The small-town drama The Last Picture Show earned eight Oscar nominations and made Peter Bogdanovich the hottest young film director of 1971. Bogdanovich got his start as a critic, historian and eager film buff; he wrote about (and cultivated friendships with) Howard Hawks, Orson Welles and other leading directors before moving behind the camera himself. The screwball comedy What's Up, Doc? (1972, with Barbra Streisand) and then Paper Moon (1973, with the father-daughter combo of Ryan and Tatum O'Neal) were hits, but a series of flops and financial disasters put Bogdanovich's career in turnaround. In the two decades that followed he directed only sporadically, his most successful film being Mask (1985, with Cher). Bogdanovich's romantic life was equally tumultuous: he left his first wife for Cybill Shepherd, his star in The Last Picture Show, and after their breakup he fell in love with the Playboy model-turned-actress Dorothy Stratten. Stratten was shot to death by estranged husband Paul Snider in a 1980 murder-suicide. (The incident was the basis of Bob Fosse's 1983 film Star 80). In 1988 Bogdanovich turned heads by marrying Stratten's 20-year-old sister Louise Hoogstraten; she filed for divorce in 2001. Bogdanovich's many books about film include The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock (1963), Pieces of Time (1973) and the Hollywood character studies Who the Devil Made It? (1997) and Who the Hell's In It? (2004).
His 1990 film Texasville was a sequel to The Last Picture Show; both films were based on novels by Larry McMurtry... His 2002 film The Cat's Meow was based on the mysterious death of Hollywood pioneer Thomas Ince... Bogdanovich's 1984 book about Stratten was titled The Killing of the Unicorn... Another famous critic-turned-director was Francois Truffaut... He took a recurring acting role in the TV series The Sopranos, playing a psychiatrist who treats psychiatrist Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco).
Career Highlights: The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, Mask
First Major Screen Credit: Targets (1968)
Biography
Anointed as one of New Hollywood's golden boys with his neo-classical homages to John Ford and Howard Hawks, Peter Bogdanovich's personal and professional lives crashed and burned in the late '70s. Though he was redeemed somewhat with Mask (1985), his directorial career never fully recovered. By the late '90s, however, Bogdanovich returned to his original training as an actor and found success as a supporting player in films and on HBO's acclaimed series The Sopranos.
Raised in Manhattan, the precocious Bogdanovich began studying acting with Stella Adler at age 15 and spent his teens at the movies, developing a devotion to Hollywood. Though he acted in and directed several off-Broadway plays, Bogdanovich decided movies were his calling. While working as a film programmer in his early twenties, Bogdanovich began writing about cinema, publishing articles in Esquire and monographs on Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock; he married aspiring production designer Polly Platt in 1962. Inspired by the French critics-turned-New Wave directors, Bogdanovich headed to Hollywood in 1964, where he and Platt met both their graying heroes and a generation of unruly newcomers.
Like fellow gatecrashers Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, Bogdanovich's directorial career was jump-started by B-movie giant Roger Corman. Familiar with his Esquire writing, Corman hired Bogdanovich to work on his Peter Fonda motorcycle flick The Wild Angels (1966). Bogdanovich's experience encompassed rewrites, second unit direction, editing, and dubbing; Corman also cast Bogdanovich alongside Fonda and Dennis Hopper in The Trip (1967). Corman subsequently gave Bogdanovich a cheapie feature to write and direct, with the stipulation that he use Boris Karloff. With an assist from Platt, Bogdanovich came up with Targets (1968), a skillful thriller about an aging star and a nihilistic assassin. Cross-cutting between the two stories on the way to a suspenseful drive-in climax, Targets proved that Bogdanovich could make a movie as well as worship them, even if the assassination-weary 1968 audience stayed away.
While he got his movie-making career off the ground, Bogdanovich continued to write, publishing books on John Ford and Fritz Lang. After Targets, Bogdanovich spent several weeks locking horns with producer Sergio Leone on pre-production for Duck, You Sucker! (1971) in Rome before pulling out and returning to the states. Back in Hollywood, Bogdanovich put together the lauded AFI documentary Directed by John Ford (1971) and wrote a book on Allen Dwan.
