Peter BogdanovichComSE (July 30, 1939 – January 6, 2022) was an American director, writer, actor, producer, critic, and film historian. He started his career as a film critic for Film Culture and Esquire before becoming a film director in the New Hollywood movement. He received accolades including a BAFTA Awards and Grammy Award, as well as nominations for two Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards.
An accomplished film historian, he directed documentaries such as Directed by John Ford (1971) and The Great Buster: A Celebration (2018). He also published over ten books, some of which include in-depth interviews with friends Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock. Bogdanovich's works have been cited as important influences by many major filmmakers.[5]
Early life
Peter Bogdanovich was born in Kingston, New York, the son of Herma (née Robinson) and Borislav Bogdanovich, a pianist and painter.[6][7] His mother was of Austrian Jewish descent and his father was a Serb. Bogdanovich was fluent in Serbian, having learned it before English.[8][9] He had an older brother who died in an accident in 1938, at eighteen months of age, after a pot of boiling soup fell on him, though Bogdanovich did not learn about his brother until he was seven and did not know the circumstances of his death until he was an adult.[10] His parents both arrived in the U.S. in May 1939 on visitors' visas, along with his mother's immediate family, three months before the onset of World War II.[7][11] In 1952, when he was twelve, Bogdanovich began keeping a record of every film he saw on index cards, complete with reviews; he continued to do so until 1970.[12][13] He saw up to four hundred films a year.[14] He graduated from New York City's Collegiate School in 1957 and studied acting at the Stella Adler Conservatory.[8]
In 1966, following the example of Cahiers du Cinéma critics François 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. Encouraged by director Frank Tashlin, whom he would interview in his book Who the Devil Made It, Bogdanovich headed for Los Angeles with his wife Polly Platt and in so doing, left his rent unpaid.[19][20]
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."[21]
1970s
Returning to journalism, Bogdanovich struck up a lifelong friendship with Orson Welles while interviewing him on the set of Mike Nichols's Catch-22. Bogdanovich played a major role in reviving Welles and his career with his writings on the actor-director, including his book This is Orson Welles. In the early 1970s, when Welles was having financial problems, Bogdanovich let him stay at his Bel Air mansion for a couple of years.[8]
Much of the inspiration that led Bogdanovich to his cinematic creations came from early viewings of the film Citizen Kane. In an interview with Robert K. Elder, author of The Film That Changed My Life, Bogdanovich explains his appreciation of Orson Welles's work:
It's just not like any other movie you know. It's the first modern film: fragmented, not told straight ahead, jumping around. It anticipates everything that's being done now, and which is thought to be so modern. It's all become really decadent now, but it was certainly fresh then.[23]
The 32-year-old Bogdanovich was hailed by critics as a "Wellesian" wunderkind when his best-received film, The Last Picture Show, was released in 1971. The film earned eight Academy Award 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 leading to his divorce from Polly Platt, his longtime artistic collaborator and the mother of his two daughters.[24]
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 Cybill Shepherd-starring Daisy Miller, which had a lackluster critical reception and was a disappointment at the box office.[8] The partners of The Directors Company all went their separate ways after the production of Daisy Miller.[25]
Bogdanovich's next effort, At Long Last Love, was a musical starring Shepherd and Burt Reynolds. Both that and his next film, Nickelodeon, were critical and box-office disasters,[8] severely damaging his standing in the film community. Reflecting upon his recent career, Bogdanovich said in 1976, "I was dumb. I made a lot of mistakes."[27]
In 1975, he sued Universal for breaching a contract to produce and direct Bugsy.[28] He then took a few years off, then returned to directing with a lower-budgeted film, Saint Jack, which was filmed in Singapore and starred Ben Gazzarra in the title role.[29] The film earned critical praise, although was not a box-office hit.[30] The making of this film marked the end of his romantic relationship with Cybill Shepherd.[31]
1980s
Bogdanovich's next film was the romantic comedy They All Laughed which featured Dorothy Stratten, a former model and Playboy Playmate of the Month for August 1979 and Playmate of the Year in 1980,[32] who began a romantic relationship with Bogdanovich. Bogdanovich took over distribution of They All Laughed himself. He later blamed this for why he had to file for bankruptcy in 1985.[33] He declared he had a monthly income of $75,000 and monthly expenses of $200,000.[34]
Stratten was murdered by her estranged husband shortly after filming completed.[24] Following her death, Bogdanovich began writing The Killing of the Unicorn – Dorothy Stratten 1960–1980, a memoir detailing the relationship between Bogdanovich and Stratten, the making of They All Laughed and Stratten's murder. Bogdanovich says he wrote the book for himself, "I wanted to understand what happened to her. I felt I couldn't move forward with my life, creative or otherwise until I did." Bogdanovich says the book was meant to be delivered to William Morrow in August 1982 "but new facts kept coming to light and so it was delayed. I did more and more rewriting. In all, I suppose, I wrote the book five times." The book was eventually published in 1984.[35]
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.[8] Carpenter's article served as the basis of Bob Fosse's film Star 80. Bogdanovich opposed the production and refused to allow the film to use his name. He was portrayed as the fictional "Aram Nicholas", and he threatened litigation if he found the character objectionable.[36]
Hefner retaliated by accusing Bogdanovich of seducing Stratten's younger sister Louise, shortly after the murder, when she was 13. Bogdanovich vehemently denied the accusation. On December 30, 1988, the 49-year-old Bogdanovich married 20-year-old Louise, sparking a tabloid frenzy.[8][37] The couple divorced in 2001.[38]
Bogdanovich returned to directing officially with Mask, released in 1985 to critical acclaim. Mask was released with a song score by Bob Seger against Bogdanovich's wishes (he favored Bruce Springsteen). A director's cut of the film, slightly longer and with Springsteen's songs, was belatedly released on DVD in 2004.[40][41]
Bogdanovich directed the comedy Illegally Yours in 1988, a film he later disowned.
