Peter Bogdanovich
Bittersweet success of Hollywood titan’s love affair with Moviesville
AT BARELY 31 he was the toast of Hollywood, hailed as “the most exciting new director in America”— his film, The Last Picture Show, up for eight Oscars. Fast forward five years, and those same critics who had raved about him were sniggering and competing to pile up the misery. Yet, in spite of his spectacular fall from grace, Peter Bogdanovich, who has died aged 82, remained a Hollywood creature, a man steeped in the movies and movie history.
Fond of saying: “I was born. And then I liked movies”, Bogdanovich had been passionately in love with Moviesville’s past since childhood. Starting out as a chronicler and historian, he went on to become one of Hollywood’s movers and shakers, only to be pushed to the fringes again and again, but his fascination with cinema never waned.
Peter Bogdanovich was born in Kingston, New York State, the son of Borislav, a Serbian pianist and painter, and Herma Robinson, who came from a well-off Austrian Jewish family. The Bogdanovichs, together with Herma’s immediate family, had fled Europe at the onset of the Second World War, arriving in the US just a few months before Peter’s birth on visitors’ visas.
The family settled in Manhattan’s Upper West Side but the atmosphere at home was, as Bogdanovich would later describe it, infused with a sense of melancholy. Peter only found out the reason for that sadness at the age of eight when he discovered there had been another child born before him who had died as a baby in a horrific domestic incident.
His relationship with his father was difficult: Borislav was withdrawn and prone to long silences and the two of them only managed to establish some sort of communication when they went to the Museum of Modern Art to watch silent films.
By then Bogdanovich was in love. He was in love with the movies, especially those from Hollywood’s golden era, a world tinged with nostalgia for an America of small towns and small pleasures.
Since the age of 12 Bogdanovich had evaluated each movie he saw, (sometimes up to 400 a year) writing that critique down on a card, one per film. By the age of 30 he had collected some 5,000 cards, a veritable history of the movies.
But Bogdanovich wasn’t satisfied with just chronicling that world; he wanted to be part of it. So, after graduating from New York City’s Collegiate School in 1957, he enrolled at the wellknown Stella Adler Conservatory to study acting. His dream was to be “a real American boy”, like one of his heroes, Bill Holden, but he was aware that “with a name like Bogdanovich there wasn’t much of a chance.”
Still, he managed to get a few small roles off-Broadway and on TV, and at 20 he even tried his hand at directing. By his early 20s, however, he was already making a name for himself as a film critic for various publications, among them Esquire and the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma.
He was also a film programmer for New York’s Museum of Modern Art and wrote a number of monographs on Hollywood’s great directors — John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. It was, he would say later, partly an excuse to meet his heroes but also a way to learn about cinema from the very best teachers.
In 1964 together with Polly Platt, a production designer he had married two years earlier, he finally decided to take his chance in Hollywood. Soon he was directing his first movie, Targets, for producer Roger Corman, famed for cheap shockers. Although based on the true story of a young shooter, Targets, (which also featured Boris Karloff in a minor role) was a stylish product, a cut above other killing-spree movies.
The critics loved it and on the wave of that critical acclaim, Bogdanovich was hired to direct the film that would make his name, The Last Picture Show. Often described as a paean to a small-town America that was already fading away, the black-and-white movie was also a love letter to the golden age of Hollywood.
Nominated for eight Academy Awards in 1971, it went on to win two and catapulted into the limelight its young, little-known stars: Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms and Cybill Shepherd, a 19-year-old fashion model Bogdanovich had first seen on the cover of Glamour magazine.
For Bogdanovich the movie’s success had a seismic effect: not only was he suddenly Hollywood’s hottest property but he also became gossip fodder when he left his wife and two young daughters for Shepherd.
For a while he could do no wrong: his next project, What’s Up, Doc? (1972) a wacky comedy with Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neil, was loved by both critics and audiences, while the 1973 Paper Moon, starring O’Neil and his 10-yearold daughter Tatum made Tatum the youngest-ever Oscar winner. Both movies harked back to an older era, What’s Up, Doc? re-working a 1938 Howard Hawks comedy, Paper Moon set in the 1930s and featuring a couple of father and daughter con-artists.
But Bogdanovich’s success was shortlived and his fall from grace spectacular even by Hollywood standards. His 1974 adaptation of Henry James’s novel, Daisy Miller and the 1975 musical, At Long Last Love, both intended as a showcase for Shepherd, were flops. The critics who had heaped such praise on him now unleashed buckets of vitriol.
Earlier on he had captivated both critics and public with his eulogies to Hollywood’s past but when he tried that trick again with Nickelodeon (1976) it failed to work.
It looked as if things couldn’t get any worse, but they did. The Hollywood gossip mill that had so enjoyed dissecting his relationship with Shepherd went into overdrive in 1980 when his latest love interest, Dorothy Stratten, was murdered by her estranged husband, who then committed suicide. Stratten was a Playboy Playmate of the Year whom Bogdanovich had directed in a romantic comedy, They All Laughed.
When the film was eventually released in 1981 it was another flop. Convinced that it been badly promoted, Bogdanovich tried to distribute it himself but lost $5 million in the process. Forced to declare bankruptcy, he became even more marginalised.
Addiction to prescription drugs followed and then another disaster with his 1984 biography of Stratten, The Killing of the Unicorn, in which he accused Playboy’s Hugh Hefner of being partly responsible for her death.
A poisonous war of words with Hefner ensued, with Hefner accusing Bogdanovich of seducing Stratten’s younger sister Louise when she was well below the age of consent. Bogdanovich vehemently denied the accusation but when he later married Louise, the tabloids went crazy yet again.
Amid all this, Bogdanovich kept on directing; he did a number of movies for TV but also for the cinema – the critically acclaimed Mask with Cher in 1985 as well as flops such as Texasville (1990). His 2001 film The Cat’s Meow, telling the story of magnate William Randolph Hearst and his film star mistress was well received. He also published Who the Devil Made It (1997), a book of interviews with great directors, and Who the Hell’s in It (2004), about great stars. He also went back to acting, most notably playing the therapist of Tony Soprano’s therapist in The Sopranos.
Bogdanovich claimed not to be bitter about how his career had worked out: “I asked for it,” he said. “Success is very hard, nobody prepares you for it. Pride goeth before the fall.”
Peter Bogdanovich’s marriages, to Polly Platt and Louise Stratten, ended in divorce. He is survived by his daughters from his first marriage, Antonia and Alexandra and three grandchildren.