Peter BogdanovichComSE (July 30, 1939 – January 6, 2022) was an American director, writer, actor, producer, critic, and film historian of Serbian extraction. 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 Award and Grammy Award, as well as nominations for two Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards.
Peter Bogdanovich was born in Kingston, New York, the son of Herma (née Robinson) and Borislav Bogdanovich, a pianist and painter.[6][7] His father was a Serbian descent and his mother was of Austrian Jewish. 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]
Shortly after the film finished shooting, Dorothy Stratten was murdered by her estranged husband Paul Snider, who then killed himself.[24] To cope with the tragedy, Bogdanovich began writing The Killing of the Unicorn, a memoir detailing the relationship between Stratten and himself, the making of They All Laughed and her murder. "I wanted to understand what happened to her," said Bogdanovich, "I felt I couldn't move forward with my life, creative or otherwise until I did." Bogdanovich said the book was meant to be delivered to William Morrow and Company 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]
Stratten's murder was highly publicized, with Teresa Carpenter's "Death of a Playmate" article even claiming that she was as much a victim of Bogdanovich and Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner as she was Snider.[8] Carpenter's article then served as the basis for 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] Shortly after, Hefner accused Bogdanovich of seducing Stratten's younger sister Louise when she was 13. On December 30, 1988, the 49-year-old Bogdanovich married 20-year-old Louise, sparking a tabloid frenzy.[8][37]
After Stratten's murder, Bogdanovich said he "didn't go out much", but one day got a call from his friend John Cassavetes who asked him to direct Diahnne Abbott in a scene from his film Love Streams to help get him out of house.[38][39] Despite Bogdanovich's contribution to the film, which even he himself admits was minor, Cassavetes tried to get the Directors Guild to give him a shared credit.
Bogdanovich returned to directing officially with Mask, released in 1985 to critical acclaim. The film 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, starring Rob Lowe. Bogdanovich later disowned the film, saying he had "high hopes for it", but that it had been completely re-cut by Dino De Laurentiis, the film's distributor.
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 The Criterion Collection 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 film recaptured the success of his early career. One, Noises Off, was based on a stage play by Michael Frayn,[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 Who the Devil Made It, featuring archival interviews that Bogdanovich had held with famous Hollywood directors, and Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week, which offered the lifelong cinephile's commentary on 52 of his favorite films.[8]
2000s
In 2001, Bogdanovich resurfaced with The Cat's Meow, his return 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 the critically praised mini-series 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]
One of his final hopes was to direct a personal passion project he had worked on since the late '90s titled Wait for Me which Bogdanovich had described as a "ghost picture", the likes of The Ghost Goes West, that was directly inspired by his relationship with Dorothy Stratten. In a July 2015 interview for Entertainment Weekly, Bogdanovich revealed that Brett Ratner was going to produce the film, and that they were currently in the process of attaching actors. The plot, as described by Bogdanovich, would have followed a washed-up Hollywood director/star (someone like Orson Welles or Charlie Chaplin), who is visited by his the ghost of his last wife, who was killed six years earlier in a plane crash.[59]
2020s
Bogdanovich collaborated with Turner Classic Movies, and host Ben Mankiewicz, to create a documentary podcast about his life, which premiered in 2020.[60][61] That same year, a copy of his original cut of She's Funny That Way, originally titled Squirrels to the Nuts, was found on eBay.[62] 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.[63]
Weeks before his death, 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.[64] He was also working on developing a new screenplay, with the help of author Sam Kashner, titled Our Love Is Here to Stay about composers George and Ira Gershwin.[65] According to Louise Stratten, after they had finished the script, Guillermo del Toro was involved to produce the film at Netflix.[66] Stratten also noted that, prior to his death, Bogdanovich had completed his memoirs, which he wanted to call All I Wanna Do is Direct.[66]
Death and legacy
Bogdanovich died from complications of Parkinson's disease at his home in Los Angeles on January 6, 2022 at age 82.[12][67] Since his death, many directors, actors, and other public figures paid tribute to him. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian described him as "a loving cineaste and fearless genius of cinema."[68]The New York Times described him as a genius "of the Hollywood system who, with great success and frustration, worked to transform it in the same era."[69] His work has been cited as an influence by many filmmakers.
^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.
^Labrecque, Jeff (July 24, 2015). "Peter Bogdanovich talks his new screwball comedy and his plans to finish Orson Welles' lost, last movie". Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved September 3, 2022. It's about a movie director slash star — somebody like Woody Allen or John Cassavetes or Orson Welles or Charlie Chaplin — and he's basically known for comedy. And he's been married six times and he's got six daughters, and his last wife, the one he seems to have been most keen on, was killed in a plane crash, six years before the movie begins. And the guy's life in those six years, since it happened, has turned to s**t. He's in bad shape. He can't be hired by Hollywood because he chopped up a projection room and beat up a producer. So he's persona non grata in Hollywood. Before the picture begins, he spends quite a bit of time in Italy, conning the Italians that he's got a story, that he's got to check locations. So he's been traveling all around Italy. I don't want to get into the whole plot, but the point is the ghost of his last wife shows up eventually. And there's a rock star that gets into trouble. He's a friend of his, and he's in love with one of his daughters. It's a complicated comedy-drama-fantasy, and I'm very keen on it. And Brett likes it and we're going to do it.
^"Bogdanovich, Peter – Senses of Cinema". Senses of Cinema. July 1, 2004. Retrieved June 9, 2023. While I was finishing They All Laughed, before Dorothy [Stratten] was killed, I was thinking about the next picture I was going to make and it was going to be with Dorothy. And I wasn't sure who was going to play the lead, but it was very much a character like me, so it might have been John Cassavetes I was thinking of, someone dramatic who would be funny, theatrical, and real. It was about an orchestra conductor and a Dutch girl he meets when he goes to Amsterdam to conduct. She's a violinist and he falls for her. He brings her home to Los Angeles. And it was called The Return of the Count because he's a count, some kind of middle-European count. Again, I was going to do what I did on They All Laughed, which was I was going to take my own life stuff – with my kids and people that I knew who worked with me or whatever – and kind of change it enough to make it a romantic comedy about an orchestra conductor and a girl he falls for who doesn't speak English. Dorothy was going to play it. And of course when she was killed, that just went away and I didn't have an idea for quite a while to do anything.
