Director famous for ‘Last Picture Show,’ infamous for personal life
Peter Bogdanovich, the ascotwearing cinephile and director of 1970s black-and-white classics like “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon,” has died. He was 82.
Bogdanovich died early Thursday morning 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 small, dying town earned eight Oscar nominations, won 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. I’ll never forget although I felt I had never myself experienced a reaction like that, that Peter and his film deserved it. May he sleep in bliss for eternity, enjoying the thrill of our applause forever.”
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 … Peter’s debut, ‘Targets,’ is still one of his very best films. 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.
His own Hollywood education started early: His father took him at age 5 to see Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton movies at the Museum of Modern Art. He’d later make his own Keaton documentary, “The Great Buster,”
which was released in 2018.
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,” the country music romantic drama “The Thing Called Love,” which was one of River Phoenix’s last films, and, in 2001, “The Cat’s Meow,” about a party on William Randolph Hearst’s yacht starring Kirsten Dunst as Marion Davies. 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 authored several books about movies, including “Peter Bogdanovich’s Movie of the Week,” “Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors” and “Who the Hell’s in It: Conversations with Hollywood’s Legendary Actors.”