Peter Bogdanovich (1939 - 2022)

thehollywoodinerview

     Yesterday, I followed my morning routine of reading the Wall Street Journal with my morning coffee.  On page A2, at the bottom of the page, was a very short article with the heading Obituary and the title Director Bogdanovich, Auteur From Start, 82.  It was a short article that packed as good a summary in three short paragraphs as one might expect.  Bogdanovich passed away on January 6^th.

In college, I took a film class.  It was an elective and perhaps the best elective I ever took.  I learned a little about the history of motion pictures, how films are crafted, some of the basic terminology, and gained a greater appreciation for a genre that I really liked anyway.  It was in that class that I learned what an auteur was.  The professor in that class loved Francois Truffaut who in his mind was the ultimate, the definitive, auteur.

An auteur is an artist with a distinctive approach, yet usually a film director whose filmmaking control is so unbounded but personal that the director is likened to the "author" of the film, which thus manifests the director's unique style or thematic focus. ~ Wikipedia

I am not by any means a Bogdanovich scholar, but I remember how promising he was around the time I graduated from high school.  He was the toast of Hollywood and there were great expectations for him for future cinematic works.  I didn’t buy into the hype though I came to really like his 1972 What’s Up Doc? and 1973 Paper Moon.   It was not until many years later that I saw his best film, The Last Picture Show (1971).  It was his second and most acclaimed film.  I was blown away by the quality of this film based on a novel by Larry McMurtry.  Bogdanovich and McMurtry penned the screenplay.  Based on this film, Bogdanovich is a gifted auteur in my view.

As luck would have it, The Last Picture is featured on Showcase this month, I tuned in and watched it again.  It really and truly is a great film.  It was filmed in black and white and captured, beautifully, a backwater and dying Texas town in the early 1950s.  It was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won two.  Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson both won for Best Supporting Actress and Best Supporting Actor.  Cloris Leachman was absolutely amazing in her role.  William Friedkin won the Best Director Oscar that year for the French Connection.

While the Wall Street Journal obituary was brief, there was a more complete one in the New York Times by Margarlit Fox:  Peter Bogdanovich, 82, Director Whose Career Was a Hollywood Drama, Dies.

This obituary definitely focused on the drama in the director’s life.  After his initial success with the three films listed above, Bogdanovich had a long spell of poor critical and commercial success.  His love life was also the subject of Hollywood gossip and tragedy.  He married a production designer Polly Platt, also mother of his two daughters, who worked with him on his three major hits.  After The Last Picture Show, he left her and took up with Cybil Shepard who starred in the movie.  That relationship lasted for eight years.  After his relationship with Shepard ended, he met and fell in love with Playboy model Dorothy Stratten.  She left her husband to live with Bogdanovich.  Her husband later murdered her and then killed himself. 

Such a series of events would test anyone and impact their behavior and decisions.  Bogdanovich went on to marry Stratten’s younger sister, Louise, a marriage which lasted until 2001. 

In 1985, with “$21.37 in the bank and $25.79 in his pocket,” according to court papers, he declared bankruptcy, a move that further marginalized him in Hollywood. In the years that followed, he became, by his own account, addicted to prescription drugs.

“I made an enormous number of mistakes,” Mr. Bogdanovich said in a 2004 interview. “You don’t do rational things when somebody blows up an atom bomb at your feet.” ~ New York Times

After such an impressive start, his career basically wallowed.  He declared bankruptcy again in the 90s.  He sued Universal Pictures about their changing the soundtrack of one of the movies he directed.  He fought with Hugh Hefner.  He wrote a book about Stratten and directed some of the blame for her death at Hefner.  Hefner responded by accusing Bogdanovich of seducing Louise when she was 13 and later paying for facial surgery to make her look more like her sister.

A few of Bogdanovich’s later films had some critical success namely The Mask (1985) starring Cher and The Cat’s Meow (2001).  In his later years, he did more work directing television movies.  He was also an actor.  His credits in this regard include portraying a therapist, Elliot Kupferberg, in fifteen episodes of The Sopranos.  I learned also that in the 20s, he penned monographs for the Museum of Modern Art in New York on Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Ford.

A month ago, I stumbled across a documentary on Buster Keaton, The Great Buster (2018).  I watched it.  It was really good.  I remember being glad that it was written and directed by Peter Bogdanovich probably because I had not heard of the director in so long.  This was his last major work and a perfect cap for his career.  It was an homage to a flawed great of early Hollywood created by a flawed film maker of our time who was devoted to the history of film. 

Bogdanovich will be remembered for The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, and What’s Up Doc? long after people forget about his shortcomings and troubles dealing with too much success and acclaim too early in life.  The Last Picture Show is an absolute gem and an amazing piece of work.

I close with another passage from the New York Times obituary:

Mr. Bogdanovich’s film career had seemed almost foreordained, for he was nothing short of a cinematic prodigy. “I was born,” he liked to say. “And then I liked movies.”