Director Bogdanovich dies at 82
Filmmaker known for ‘Last Picture Show,’ ‘Paper Moon’
Peter Bogdanovich, the ascot-wearing cinephile and director of 1970s black-andwhite classics that include “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon,” has died. He was 82.
Bogdanovich died early Thursday at his home in Los Angeles, said his daughter, Antonia Bogdanovich. She said he died of natural causes.
Considered part of a generation of young “New Hollywood” directors, Bogdanovich was heralded as an auteur from the start, with the chilling lone-shooter film “Targets” and soon after “The Last Picture Show,” from 1971.
His evocative and melancholic portrait of teenage angst and middle age loneliness in a small, dying town earned eight Oscar nominations, winning two (for Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman) and catapulted him to stardom at the age of 32. He followed “The Last Picture Show” with the screwball comedy “What’s Up, Doc?,” starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal, and then the Depression-era road trip film “Paper Moon,” which won 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal an Oscar as well.
His turbulent personal life was also often in the spotlight, from his well-known affair with Cybill Shepherd that began during the making of “The Last Picture Show” while he was married to his close collaborator, Polly Platt, to the murder of his Playmate girlfriend Dorothy Stratten and his subsequent marriage to her younger sister, Louise, who was 29 years his junior.
Reactions came in swiftly at the news of his death.
Streisand wrote on Twitter that, “Peter always made me laugh! He’ll keep making them laugh up there, too.”
Francis Ford Coppola wrote in an email that, “I’ll never forgot attending a premiere for ‘The Last Picture Show.’ I remember at its end, the audience leaped up all around me bursting into applause lasting easily 15 minutes.”
Tatum O’Neal posted a photo of herself with him on Instagram, writing “Peter was my heaven & earth. A father figure. A friend. From ‘Paper Moon’ to ‘Nickelodeon’ he always made me feel safe. I love you, Peter.”
And Martin Scorsese, in an email, wrote that, “In the ’60s, at a crucial moment in the history of the movie business and the art of cinema, Peter Bogdanovich was right there at the crossroads of the Old Hollywood and the New… With ‘The Last Picture Show,’ he made a movie that seemed to look backward and forward at the same time as well as a phenomenal success… In the years that followed, Peter had setbacks and tragedies, and he just kept going on, constantly reinventing himself.”
Born in Kingston, N.Y., in 1939, Bogdanovich started out as an actor, a film journalist and critic, working as a film programmer at the Museum of Modern Art, where through a series of retrospectives and monographs, he endeared himself to a host of old guard filmmakers including Orson Welles, Howard Hawks and John Ford. He regaled them with knowledge of their films, took lessons for his own and kept their conversations for future books.
“I’ve gotten some very important one-sentence clues like when Howard Hawks turned to me and said ‘Always cut on the movement and no one will notice the cut,’” he said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It was a very simple sentence but it profoundly affected everything I’ve done.”
After marrying young, Bogdanovich and Platt moved to Los Angeles in the mid1960s, where they attended Hollywood parties and struck up friendships with director Roger Corman and Frank Marshall, then just an aspiring producer, who helped get the film “Targets” off the ground. While the professional ascent continued for the next few films, after “Paper Moon,” which Platt collaborated on after they had separated, Bogdanovich would never again capture the accolades of those first five years in Hollywood.
Bogdanovich’s relationship with Shepherd led to the end of his marriage to Platt, with whom he shared daughters Antonia and Sashy, and a fruitful creative partnership. The 1984 film “Irreconcilable Differences” was loosely based on the scandal. He later disputed the idea that Platt, who died in 2011, was an integral part of the success of his early films.
He also passed on major opportunities at the height of his successes. He told Vulture in an interview that he turned down “The Godfather,” “Chinatown” and “The Exorcist.”
Despite some flops along the way, Bogdanovich’s output remained prolific in the 1980s and 1990s, including a sequel to “The Last Picture Show” called “Texasville.” His last narrative film, “She’s Funny that Way,” a screwball comedy starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston that he co-wrote with Louise Stratten, debuted to mixed reviews in 2014.
Over the years he also wrote several books about movies, including “Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors” and “Who the Hell’s in It: Conversations with Hollywood’s Legendary Actors.”
He acted semi-frequently, too, sometimes playing himself and sometimes other people.
Bogdanovich also inspired a new generation of filmmakers, from Wes Anderson to Noah Baumbach.
“They call me ‘Pop,’ and I allow it,” he told Vulture.