Peter Bogdanovich

Peter Bogdanovich
Peter Bogdanovich.jpg
Born July 30, 1939 (1939-07-30) (age 70)
Kingston, New York
Spouse(s) Polly Platt (1966-1970)
Louise Stratten (1988-2001)

Peter Bogdanovich (Serbian Cyrillic: Петар Богдановић, Serbian Latin: Petar Bogdanović) (born July 30, 1939) is an American film historian, director, writer, actor and critic. He was part of the wave of "New Hollywood" directors (which included William Friedkin, Brian DePalma, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Michael Cimino and Francis Ford Coppola, among others), and was particularly relevant during the 1970s with his film The Last Picture Show.

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Early life

The son of immigrants fleeing the Nazis -- his father is a Serbian painter and pianist and his mother descended from a rich Austrian Jewish family -- Bogdanovich was conceived in Europe but born in America. He was originally an actor in the 1950s, studying his craft with acting teacher Stella Adler (he was only 16 but had to lie about his age and say he was 18 to qualify), and appearing on television and in summer stock. In the early 1960s, Bogdanovich became known for programming movies at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. An obsessive cinema-goer, sometimes seeing up to 400 movies a year in his youth, Bogdanovich prominently showcased the work of American directors such as John Ford, whom he subsequently wrote a book about based on the notes he had produced for the MoMA retrospective of the director, and the then-underappreciated Howard Hawks. Bogdanovich also brought attention to such forgotten pioneers of American cinema as Allan Dwan.

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). In 1968, 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 in tow, they packed their bags, took a grocery carriage full of books and loaded them into their car and headed for Los Angeles, skipping out on their rent in the process. Intent on getting into the industry, Bogdanovich's persistence paid off when he would bug publicists for movie premiere and industry party invites. At one screening, Bogdanovich was viewing a film with film director Roger Corman sitting behind him. The two struck up a conversation when Corman mentioned he liked a cinema piece Bogdanovich wrote for Esquire. It was in this conversation that Corman offered him a directing job which Bogdanovich didn't even blink before accepting. He went on to work with Corman on Targets and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. 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."[1]

Turning back to journalism, Bogdanovich struck up a life-long friendship with Orson Welles while interviewing him on the set of Mike Nichols's Catch-22. 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 '70s 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 a tribute, Directed by John Ford. The resulting film is considered a classic Hollywood profile documentary. It included candid interviews with the likes of John Wayne, James Stewart, 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.

Eruption into stardom

The 32-year old Bogdanovich was hailed by a critics as a "Wellesian" wunderkind when his best known film, The Last Picture Show, was released in 1971. The film received eight Academy Awards nominations, including Best Director, and won two statues: Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson in the supporting acting categories. Bogdanovich, who had cast the 21-year-old model Cybill Shepherd in a major role in the film, fell in love with her, an affair that eventually led to his divorce from Polly Platt, his long-time artistic collaborator and the mother of his two children.

Bogdanovich followed up The Last Picture Show with the popular hit What's Up, Doc? (1972) starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal, a screwball comedy indebted to Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (1937) and His Girl Friday (1941). Despite his reliance on homage to bygone cinema, Bogdanovich had 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 to be 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 (1974), and Bogdanovich's Daisy Miller, a film that had a lackluster critical reception.

Commercial demise

An adaptation of the Henry James novella, Daisy Miller (1974) spelled the beginning of the end of Bogdanovich's career as a popular, critically acclaimed director. The film, which starred Bogdanovich's lover Shepherd as the title character, was savaged by critics and was a flop at the box office. Bogdanovich's follow-up, an original screenplay (set to the music of Cole Porter), At Long Last Love (1975) starring Shepherd, was panned by critics as one of the worst films ever made and noted as such in Harry and Michael Medved's The Golden Turkey Awards: Nominees and Winners, the Worst Achievements in Hollywood History (1980). The film also was a box office bomb despite featuring Burt Reynolds, whose star would only rise during the 1970s.

Once again beholden to the past, Bogdanovich insisted on filming the musical numbers for At Long Last Love live, a process not used since the early days of the talkies. The decision was widely ridiculed as none of the leading actors were known for their singing abilities. (Bogdanovich himself had produced a critically panned album of Shepherd singing Porter songs in 1974.) The public perception of Bogdanovich became that of an arrogant director hamstrung by his own hubris.

Bogdanovich turned back again to old triumphs and traditions with Nickelodeon (1976), a comedy recounting the earliest days of the motion picture industry and reuniting Paper Moon's Ryan and Tatum O'Neal with Reynolds. Counseled not to use the critically unpopular Shepherd in the film, Bogdanovich instead used newcomer Jane Hitchcock as the film's ingénue. Unfortunately, the magic of Paper Moon could not be repeated and the film died at the box office.

The Dorothy Stratten affair

After a three-year hiatus, Bogdanovich returned with the critically and financially underwhelming Saint Jack (1979) for Hugh Hefner's Playboy Productions Inc. Bogdanovich's long affair with Shepherd had ended in 1978, but the production deal making Hefner the film's producer was part of the settlement of a lawsuit Shepherd had filed against Hefner for publishing nude photos of her pirated from a print of The Last Picture Show in Playboy Magazine. Bogdanovich then launched the film that would be his career Waterloo, They All Laughed, a low-budget ensemble comedy starring Audrey Hepburn and the 20 year-old Playboy Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten. During the filming of the picture, Bogdanovich fell in love with Stratten, who was married to Paul Snider. Stratten moved in with Bogdanovich, and when she told Snider she was leaving him, she was killed in a murder-suicide.