1990s
In 1990, Bogdanovich adapted Larry McMurtry's novel Texasville, a sequel to The Last Picture Show, into a film. It is set 33 years after the events of The Last Picture Show, and Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd both reprised their roles as Duane and Jacy. It was a critical and box office disappointment relative to the first film.[24] Bogdanovich often complained that the version of Texasville that was released was not the film he had intended. His cut of Texasville was later released on LaserDisc, and the theatrical cut was released on DVD by MGM in 2005.[42] After the release of Texasville, Bogdanovich revisited The Last Picture Show and produced a modified director's cut for Criterion which includes seven minutes of previously unseen footage and re-edited scenes.[43]
In 1991, Bogdanovich developed an alternative calendar, titled A Year and a Day: Goddess Engagement Calendar. The calendar consisted of 13 months of 28 days and a bonus day to equal 365 days. Each month was named after a different species of tree.[44] Bogdanovich attributed his inspiration for the calendar to the works of Robert Graves.[45]
Bogdanovich directed two more theatrical films in 1992 and 1993, but neither of these films recaptured the success of his early career. One, Noises Off, based on the Michael Frayn play,[24] while another, The Thing Called Love, is better known as one of River Phoenix's last roles before his death. In the mid-90s, Bogdanovich began to work in television, directing films such as To Sir, with Love II.[46] In 1997, he declared bankruptcy again.[47] Drawing from his encyclopedic knowledge of film history, he 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.[8]
2000s
In 2001, Bogdanovich resurfaced with The Cat's Meow. Returning once again to a reworking of the past, this time the alleged killing of director Thomas Ince by William Randolph Hearst. The film was a modest critical success but made little money at the box-office. Bogdanovich said that he was told the story of the alleged Ince murder by Welles, who in turn said he heard it from writer Charles Lederer.[48]
In addition to directing some television work, Bogdanovich returned to acting with a recurring guest role on the cable television series The Sopranos, playing Dr. Melfi's psychotherapist,[8] also later directing a fifth-season episode. He had a voice role, as Bart Simpson's therapist's analyst in an episode of The Simpsons,[49] and appeared as himself in the "Robots Versus Wrestlers" episode of How I Met Your Mother.[50]Quentin Tarantino cast Bogdanovich as a disc jockey in Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Kill Bill: Volume 2. "Quentin knows, because he's such a movie buff, that when you hear a disc jockey's voice in my pictures, it's always me, sometimes doing different voices", said Bogdanovich. "So he called me and he said, 'I stole your voice from The Last Picture Show for the rough cut, but I need you to come down and do that voice again for my picture... '"[51] He hosted The Essentials on Turner Classic Movies, but was replaced in May 2006 by TCM host Robert Osborne and film critic Molly Haskell. Bogdanovich hosted introductions to movies on Criterion Collection DVDs, and had a supporting role in Out of Order.[52]
In 2006, Bogdanovich joined forces with ClickStar, where he hosted a classic film channel, Peter Bogdanovich's Golden Age of Movies. Bogdanovich also wrote a blog for the site.[53] In 2003, he appeared in the BBC documentary Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, and in 2006 he appeared in the documentary Wanderlust. The following year, 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.[54]
2010s
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. In 2011, he was given the Auteur Award by the International Press Academy, which is awarded to filmmakers whose singular vision and unique artistic control over the elements of production give a personal and signature style to their films.[55]
Today, there's a general numbing of the audience. There's too much murder and killing. You make people insensitive by showing it all the time. The body count in pictures is huge. It numbs the audience into thinking it's not so terrible. Back in the '70s, I asked Orson Welles what he thought was happening to pictures, and he said, 'We're brutalizing the audience. We're going to end up like the Roman circus, live at the Coliseum.' The respect for human life seems to be eroding.[56]
In 2014, Bogdanovich's last narrative film, She's Funny That Way, was released in theaters and on-demand, followed by the documentary, The Great Buster: A Celebration in 2018.[57] In 2018, Orson Welles' long-delayed film The Other Side of the Wind, which was filmed in the 1970s and featured a prominent supporting role by Boganovich, who had long hoped to complete it, was released by Netflix to critical acclaim.[58]
2020s
