OSCAR-NOMINATED DIRECTOR OF ’70S CLASSICS
PETER BOGDANOVICH • 1939-2022
Peter Bogdanovich, an Oscar-nominated filmmaker who was part of the vanguard of “New Hollywood” directors who helped reinvigorate American cinema in the 1960s and ’70s, gaining wide popularity with his films “The Last Picture Show,” “What’s Up, Doc?” and “Paper Moon” before suffering a string of personal and professional calamities, died Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 82.
His daughter Antonia Bogdanovich confirmed his death to The Associated Press but did not give a cause.
Like French directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer and François Truffaut, Bogdanovich started out as a film critic before going on to make movies. But he made that transformation in a distinctly American way, breaking into the industry as a protege of B-movie maestro Roger Corman, who also helped launch the careers of directors such as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.
Bogdanovich directed about 20 feature films, writing or co-writing many of them himself — including “Targets” (1968), a taut thriller inspired by a mass shooting at the University of Texas tower. He was best known for “The Last Picture Show” (1971), a coming-ofage story about high school seniors in a windswept Texas town.
Shot in black and white and based on a novel by Larry McMurtry, with whom he co-wrote the screenplay, the film was funny, poignant and rapturously received. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including best picture, director and adapted screenplay, and won two, for supporting actors Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman.
Bogdanovich received further acclaim for his next two films: “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972), a wacky ode to Howard Hawks’s screwball comedies, set in San Francisco and starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal; and “Paper Moon” (1973), a Depression-era road film featuring O’Neal and his real-life daughter, 10-yearold Tatum O’Neal, who became the youngest person to win a competitive Academy Award.
Yet Bogdanovich increasingly made headlines more for his personal life than his movies. His marriage to screenwriter and production designer Polly Platt, one of his closest collaborators, broke down when he started a muchpublicized affair with one of the stars of “The Last Picture Show,” former model Cybill Shepherd. In 1980, his girlfriend Dorothy Stratten, an actress who had modeled for Playboy, was murdered by her estranged husband. Eight years later, Bogdanovich — then 49 — married Stratten’s 20-year-old sister Louise.