Peter Bogdanovich(1939-2022)
- Actor
- Director
- Writer
Peter Bogdanovich was conceived in Europe but born in Kingston, New York. He is the son of immigrants fleeing the Nazis, Herma (Robinson) and Borislav Bogdanovich, a painter and pianist. His father was a Serbian Orthodox Christian, and his mother was from a wealthy Austrian Jewish family. Peter originally was an actor in the 1950s, studying his craft
with legendary acting teacher Stella Adler
and appearing on television and in summer stock. In the early 1960s he
achieved notoriety 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, about whom he subsequently
wrote a book 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 Cinema, especially critic-turned-director
François Truffaut. Before becoming a
director himself, he built his reputation as a film writer with
articles in Esquire Magazine. In 1968, following the example of Cahiers
du Cinema critics Truffaut,
Jean-Luc Godard,
Claude Chabrol and
Éric Rohmer who had created the Nouvelle
Vague ("New Wave") by making their own films, Bogdanovich became a
director. Working for low-budget schlock-meister
Roger Corman, Bogdanovich directed the
critically praised Targets (1968) and the
not-so-critically praised
Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968),
a film best forgotten.
Turning back to journalism, Bogdanovich struck up a lifelong friendship
with the legendary Orson Welles while
interviewing him on the set of
Mike Nichols' film adaptation of
Catch-22 (1970) from the novel by
Joseph Heller. Subsequently, Bogdanovich
has played a major role in elucidating Welles and his career with his
writings on the great actor-director, most notably his book "This is
Orson Welles" (1992). He has steadily produced invaluable books about
the cinema, especially "Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with
Legendary Film Directors," an indispensable tome that establishes
Bogdanovich, along with Kevin Brownlow,
as one of the premier English-language chroniclers of cinema.
The 32-year-old Bogdanovich was hailed by a critics as a Wellesian
wunderkind when his most famous film,
The Last Picture Show (1971)
was released. The film received eight Academy Award nominations,
including Bogdanovich as Best Director, and won two of them, for
Cloris Leachman and "John Ford Stock
Company" veteran Ben Johnson in the
supporting acting categories. Bogdanovich, who had cast 19-year-old
model Cybill Shepherd in a major role in
the film, fell in love with the young beauty, an affair that eventually
led to his divorce from the film's set designer
Polly Platt, his longtime artistic
collaborator and the mother of his two children.
Bogdanovich followed up
The Last Picture Show (1971)
with a major hit,
What's Up, Doc? (1972), a
screwball comedy heavily indebted to Hawks'
Bringing Up Baby (1938) and
His Girl Friday (1940), starring
Barbra Streisand and 'Ryan
O'Neal'. 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 strict budget limitations.
It was through this entity that Bogdanovich's next big hit, the
critically praised Paper Moon (1973),
was produced.
Paper Moon (1973), a Depression-era
comedy starring Ryan O'Neal that won his
ten-year-old daughter Tatum O'Neal an Oscar as Best
Supporting Actress, proved to be the highwater 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 films,
Francis Ford Coppola's critically
acclaimed
The Conversation (1974) which
was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture of 1974 and
garnered Coppola an Oscar nod for Best Director, and Bogdanovich's
Daisy Miller (1974), a film that had
a quite different critical reception.
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 Cybill Shepherd as the title
character, was savaged by critics and was a flop at the box office.
Bogdanovich's follow-up,
At Long Last Love (1975), a
filming of the Cole Porter musical starring
Cybill Shepherd, was derided by some critics
as one of the worst films ever made, noted as such in
Harry Medved and
Michael Medved's book "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, a hotly burning
star who would achieve super-nova status at the end of the 1970s.
Bogdanovich insisted on filming the
musical numbers for
At Long Last Love (1975) live,
a process not used since the early days of the talkies, when sound
engineer Douglas Shearer developed
lip-synching at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. 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
Cybill Shepherd singing
Cole Porter songs in 1974). The public
perception of Bogdanovich became that of an arrogant director hamstrung
by his own hubris.
Trying to recapture the lightning in the bottle that was his early
success, Bogdanovich once again turned to the past, his own and that of
cinema, with Nickelodeon (1976). The
film, a comedy recounting the earliest days of the motion picture
industry, reunited Ryan O'Neal and 'Tatum O'Neal'
from his last hit, Paper Moon (1973)
with Burt Reynolds. Counseled not
to use the unpopular (with both audiences and critics)
Cybill Shepherd in the film, Bogdanovich
instead used newcomer Jane Hitchcock as
the film's ingénue. Unfortunately, the magic of
Paper Moon (1973) was not be
repeated and the film died at the box office.
Jane Hitchcock, Bogdanovich's discovery,
would make only one more film before calling it quits.
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
Cybill Shepherd had ended in 1978, but
the production deal making Hugh 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 (1971)
in Playboy Magazine. Bogdanovich then launched the film that would be
his career Waterloo,
They All Laughed (1981), a
low-budget ensemble comedy starring
Audrey Hepburn and the 1980 Playboy
Playmate of the Year, Dorothy Stratten.
During the filming of the picture, Bogdanovich fell in love with
Stratten, who was married to an emotionally unstable hustler,
Paul Snider, who relied on her
financially. Stratten moved in with Bogdanovich, and when she told
Snider she was leaving him, he shot and killed her, then committed suicide.
They All Laughed (1981) could
not attract a distributor due to the negative publicity surrounding the
Stratten murder, despite it being one of the few films made by the
legendary Audrey Hepburn after her
provisional retirement in 1967 (the film would prove to be Hepburn's
last starring role in a theatrically released motion picture). 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,
garnered weak reviews and cost Bogdanovich millions of dollars, driving
the emotionally devastated director into bankruptcy.
Bogdanovich turned back to his first avocation, writing, to pen a
memoir of his dead love, "The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten
(1960-1980)" that was published in 1984. The book was a riposte to
Teresa Carpenter's "Death of a
Playmate" article written for The Village Voice that had won the 1981
Pulitzer Prize. Carpenter had lambasted Bogdanovich and
Hugh Hefner, claiming that Stratten
was as much a victim of them as she was of
Paul Snider. The article served as
the basis of Bob Fosse's film
Star 80 (1983), in which Bogdanovich was
portrayed as the fictional director "Aram Nicholas".
Bogdanovich's career as a noted director was over, and though he
achieved modest success with Mask (1985),
his sequel to his greatest success
The Last Picture Show (1971),
Texasville (1990), was a critical and
box office disappointment. He directed two more theatrical films in
1992 and 1993, but their failure kept him off the big screen until
2001's The Cat's Meow (2001).
Returning once again to a reworking of the past, this time the alleged
murder of director Thomas H. Ince by
Welles' bete noir
William Randolph Hearst,
The Cat's Meow (2001) was a
modest critical success but a flop at the box office. In addition to
helming some television movies, Bogdanovich has returned to acting,
with a recurring guest role on the cable television series
The Sopranos (1999) as Dr.
Jennifer Melfi's analyst.
Bogdanovich's personal reputation suffered from gossip about his
13-year marriage to Dorothy Stratten's
19-year-old-kid sister Louise Stratten,
who was 29 years his junior. Some gossip held that Bogdanovich's
behavior was akin to that of the
James Stewart character in
Alfred Hitchcock's necrophiliac
masterpiece Vertigo (1958), with the
director trying to remold Stratten into the image of her late sister.
The marriage ended in divorce in 2001.
Now in his early eighties, Bogdanovich has arguably imitated his hero
Orson Welles, but in an unintended fashion,
as filmmaker who never regained the acclaim bestowed on their first major success.
However, unlike the widely acclaimed master Welles, the
orbit of Bogdanovich's reputation has never recovered from the apogee
it reached briefly in the early 1970s.
There has been speculation that Peter Bogdanovich's ruin as a director
was guaranteed when he ditched his wife and artistic collaborator
Polly Platt for Cybill Shepherd. Platt
had worked with Bogdanovich on all his early successes, and some
critics believe that the controlling artistic consciousness on
The Last Picture Show (1971)
was Platt's. Parting company with Platt after
Paper Moon (1973), Bogdanovich
promptly slipped from the heights of a wunderkind to a has-been
pursuing epic folly, as evidenced by
Daisy Miller (1974) and
At Long Last Love (1975).