He collaborated with Turner Classic Movies, and TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, to create a documentary podcast about his life, which premiered in 2020.[59][60]
In 2020, a copy of Bogdanovich's original cut of She's Funny That Way, originally titled Squirrels to the Nuts, was found on eBay.[61] In the wake of Bogdanovich's death in January 2022, the cut was shown at New York's Museum of Modern Art beginning on March 28, 2022.[62]
Weeks before his death in January 2022, Bogdanovich collaborated with Kim Basinger to create LIT Project 2: Flux, a first of its kind short film made available on the Ethereumblockchain as a non-fungible token. The project was scheduled to be released on January 25, 2022.[63]
Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film directed by, produced by, and starring Orson Welles. He also co-wrote the screenplay with Herman J. Mankiewicz. The picture was Welles' first feature film. Citizen Kane is frequently cited as the greatest film ever made. For 50 consecutive years, it stood at number 1 in the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound decennial poll of critics, and it topped the American Film Institute's 100 Years ... 100 Movies list in 1998, as well as its 2007 update. The film was nominated for Academy Awards in nine categories and it won for Best Writing by Mankiewicz and Welles. Citizen Kane is praised for Gregg Toland's cinematography, Robert Wise's editing, Bernard Herrmann's music, and its narrative structure, all of which have been considered innovative and precedent-setting.
George Orson Welles was an American director, actor, producer, and screenwriter who is remembered for his innovative work in film, radio, and theatre. He is considered to be among the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time.
Stagecoach is a 1939 American Western film directed by John Ford and starring Claire Trevor and John Wayne in his breakthrough role. The screenplay by Dudley Nichols is an adaptation of "The Stage to Lordsburg", a 1937 short story by Ernest Haycox. The film follows a group of strangers riding on a stagecoach through dangerous Apache territory.
The Last Picture Show is a 1971 American coming-of-age drama film directed and co-written by Peter Bogdanovich, adapted from the semi-autobiographical 1966 novel The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry. The film's ensemble cast includes Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Ellen Burstyn, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, and Cybill Shepherd. Set in a small town in northern Texas from November 1951 to October 1952, it is a story of two high-school seniors and long-time friends, Sonny Crawford (Bottoms) and Duane Jackson (Bridges).
Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten, known professionally as Dorothy Stratten, was a Playboy Playmate and actress, originally from Vancouver British Columbia. Stratten was the Playboy Playmate of the Month for August 1979 and Playmate of the Year in 1980, and appeared in three comedy films and in at least two episodes of shows broadcast on American network television. She was murdered shortly after starring in the movie Galaxina at the age of 20 by her estranged husband and manager Paul Snider, who she was in the process of divorcing and breaking business ties. Snider committed suicide after he killed Stratten.
Star 80 is a 1983 American biographical drama film written and directed by Bob Fosse. It was adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Village Voice article "Death of a Playmate" by Teresa Carpenter and is based on Canadian Playboy model Dorothy Stratten, who was murdered by her husband Paul Snider in 1980. The film’s title is taken from one of Snider's vanity license plates.
Frank Wilton Marshall is an American film producer and director. He often collaborates with his wife, film producer Kathleen Kennedy. With Kennedy and Steven Spielberg, he was one of the founders of Amblin Entertainment. In 1991, he founded, with Kennedy, The Kennedy/Marshall Company, a film production company which has a contract with Amblin Partners. Since May 2012, with Kennedy taking on the role of President of Lucasfilm, Marshall has been Kennedy/Marshall's sole principal. Marshall has consistently collaborated with directors Spielberg, Paul Greengrass, and Peter Bogdanovich. He received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2018, awarded to "creative producers, whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production."
They All Laughed is a 1981 American romantic comedy film directed by Peter Bogdanovich and starring Audrey Hepburn, Ben Gazzara, John Ritter, Colleen Camp, Patti Hansen, and Dorothy Stratten. The film was based on a screenplay by Bogdanovich and Blaine Novak. It takes its name from the George and Ira Gershwin song of the same name.
Oja Kodar is a Croatian actress, screenwriter and director known as Orson Welles's romantic partner during the later years of his life.
