawks
• M, with digital transfer supervisor Torsten Kaiser and restoration supervisor Martin Koerber, plus audio interview excerpts of director Fritz Lang
• The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
• Othello, with Orson Welles scholar Myron Meisel, on the Criterion Collection edition of the film
• The Rules of the Game, reading commentary written by film scholar Alexander Sesonske, on the Criterion Collection edition of the film
• The Searchers
• The Sopranos (TV series) (episode "Pilot") with Sopranos creator David Chase
• Strangers on a Train, with Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano, Patricia Highsmith biographer Andrew Wilson and other participants
• To Catch a Thief, with film historian Laurent Bouzereau
• The Third Man, on the Criterion Collection edition of the film
• Make Way for Tomorrow, on the Criterion Collection edition of the film