Bogdanovich's second fiction feature came together when BBS Films (home of Fonda and Hopper's Easy Rider [1969]) enlisted Bogdanovich to write and direct a project of his choice. On Platt's advice, Bogdanovich adapted Larry McMurtrey's coming-of-age novel The Last Picture Show. Working closely with Platt, Bogdanovich crafted The Last Picture Show (1971) as a nostalgic look back to 1950s small town America and Hollywood tradition combined with a more clear-eyed, "European" view of the period's sexual mores and personal weaknesses. Starring Ford stalwart Ben Johnson as the town patriarch alongside newcomers Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms, and Cybill Shepherd as the troubled youth, and shot in crisp Ford-ian deep focus black-and-white, The Last Picture Show was hailed as one of the best films by a neophyte since Citizen Kane (1941) and earned eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Director. A popular success as well, The Last Picture Show was still playing when Bogdanovich's next film, What's Up, Doc?, opened in 1972. An update of Howard Hawks' screwball classic Bringing Up Baby (1938), starring Barbra Streisand as the dizzy dame and Ryan O'Neal as the uptight, bespectacled object of her affection, What's Up Doc? was a funny enough facsimile of Hawks to become one of the year's top hits.
An A-list phenom, Bogdanovich signed on to form the creatively autonomous (and potentially lucrative) Directors Company with fellow wunderkind Coppola and William Friedkin. His first film for the company, Paper Moon (1973), lived up to the hype. A Depression-era story about a grifter and his foul-mouthed daughter shot once again in Ford-esque monochrome, Paper Moon earned an Oscar for child actress Tatum O'Neal's performance opposite her father Ryan O'Neal, as well as big box office. Bogdanovich's personal life, however, began to intrude on his professional fortunes after Paper Moon. Though he left her for Shepherd in 1970, Platt had continued to work with Bogdanovich on What's Up Doc? and Paper Moon; after Platt severed their professional relationship, Bogdanovich's work floundered.
That relationship with Shepherd dealt a more visible blow to Bogdanovich's career when he decided to showcase her in his next two films. While she had been ideally cast as Picture Show's thoughtless beauty, the meticulous period design and strong supporting cast couldn't disguise Shepherd's failings in the title role of Bogdanovich's adaptation of Henry James' Daisy Miller (1974). Bogdanovich's homage to lavish 1930s musicals, At Long Last Love (1975), was a disaster; Shepherd's companion record, unfortunately titled Cybill Does It to Cole Porter, didn't help. The Directors Company (and his relationship with Shepherd) dissolved shortly thereafter. Bogdanovich's stylish silent movie tribute, Nickelodeon (1976), became his third consecutive flop.
Though Saint Jack (1979) was a succès d'estime, the troubled history of They All Laughed (1981) sent Bogdanovich into a tailspin. Reeling after one of the movie's stars and his new girlfriend, Dorothy Stratten, were murdered by her estranged husband, Bogdanovich then went bankrupt when he had to distribute the movie himself and it flopped. Retreating from Hollywood, Bogdanovich spent the early '80s revising his early books and writing a biography of Stratten; he raised eyebrows when he married Stratten's younger sister, Louise, in 1988. They split in 2001.
Working as a director for hire, Bogdanovich returned to favor with Mask (1985). A compelling study of a disfigured teen and his forceful mother, Mask won CherCannes' Best Actress prize and sterling reviews. The wretched comedy Illegally Yours (1988) and the poorly received Picture Show sequel Texasville (1990) squandered the professional goodwill; the barely released The Thing Called Love (1993) was better known as one of River Phoenix's last movies. Relegated to directing TV-movies, straight-to-videos, and contributing to documentaries, Bogdanovich declared bankruptcy again in the 1990s. He remained visible, though, as an actor in such films as Mr. Jealousy (1997). By 2000, Bogdanovich landed a part on the award-winning series The Sopranos as Lorraine Bracco's quizzical psychiatrist and returned to subjects close to his heart with the independent feature The Cat's Meow (2001), about the mystery surrounding Hollywood pioneer Thomas Ince's death. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
The son of immigrants fleeing the Nazis - his father, Borislav Bogdanovich, is a Serbian painter and pianist and his mother, Herma Bogdanovich, descended from a rich AustrianJewish 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."[1]
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.
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: Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson in the supporting acting categories. Bogdanovich also co-wrote the screenplay with Larry McMurtry. The screenplay won a BAFTA award in 1971 for Best Screenplay. 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 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' Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940). 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.
Later Years
Bogdanovich turned back to writing as his directorial career sagged, beginning with a 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 Dorothy Stratten, 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 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..., 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 actor River Phoenix's last roles before an 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 conducted in the past 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 Welles' bête noireWilliam 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 from Welles who in turn said he heard it from writer Charles Lederer.[2]
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. He has 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.
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.[3] 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.[4] The same year, Bogdanovich was sued by Iaroslav Jivov, a Canadian businessman, for breach of contract. Jiviov's suit alleged that Bogdonavich 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.[5]
