"You see so many movies... the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there's no sense of film grammar. There's no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It's just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy." -- Peter Bogdanovich
Peter Bogdanovich (born July 30, 1939) is an American film historian, director, writer, actor, producer, and critic. He was part of the wave of "New Hollywood" directors, which included William Friedkin, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Michael Cimino, and Francis Ford Coppola. His most critically acclaimed film is The Last Picture Show (1971).
In recent years, he’s developed a reputation as “America’s most famous former filmmaker” and for also being the most ubiquitous DVD critic and commentarian.
"But at a certain point, and I don't really know... people have asked me this. I don't know exactly what it was that pushed me towards directing, but I think it was a naive notion that if I directed I would be able to play all the roles. A kind of greed.""One of the things that wrong with pictures today, I think, is that so many of the people making them started out wanting to.""The actors are in control, getting outrageous amounts of money. The reason they're getting this kind of money is because the studios don't know what else to do. They don't have a clue about what to do except to pay an actor a lot of money."
The son of immigrants fleeing the Nazis - his father, Borislav Bogdanovich, is a Serbian painter and pianist and his mother, Herma Bogdanovich, descended from an Austrian Jewish family - Bogdanovich was conceived in Europe but born in America. He was an actor in the 1950s, studying his craft with acting teacher Stella Adler (he was only 16 but lied about his age and said he was 18 to qualify), and appeared on television and in summer stock. 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 and John Ford, whom he later wrote a book about based on the notes he had produced for the MoMA retrospective of the director, and 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, 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 life-long 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 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.
The 32-year-old Bogdanovich was hailed by a critics as a "Wellesian" wunderkind when his best-received film, The Last Picture Show, was released in 1971. The film gained eight Academy Awards 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 hit comedy What's Up, Doc? (1972), starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal, a screwball comedy indebted to Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940). Despite his reliance 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.
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 also 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, the 49-year-old Bogdanovich married 20-year-old Louise Stratten, Dorothy's younger sister, whom he had begun dating a few years after Dorothy's death. The couple divorced in 2001.
Though he achieved huge success with Mask (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 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 has 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, though it has never been released on DVD. 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 drug-related death.
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.
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 says 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 has returned to acting with a recurring guest role on the cable television series The Sopranos, playing 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 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 Criterion Collection DVDs, and has 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.
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 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. The same year, Bogdanovich was sued by Iaroslav Jivov, a Canadian businessman, for breach of contract. Jivov's suit alleged that Bogdanovich took $100,000 as a fee for allowing Jivov's son to work as an assistant on Bogdanovich's next film but failed to live up to his side of the deal.
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 significant films.
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.
