Peter Bogdanovich, who died Thursday at 82, goes in the books as a cautionary lesson.
Peter Bogdanovich, who died Thursday at 82, goes in the books as a cautionary lesson.
A true student of cinema, Peter Bogdanovich set the table for the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino by pioneering an intriguing new approach to cinema: making movies about other movies.
Like those others, Bogdanovich lived in the movies, and so he refracted and reflected on his Golden Age of Hollywood favorites with Seventies intensity, and in some cases improved on them. The intricately plotted and hilarious Ryan O’Neal–Barbra Streisand screwball comedy What’s Up Doc (1972) is funnier than the 1930s farces that inspired it, notably 1938’s Bringing Up Baby, and there’s a slapstick sequence starring Burt Reynolds in Bogdanovich’s vastly underrated homage to the silent era, Nickelodeon (1976), that is at least as funny as the Buster Keaton routines to which it pays homage.
Yet Bogdanovich, who died Thursday at 82, goes in the books as a cautionary lesson: Like Orson Welles, he did almost all of his best work at the outset of his career. Welles to Seventies audiences was best known for the wine commercials he did to stay solvent, and many younger viewers today recognize Bogdanovich only from his role playing a psychiatrist on The Sopranos.
Bogdanovich entered filmmaking through almost the least-likely path: as a film critic. Writing monographs for retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art gave him an excuse to interview filmmakers he loved, and as those directors — Welles, John Ford, Howard Hawks — were starting to be ushered out of Hollywood, they were happy to talk to him at length. As a writer, Bogdanovich produced perhaps the single greatest archive of in-depth discussions of film created by any one person and later published several books collecting this invaluable work.
Still, it was fanciful for him to think he could convert writing about film to making movies, and yet after he moved to L.A. from Manhattan, where he grew up, he quickly got a gig at the schlock factory of low-budget genre producer Roger Corman. Bogdanovich learned technique quickly, shooting a few scenes for a sci-fi film and then directing his own feature, Targets, a thriller about a mass shooting at a movie theater.
The Last Picture Show was just the second full movie Bogdanovich directed, and it was one of the cornerstones of cinema’s greatest era. Bogdanovich adapted a Larry McMurtry novel and built it around an old cowboy actor, Ben Johnson, who was notable for looking capable but barely saying anything while filling out the background in Ford’s westerns. As Sam the Lion, the moral authority of a desperate little Texas town, Johnson delivered a heartbreaking Oscar-winning performance, and so did Cloris Leachman as a wife who has been neglected by her husband and begins an affair with a high-school boy, who also doesn’t take her seriously. Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd’s careers also took off in the film, the best one of an outstanding year.
That movie and another black-and-white offering, the con-man comedy Paper Moon (1973), which won an Oscar for Tatum O’Neal, revived qualities that had been sorely lacking in late-’60s Hollywood: texture and authenticity. Despite being a New Yorker, and working with small budgets, Bogdanovich displayed a miraculous feel for 1950s Texas and 1930s Kansas as depicted in the detail-saturated and ageless films, which did much to renew Hollywood creatively and inspired a boomlet in black-and-white filmmaking. In between, the farce What’s Up Doc? (1972) was beautifully engineered, sheer comic perfection.
Yet at the same time, Bogdanovich was becoming hated. Dumping his wife and collaborator Polly Platt, he started a romance with Shepherd. He began wearing ascots and directing on horseback. His vocal register — condescending Eastern professorial snob — grated on people, though he was middle-class and hadn’t attended college. He had risen very quickly, from out of nowhere, and the industry prayed for his failure. It came quickly, with three of the most notorious flops of the Seventies — the Shepherd vehicles Daisy Miller (1974) and At Long Last Love (1975), in which we learned that neither Shepherd nor Reynolds could sing, and Nickelodeon, which worked terrifically in black and white, the way it was intended to be seen, but was released in color and failed.
Bogdanovich was in the doghouse, and by the time he emerged from it, he was hit with another flop and a horrific tragedy at the same time. His girlfriend, Playboy model Dorothy Stratten, was murdered by her jealous estranged husband at age 20 shortly after completing filming of her splashy film debut in Bogdanovich’s contorted comedy, They All Laughed. (Stratten’s story is chillingly told in Bob Fosse’s film Star 80.) Stratten didn’t live to see the finished picture, released a year after her death in 1981; Bogdanovich later married her little sister, Louise, who was just eleven when they met. He went bankrupt, and though he had success with the 1985 film Mask, starring Cher and Eric Stoltz as a boy with an extreme facial disfigurement, the film didn’t have the personal vision that characterized his early work, and it turned out to be the only hit he made in the last 45 years of his life.
Bogdanovich reflected frankly on his career in The Plot Thickens, an excellent series of podcasts produced by TCM in which he comes across as thoughtful and humble rather than arrogant. More so than the film nerds who followed him and live quietly, Bogdanovich accidentally made himself an outsized showbiz personality, becoming such a caricature of the entitled New Hollywood brat that he inspired an (excellent) film about his journey to the top and bottom, Irreconcilable Differences (1984), in which his old colleague Ryan O’Neal plays the Bogdanovich figure.
Welles and Bogdanovich — the one coming up with Citizen Kane at 26, the other with The Last Picture Show at 32, each of them responsible for a long string of personal and professional wreckage — seem to go into cinema history as a twinned pair; in the Seventies the older man was so broke that he moved into Bogdanovich’s house for a couple of years and ate all his ice cream. (Let’s have a film about that.) So loyal to his friend down the decades was Bogdanovich that his final project as a director was to complete Welles’s (terrible) movie The Other Side of the Wind; it’s an apropos double ending that both men finished their careers with the same flop.
“They’ll love me when I’m dead,” Welles once told Bogdanovich, and so it will probably be for the younger man. Let the reappraisal begin.