They All Laughed could not attract a distributor due to the negative publicity surrounding the Stratten murder, despite its being one of the few films made by the legendary Audrey Hepburn after her provisional retirement in 1967. The heartbroken Bogdanovich bought the rights to the negative so that it would be seen by the public, but the film had a limited release to weak reviews and lost Bogdanovich millions, driving him into bankruptcy. Apart from the tragic circumstances of its making, though, the film has a small but devoted following. Director Quentin Tarantino listed it as one of the Ten Best Films of All Time in the 2002 Sight and Sound poll.

Later years

Bogdanovich turned back to writing as his directorial career sagged, beginning with memoir of his dead love, The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten (1960–1980) that was published in 1984. Teresa Carpenter's "Death of a Playmate" article about Stratten's murder had been published in The Village Voice, and had won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize. While Bogdanovich never criticized Carpenter's article in his book, she had lambasted Bogdanovich and Hefner, claiming that Stratten was as much a victim of them as she was of Snider. In particular she criticized Bogdanovich for his "puerile preference for ingenues." 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.

On December 30, 1988 49 year old Bogdanovich married then 20 year old Louise Stratten, the younger sister of the murdered Playboy playmate/actress Dorothy Stratten whom he had been dating a few years after Dorothy Stratten's death. Louise had been 12 years old at the time of her sister Dorothy's death. Louise and Peter were divorced in 2001.

Though he achieved huge success with Mask in 1985, Bogdanovich's sequel to The Last Picture Show, Texasville (1990), 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 now exerted control over the finance 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 has often complained that the version of Texasville that was released was not the film he had intended to release. A director's cut of Mask, slightly longer and with the songs of Springsteen, was belatedly released on DVD in 2006. A director's cut of Texasville was released on laserdisc, though it has never been released on DVD. Around the time of the release of Texasville, Bogdanovich also re-visited his earliest success, The Last Picture Show, and produced a slightly modified director's cut. Since that time, his re-cut 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..., has subsequently developed a strong cult following, while the other, The Thing Called Love, is better known as one of actor River Phoenix's last roles before an untimely drug-related death.

In 1997, the director entered bankruptcy protection once more and briefly moved in with friends in New York City.

Bogdanovich, drawing from his encyclopedic knowledge of film history, authored several critically lauded texts including Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week, which offered the lifelong cinephile's erudite 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 conducted in the past with many of the greatest directors and actors.

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 Welles' bête noire William Randolph Hearst, The Cat's Meow was a modest critical success but made little money at the box office. Bogdanovich says he heard the story of the alleged Ince murder from director Orson Welles who in turn said he heard it from writer Charles Lederer.[2] In addition to helming some television movies, Bogdanovich has returned to acting, with a recurring guest role on the cable television series The Sopranos as Dr. Melfi's psychotherapist. Bogdanovich directed a fifth season episode of the series. In an homage to his Sopranos character, he also voiced the analyst of Bart Simpson's therapist in an episode of The Simpsons.

Bogdanovich's personal reputation suffered from gossip about his 13-year marriage to Dorothy Stratten's younger sister, Louise Hoogstraten, who was 29 years his junior. The marriage ended in divorce in 2001.

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 the most culturally significant films.

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 is also frequently featured in introductions to movies on the famed Criterion Collection DVDs. He also had a supporting role as a fictional version of himself in the Showtime comedy series Out of Order. He will next appear in The Dream Factory.

Bogdanovich is a vegetarian[3].

In addition to his writing, directing and acting, Bogdanovich is in demand as a speaker for doing impeccable impressions of Hollywood legends whom he befriended over the years, among them Cary Grant, James Stewart, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Jerry Lewis.

In 2006, Bogdanovich joined forces with ClickStar, where he hosts a classic movie channel, Peter Bogdanovich's Golden Age of Movies. Bodganovich also writes a blog for the site.

In 2007, Bogdanovich was presented with the 2007 award for outstanding contribution to film preservation by The International Federation of Film Archives at the Toronto International Film Festival.[4]

Filmography

Books

References

  1. ↑ "What They Learned From Roger Corman", by Beverly Gray, Moviemaker Magazine, Spring 2001, retrieved April 29, 2006
  2. ↑ Interview with Peter Bogdanovich from March 9, 2008
  3. ↑ Peter Bogdanovich - Biography
  4. ↑ "TIFF '07 - Films & Schedules La Grand Illusion:", by Sylvia Frank, Toronto International Film Festival Guide, September 2007, retrieved September 09, 2007

External links

Films Directed by Peter Bogdanovich
Targets (1968) • Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968)  • The Last Picture Show (1971)  • What's Up, Doc? (1972) • Paper Moon (1973) • Daisy Miller (1974) • At Long Last Love (1975) • Nickelodeon (1976) • Saint Jack (1979) • They All Laughed (1981) • Mask (1985) • Illegally Yours (1988) • Texasville (1990) • Noises Off (1992) • The Thing Called Love (1993) • The Cat's Meow (2001) • Hustle (2004) • Runnin' Down a Dream (2007)
Persondata
NAME Bogdanovich, Peter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION Film director
DATE OF BIRTH 1939-7-30
PLACE OF BIRTH Kingston, New York
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH