Peter Bogdanovich

Film Director

• Born: July 30, 1939
• Birthplace: Kingston, New York
• Died: January 6, 2022
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Director, actor, and writer

Bogdanovich was an auteur whose early accomplishments in film direction earned worldwide acclaim and contributed to film history.

Areas of achievement: Entertainment; literature

Early Life

Peter Bogdanovich was born on July 30, 1939, to an Austrian Jewish mother, Herma, and a Greek Orthodox Serbian painter and pianist father, Borislav Bogdanovich. The couple fled Europe in 1939 with visas for the New York World’s Fair as Adolf Hitler’s noose tightened on European Jewry. They never went back. The efforts of Bogdanovich’s father saved his wife’s immediate family, but extended family members were all murdered. Bogdanovich was born soon after they arrived and settled in New York.

Growing up in Manhattan, Bogdanovich was a film aficionado and the film expert for his high school newspaper. As he told a reporter in a 1995 interview, “I was looking for ways to get into films for free, and I found you could get on screening lists if you wrote columns.” He bluffed his way into Stella Adler’s acting school by lying about his age and eventually found minor roles on television and in summer stock. By the early 1960s he was a film programmer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His fascination with American directors John Ford, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, and Allan Dwan inspired him to write books about each of them.

In another interview, Bogdanovich observed, “I started as a theater actor hoping I’d be discovered. I wasn’t. I wrote about films to learn about them . . . for my own purposes . . . and as a way of meeting legendary figures. I did and I published twelve books on them. But I prefer acting and directing to writing. It’s more fun than working by yourself.” A friend at Harper’s magazine noticed his writing, and soon he was contributing articles about film to Esquire, The New York Times, and Cahiers du Cinema. (A collection of his profiles, Pieces of Time, was first published in 1973.)

In 1962, he married fellow film buff Polly Platt. She would soon become his artistic collaborator. They had two daughters, Antonia and Sashy. Following such New Wave directors as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, Bogdanovich decided to become a film director. In 1964, he and his wife headed to Los Angeles.

In Hollywood, Bogdanovich met Roger Corman, who, familiar with Bogdanovich’s written work, offered him a job. Corman, a Hollywood legend whose main oeuvre was shlock epics made quickly and within low budgets, became a seminal figure in film because under his tutelage many actors and directors would go on to achieve great fame. Corman taught Bogdanovich the basics of the film industry. (In a 2001 interview Bogdanovich revealed, “I went from getting the laundry to directing a picture in three weeks. Altogether, I worked for twenty-two weeks—preproduction, shooting, second unit, cutting, dubbing—I haven’t learned as much since.”)

In 1966, Bogdanovich assisted Corman with The Wild Angels and acted in The Trip (1967). Under Corman, Bogdanovich directed Boris Karloff’s final film, Targets (1968), and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968).

In 1971, Bogdanovich was hired by Italian director Sergio Leone (who turned Clint Eastwood into a megastar with his spaghetti Westerns) for Duck You Sucker! The relationship quickly soured, and Bogdanovich returned to the United States to film the American Film Institute documentary Directed by John Ford (1971).

Life’s Work

In 1970, as part of his continuing work for various publications on the subject of film, Bogdanovich interviewed Welles. The two developed a deep rapport. When pinched for cash, Welles even lived with Bogdanovich. (In 1992, Bogdanovich published This Is Orson Welles, a record of their conversations, which became an important text in detailing the life and career of the great but troubled Welles.)

It was at this time that BBS Films, former Corman associates, approached him to write and direct a film of his own choosing. Platt advised him to adapt The Last Picture Show (1966), a Larry McMurtry coming-of-age novel, for the screen. Filmed in black and white, the 1971 film starred Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges (in his first major film role) as teens struggling against the decline of their small Texas hometown. It went on to be nominated for eight Academy Awards, including for best director. However, it also led to Bogdanovich's divorce from Platt when he fell in love with one of the film's other lead actors, the former model Cybill Shepherd.

The Last Picture Show catapulted Bogdanovich to the forefront of a generation of young, promising filmmakers, with some critics comparing him favorably to his idol, Welles. Along with fellow wunderkinds Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin, Bogdanovich formed the Director’s Company, making a deal with Paramount Pictures that would allow them latitude on future productions. Bogdanovich’s next two films came out of that affiliation. Bogdanovich was also asked to direct The Godfather (1972) but turned it down. Eventually his partner Coppola took it on.

Bogdanovich's two followup works, the comedies What’s Up, Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973), films Platt had committed to finish with him, were successful both critically and commercially. The latter film, set during the Great Depression and also filmed in black and white, starred Ryan O'Neal and his real-life daughter Tatum, who became the youngest winner of the Academy Award for best supporting actress at the age of ten. However, once Bogdanovich's professional relationship with Platt officially ended, so did his string of successes. Again, his choice of films failed him. When he was offered Chinatown (1974), another destined classic, he rejected the offer. His company also fell apart.

Asked why he consistently turned down films that would go on to be major successes, he responded: “I made a lot of mistakes when I was successful in the 1970s. You know, there’s no handbook for success, so I couldn’t make out what vibe I was picking up. But it’s called jealousy, envy, and loathing, though they come at you with smiles because they want something from you. So you put on a front of arrogance to cover insecurity.”

Bogdanovich then showcased Shepherd in Daisy Miller (1974) and At Long Last Love (1975), both bombs at the box office. After directing the critical and commercial flop Nickelodeon (1976) and the well-reviewed but poor-performing Saint Jack (1976), which won best film at the Venice Film Festival, by 1978 his personal life fell apart as well. He and Shepherd split.

In 1980, Bogdanovich fell in love with Playboy Bunny Dorothy Stratten and showcased her in They All Laughed (1981). Stratten’s soon-to-be ex-husband, in a fit of jealous rage, killed her and then himself. It took three years for Bogdanovich to recover from the blow. In tribute, Bogdanovich wrote the memoir The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten (1960-1980), published in 1984. Four years later he married Stratten’s twenty-year-old half-sister. Their marriage lasted thirteen years.

In 1985, Bogdanovich had some success with Mask, starring Cher, but Illegally Yours (1988) and Texasville (1990), the sequel to The Last Picture Show, were failures. Noises Off was released in 1992 and then in 1993 The Thing Called Love opened. Both films were box-office failures.

During the 1990s Bogdanovich concentrated on television. He directed “Song of Songs,” an episode of Picture Windows; “A Dime a Dance” for Fallen Angels; Never Say Goodbye (1996); To Sir with Love II (1996); Blessed Assurance (1997); “Stories of Courage: Two Women,” for Rescuers; “A Killer Christmas” for Naked City; A Saintly Switch (1999); The Mystery of Natalie Wood (2004); “Sentimental Education” for The Sopranos; and Hustle: The Pete Rose Story (2004). Another theatrical release in 2001, The Cat’s Meow, enjoyed minor praise, but failed at the box office. After that Bogdanovich worked only sporadically, including appearing in a recurring role on television’s The Sopranos. He returned to the big screen as director of She's Funny That Way (2015), another screwball comedy, to once again mixed reviews.

Significance

Early in his career Bogdanovich was hailed as a great up-and-coming young talent, with his efforts as a director winning critical acclaim and significant box office success. His style drew heavily on the cinematic traditions of the 1930s and 40s, sparking new interest in those periods and helping to shape the film renaissance of the 1970s. However, his later films failed to replicate his early success, leading some critics and scholars to hold him up as a prime argument against the auteur theory of filmmaking, in which visionary directors are seen as the main creative force behind a film production.

Because he became an expert in film history and had a journalist’s access to the Hollywood greats, Bogdanovich also became a consistent and prolific writer of serious articles and reference works. In addition to his books on Orson Welles (1961), Howard Hawks (1962), Alfred Hitchcock (1963), John Ford (1967), Fritz Lang (1968) and Allan Dwan (1970), he wrote A Moment with Miss Gish (1995), Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors (1997), Peter Bogdanovich’s Movie of the Week (1999), and Who the Hell’s in It: Conversations with Hollywood’s Legendary Actors (2004). His work earned him a 2007 award from The International Federation of Film Archives and a 2010 appointment to the faculty of the School of Filmmaking at the University of North Carolina.

Bibliography

Bogdanovich, Peter. “What They Learned from Roger Corman.” Interview by Beverly Gray. Moviemaker Magazine, Spring, 2001. Print.

Bogdanovich, Peter. Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors. New York: Knopf, 1997. Print.

Bogdanovich, Peter. Who the Hell’s in It: Conversations with Hollywood’s Legendary Actors. New York: Knopf, 2004. Print.

Hopwood, Jon C. "Peter Bogdanovich Biography." IMDb. IMDb.com, 2016. Web. 25 Mar. 2016.

"Peter Bogdanovich: Biography." Hollywood.com. Hollywood.com, 2016. Web. 25 Mar. 2016.

Yule, Andrew. Picture Shows: The Life and Films of Peter Bogdanovich. New York: Limelight, 1992. Print.