Peter Bogdanovich

Peter Bogdanovich (July 30, 1939 – January 6, 2022) was an American director, writer, actor, producer, critic, and film historian. He started out his career as a young actor studying under Stella Adler before working as a film critic for Film Culture and Esquire and finally becoming a prominent filmmaker of the New Hollywood movement. He received accolades including a BAFTA Award and Grammy Award, as well as nominations for two Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards.

Bogdanovich worked as a film journalist until he was hired to work on Roger Corman's The Wild Angels (1966). His credited feature film debut came with Targets (1968), before his career breakthrough with the drama The Last Picture Show (1971) which earned him Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, and the acclaimed films What's Up, Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973). Other films include Saint Jack (1979), They All Laughed (1981), Mask (1985), Noises Off (1992), The Cat's Meow (2001), and She's Funny That Way (2014).

As an actor, Bogdanovich was known for his roles in the HBO series The Sopranos and Orson Welles' last film, The Other Side of the Wind (2018), which he also helped finish.

Bogdanovich directed documentaries such as Directed by John Ford (1971) and The Great Buster: A Celebration (2018). He received a Grammy Award for Best Music Film for directing Runnin' Down a Dream (2007), a documentary about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. He also published numerous books, some of which include in-depth interviews with friends Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles. Bogdanovich's works have been cited as important influences by many major filmmakers.

Early life

Peter Bogdanovich (Serbian Cyrillic: Петар Богдановић) was born in Kingston, New York, the son of Herma (née Robinson) and Borislav Bogdanovich, a pianist and painter. His father was of Serbian descent and his mother was of Austrian Jewish descent. Bogdanovich was fluent in Serbian, having learned it before English. He had an older brother who died in an accident in 1938, at eighteen months of age, after a pot of boiling soup fell on him, though Bogdanovich did not learn about his brother until he was seven and did not know the circumstances of his death until he was an adult. His parents both arrived in the U.S. in May 1939 on visitors' visas, along with his mother's immediate family, three months before the onset of World War II. In 1952, when he was twelve, Bogdanovich began keeping a record of every film he saw on index cards, complete with reviews; he continued to do so until 1970. He saw up to four hundred films a year. He graduated from New York City's Collegiate School in 1957 and studied acting at the Stella Adler Conservatory.

Career

1960s

In the early 1960s, Bogdanovich was known as a film programmer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where he programmed influential retrospectives and wrote monographs for the films of Orson Welles, John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock. Bogdanovich also brought attention to Allan Dwan, a pioneer of American film who had fallen into obscurity by then, in a 1971 retrospective Dwan attended. He also programmed for New Yorker Theater.

Before becoming a director, he wrote for Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, and Cahiers du Cinéma as a film critic. These articles were collected in Pieces of Time (1973).

In 1966, following the example of Cahiers du Cinéma critics François 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. Encouraged by director Frank Tashlin, whom he would interview in his book Who the Devil Made It, Bogdanovich headed for Los Angeles with his wife Polly Platt and in so doing, left his rent unpaid.

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."

1970s

Returning to journalism, Bogdanovich struck up a lifelong friendship with Orson Welles while interviewing him on the set of Mike Nichols' Catch-22. Bogdanovich played a major role in reviving Welles and his career with his writings on the actor-director, particularly through his rebuttal, in the pages of Esquire, of Pauline Kael's book The Citizen Kane Book: Raising Kane, a 1971 attack on the centrality of Welles' contribution to the film. (Bogdanovich's book-length interview with Welles, This Is Orson Welles, was not released until 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. 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, re-edited it to make it "faster and more incisive", with additional interviews with Clint Eastwood, Walter Hill, Harry Carey Jr., Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and others.

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' 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 leading 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 screwball comedy What's Up, Doc?, starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal. Bogdanovich then formed The Directors Company with Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin and co-owned by Paramount Pictures. Paramount allowed the directors to make a minimum of twelve films with a budget of $3 million each. It was through this entity that Bogdanovich's Paper Moon 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 Cybill Shepherd vehicle, Daisy Miller, which had a lackluster critical reception and was a disappointment at the box office. The partners of The Directors Company all went their separate ways after the production of Daisy Miller.

Bogdanovich's next effort, At Long Last Love, was a musical starring Shepherd and Burt Reynolds. Both that and his next film, Nickelodeon, were critical and box-office disasters, severely damaging his standing in the film community. Reflecting upon his recent career, Bogdanovich said in 1976, "I was dumb. I made a lot of mistakes."

In 1975, he sued Universal for breaching a contract to produce and direct Bugsy. He then took a few years off, then returned to directing with a lower-budgeted film, Saint Jack, which was filmed in Singapore and starred Ben Gazzara in the title role. The film earned critical praise, although was not a box-office hit. The making of this film marked the end of his romantic relationship with Cybill Shepherd.