In 1998 the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress
named
The Last Picture Show (1971)
to the National Film Registry, an honor awarded only to the most
culturally significant films.
with legendary acting teacher Stella Adler
and appearing on television and in summer stock. In the early 1960s he
achieved notoriety 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, about whom he subsequently
wrote a book 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 Cinema, especially critic-turned-director
François Truffaut. Before becoming a
director himself, he built his reputation as a film writer with
articles in Esquire Magazine. In 1968, following the example of Cahiers
du Cinema critics Truffaut,
Jean-Luc Godard,
Claude Chabrol and
Éric Rohmer who had created the Nouvelle
Vague ("New Wave") by making their own films, Bogdanovich became a
director. Working for low-budget schlock-meister
Roger Corman, Bogdanovich directed the
critically praised Targets (1968) and the
not-so-critically praised
Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968),
a film best forgotten.
Turning back to journalism, Bogdanovich struck up a lifelong friendship
with the legendary Orson Welles while
interviewing him on the set of
Mike Nichols' film adaptation of
Catch-22 (1970) from the novel by
Joseph Heller. Subsequently, Bogdanovich
has played a major role in elucidating Welles and his career with his
writings on the great actor-director, most notably his book "This is
Orson Welles" (1992). He has steadily produced invaluable books about
the cinema, especially "Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with
Legendary Film Directors," an indispensable tome that establishes
Bogdanovich, along with Kevin Brownlow,
as one of the premier English-language chroniclers of cinema.
The 32-year-old Bogdanovich was hailed by a critics as a Wellesian
wunderkind when his most famous film,
The Last Picture Show (1971)
was released. The film received eight Academy Award nominations,
including Bogdanovich as Best Director, and won two of them, for
Cloris Leachman and "John Ford Stock
Company" veteran Ben Johnson in the
supporting acting categories. Bogdanovich, who had cast 19-year-old
model Cybill Shepherd in a major role in
the film, fell in love with the young beauty, an affair that eventually
led to his divorce from the film's set designer
Polly Platt, his longtime artistic
collaborator and the mother of his two children.
Bogdanovich followed up
The Last Picture Show (1971)
with a major hit,
What's Up, Doc? (1972), a
screwball comedy heavily indebted to Hawks'
Bringing Up Baby (1938) and
His Girl Friday (1940), starring
Barbra Streisand and 'Ryan
O'Neal'. 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 strict budget limitations.
It was through this entity that Bogdanovich's next big hit, the
critically praised Paper Moon (1973),
was produced.
Paper Moon (1973), a Depression-era
comedy starring Ryan O'Neal that won his
ten-year-old daughter Tatum O'Neal an Oscar as Best
Supporting Actress, proved to be the highwater 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 films,
Francis Ford Coppola's critically
acclaimed
The Conversation (1974) which
was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture of 1974 and
garnered Coppola an Oscar nod for Best Director, and Bogdanovich's
Daisy Miller (1974), a film that had
a quite different critical reception.
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 Cybill Shepherd as the title
character, was savaged by critics and was a flop at the box office.
Bogdanovich's follow-up,
At Long Last Love (1975), a
filming of the Cole Porter musical starring
Cybill Shepherd, was derided by some critics
as one of the worst films ever made, noted as such in
Harry Medved and
Michael Medved's book "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, a hotly burning
star who would achieve super-nova status at the end of the 1970s.
Bogdanovich insisted on filming the
musical numbers for
At Long Last Love (1975) live,
a process not used since the early days of the talkies, when sound
engineer Douglas Shearer developed
lip-synching at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. 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
Cybill Shepherd singing
Cole Porter songs in 1974). The public
perception of Bogdanovich became that of an arrogant director hamstrung
by his own hubris.
Trying to recapture the lightning in the bottle that was his early
success, Bogdanovich once again turned to the past, his own and that of
cinema, with Nickelodeon (1976). The
film, a comedy recounting the earliest days of the motion picture
industry, reunited Ryan O'Neal and 'Tatum O'Neal'
from his last hit, Paper Moon (1973)
with Burt Reynolds. Counseled not
to use the unpopular (with both audiences and critics)
Cybill Shepherd in the film, Bogdanovich
instead used newcomer Jane Hitchcock as
the film's ingénue. Unfortunately, the magic of
Paper Moon (1973) was not be
repeated and the film died at the box office.