Mr. Arkadin, known in Britain as Confidential Report, is a French-Spanish-Swiss coproduction film, written and directed by Orson Welles and shot in several Spanish locations, including Costa Brava, Segovia, Valladolid and Madrid. Filming took place throughout Europe in 1954, and scenes shot outside Spain include locations in London, Munich, Paris, the French Riviera and at the Château de Chillon in Switzerland.
Nickelodeon is a 1976 comedy film directed by Peter Bogdanovich, and stars Ryan O'Neal, Burt Reynolds and Tatum O'Neal. According to Bogdanovich, the film was based on true stories told to him by silent film directors Allan Dwan and Raoul Walsh. It was entered into the 27th Berlin International Film Festival.
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood is a book by Peter Biskind, published by Simon & Schuster in 1998. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is about the 1960s and 1970s Hollywood, a period of American film known for the production of such films such as The Godfather,The Godfather Part II,The French Connection,Chinatown,Taxi Driver,Jaws,Star Wars,The Exorcist, and The Last Picture Show. The title is taken from films which bookend the era: Easy Rider (1969) and Raging Bull (1980). The book follows Hollywood on the brink of the Vietnam War, when a group of young Hollywood film directors known as the "movie brats" are making their names. It begins in the 1960s and ends in the 1980s.
The Other Side of the Wind is a 2018 satirical drama film, directed, co-written, co-produced and co-edited by Orson Welles, and posthumously released in 2018 after 48 years in development. The film stars John Huston, Bob Random, Peter Bogdanovich, Susan Strasberg, and Oja Kodar.
Mary Marr "Polly" Platt was an American film producer, production designer and screenwriter. She was the first female art director accepted into Hollywood's Art Director's Guild. In addition to her credited work, she was known as mentor as well as an uncredited collaborator and networker. In the case of the latter, she is credited with contributing to the success of ex-husband and director Peter Bogdanovich's early films; mentoring then, first-time director and writer Cameron Crowe, and discovering actors including Cybill Shepherd, Tatum O'Neal, Owen Wilson, Luke Wilson and director Wes Anderson. Platt also suggested that director James L. Brooks meet artist and illustrator Matt Groening. Their subsequent meeting eventually resulted in the satiric animated television series The Simpsons.
Illegally Yours is a 1988 American comedy film set in St. Augustine, Florida where a series of comic mishaps take place involving a blackmailer, a corpse, an incriminating audiotape, an innocent woman who accidentally picks up the tape, and a pair of teenage blackmail victims. The film was directed by Peter Bogdanovich with Rob Lowe starring as Richard Dice, the college dropout who came back home to get his act together. The film's theme song was performed by Johnny Cash.
Daisy Miller is a 1974 American drama film produced and directed by Peter Bogdanovich, and starring Cybill Shepherd in the title role. The screenplay by Frederic Raphael is based on the 1878 novella of the same title by Henry James. The lavish period costumes and sets were done by Ferdinando Scarfiotti, Mariolina Bono and John Furniss.
Directed by John Ford is a documentary film directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Originally released in 1971, it covers the life and career of film director John Ford.
She's Funny That Way is a 2014 screwball comedy film directed by Peter Bogdanovich and co-written with Louise Stratten. It stars Owen Wilson, Imogen Poots, Kathryn Hahn, Will Forte, Rhys Ifans, and Jennifer Aniston. It marked the first feature film Bogdanovich directed in 13 years since The Cat's Meow and the final non-documentary feature he directed before his death in 2022.
Laurent Bouzereau is a French-American documentary filmmaker, producer, and author.
Beatrice Giuditta Welles is an American former child actress, known for her roles in the film Chimes at Midnight (1966) and the documentary travelogue In the Land of Don Quixote (1964). The daughter of American filmmaker Orson Welles and Italian actress Paola Mori, she is a former model, radio and TV personality, founder of a cosmetics line and designer of handbags and jewelry.
↑ Bogdanovich, Peter. Interview by Robert K. Elder. The Film That Changed My Life. By Robert K. Elder. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2011. N. p56. Print.
↑ Crook, David (December 19, 1985). "Bogdanovich Files for Bankruptcy: Film's Failure Led to $6.6 Million in Debts Bankrupt". The Washington Post. p.C1.
↑ Crook, David (December 19, 1985). "BOGDANOVICH'S BANKRUPT MEMORIAL: BANKRUPT MEMORIAL". Los Angeles Times. p.i1.
↑ Mann, Roderick. (July 8, 1984). "MOVIES: STRATTEN'S GHOST STILL HOVERS OVER BOGDANOVICH". Los Angeles Times. p.y16.
↑ Bodganovich, Peter (September 30, 1991). A Year and a Day Engagement Calendar 1992: A Desk Diary Adapted From the Works of Robert Graves. New York City: Overlook Books. ISBN978-0879514297.
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