Making it last
Peter Bogdanovich made one of America’s greatest films, but even Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson couldn’t quite rescue his latest, writes Stephanie Bunbury.
Peter Bogdanovich made one of America’s greatest films, but even Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson couldn’t quite rescue his latest.
FOR a few glittering years, Peter Bogdanovich was one of the brightest lights in the socalled New Hollywood.
Like all dwindled careers, it seems hard to picture now, but in 1971 he directed what is now regarded as one of the greatest of all American films, The Last Picture Show.
Set largely around a soda fountain in the 50s, The Last Picture Show starred Timothy Bottoms and Cybill Shepherd, whom Bogdanovich cast after seeing on the cover of Glamour magazine. He also cast her in real life as his girlfriend, leaving his wife and children to live with her; at this point, he became as vividly New Hollywood as his film career.
When she left him after seven years, Bogdanovich went on a very 70s sex bender before finding love again, this time with 19-year-old Canadian Playboy Bunny Dorothy Stratten, who lived at the Hefner mansion.
After The Last Picture Show, Bogdanovich made two more hits. Then three flops. Then, despite a few radar blips such as the Cher vehicle Mask, which was critically panned but won an Oscar for best makeup in 1986, not very much at all.
Survival is evidently Bogdanovich’s strong suit, given that he’s still plugging away at the age of 76. His latest film, She’s Funny That Way ,isa backstage romantic comedy that references the screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s. ‘‘I like those kinds of pictures,’’ Bogdanovich says. ‘‘They don’t rely for their comedy on body fluid jokes, you know, or getting an appendage stuck in a zipper. It’s too easy to get laughs with that and it isn’t really comedy. It’s shock.’’
She’s Funny That Way ,by contrast, has all the trappings of farce – illicit lovers hiding in cupboards, a missing father who reappears, a private detective, a venomous psychiatrist who spills the beans on her patients at inopportune moments – hung about a curious central premise.
Affably goofy Owen Wilson plays theatre director Albert, who has a wife who is a wellknown stage actress – played by Kathryn Hahn – but cultivates a side interest in the fancier kind of callgirl – both as a customer and as a benefactor willing to help pay their way out of the game.
How he could earn enough on Broadway to be able to put an unspecified number of women through college without his wife or accountant noticing is a bit of a mystery, but that doesn’t matter: what matters is his latest Pretty Woman, a young Brooklyn broad played by English actress Imogen Poots. She uses his seed money to study acting, then starts auditioning for plays.
Albert’s jaw drops when she arrives to read for his new production; his wife is sharing that stage, although she doesn’t notice much at first as she has her own fish to fry with Rhys Ifans, playing her co-star. The film, which also includes appearances by Shepherd and Bogdanovich, screened in Venice last year; not enough laughs was the general consensus, despite Jennifer Aniston’s crisp star turn as the psychiatrist.
The idea of paying off prostitutes came, says Bogdanovich, from the Santa’s sack of his own life. In 1979, he went to Singapore to direct Saint Jack, his last unequivocal success. ‘‘If you haven’t seen it, it is about an American pimp, some of the escorts and prostitutes he manages and his problems with the Chinese underworld,’’ he explains.
‘‘We . . . interviewed a number of escorts in Singapore and ended up using three of them in the movie, playing what they do. And I liked all three of them.’’
The women were paid extra so they could give up prostitution and go home.
‘‘That gave me the idea to do it as a character. Because I think it has an interesting ambiguity. Albert is doing something that his wife absolutely would not approve of if she knew about it, and yet he is helping these women.’’