Jane Hitchcock, Bogdanovich's discovery,
would make only one more film before calling it quits.
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
Cybill Shepherd had ended in 1978, but
the production deal making Hugh 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 (1971)
in Playboy Magazine. Bogdanovich then launched the film that would be
his career Waterloo,
They All Laughed (1981), a
low-budget ensemble comedy starring
Audrey Hepburn and the 1980 Playboy
Playmate of the Year, Dorothy Stratten.
During the filming of the picture, Bogdanovich fell in love with
Stratten, who was married to an emotionally unstable hustler,
Paul Snider, who relied on her
financially. Stratten moved in with Bogdanovich, and when she told
Snider she was leaving him, he shot and killed her, then committed suicide.
They All Laughed (1981) could
not attract a distributor due to the negative publicity surrounding the
Stratten murder, despite it being one of the few films made by the
legendary Audrey Hepburn after her
provisional retirement in 1967 (the film would prove to be Hepburn's
last starring role in a theatrically released motion picture). 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,
garnered weak reviews and cost Bogdanovich millions of dollars, driving
the emotionally devastated director into bankruptcy.
Bogdanovich turned back to his first avocation, writing, to pen a
memoir of his dead love, "The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten
(1960-1980)" that was published in 1984. The book was a riposte to
Teresa Carpenter's "Death of a
Playmate" article written for The Village Voice that had won the 1981
Pulitzer Prize. Carpenter had lambasted Bogdanovich and
Hugh Hefner, claiming that Stratten
was as much a victim of them as she was of
Paul Snider. The article served as
the basis of Bob Fosse's film
Star 80 (1983), in which Bogdanovich was
portrayed as the fictional director "Aram Nicholas".
Bogdanovich's career as a noted director was over, and though he
achieved modest success with Mask (1985),
his sequel to his greatest success
The Last Picture Show (1971),
Texasville (1990), was a critical and
box office disappointment. He directed two more theatrical films in
1992 and 1993, but their failure kept him off the big screen until
2001's The Cat's Meow (2001).
Returning once again to a reworking of the past, this time the alleged
murder of director Thomas H. Ince by
Welles' bete noir
William Randolph Hearst,
The Cat's Meow (2001) was a
modest critical success but a flop at the box office. In addition to
helming some television movies, Bogdanovich has returned to acting,
with a recurring guest role on the cable television series
The Sopranos (1999) as Dr.
Jennifer Melfi's analyst.
Bogdanovich's personal reputation suffered from gossip about his
13-year marriage to Dorothy Stratten's
19-year-old-kid sister Louise Stratten,
who was 29 years his junior. Some gossip held that Bogdanovich's
behavior was akin to that of the
James Stewart character in
Alfred Hitchcock's necrophiliac
masterpiece Vertigo (1958), with the
director trying to remold Stratten into the image of her late sister.
The marriage ended in divorce in 2001.
Now in his early eighties, Bogdanovich has arguably imitated his hero
Orson Welles, but in an unintended fashion,
as filmmaker who never regained the acclaim bestowed on their first major success.
However, unlike the widely acclaimed master Welles, the
orbit of Bogdanovich's reputation has never recovered from the apogee
it reached briefly in the early 1970s.
There has been speculation that Peter Bogdanovich's ruin as a director
was guaranteed when he ditched his wife and artistic collaborator
Polly Platt for Cybill Shepherd. Platt
had worked with Bogdanovich on all his early successes, and some
critics believe that the controlling artistic consciousness on
The Last Picture Show (1971)
was Platt's. Parting company with Platt after
Paper Moon (1973), Bogdanovich
promptly slipped from the heights of a wunderkind to a has-been
pursuing epic folly, as evidenced by
Daisy Miller (1974) and
At Long Last Love (1975).
In 1998 the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress
named
The Last Picture Show (1971)
to the National Film Registry, an honor awarded only to the most
culturally significant films.