Last Picture Show director brought new energy and old sensibilities to Hollywood
Peter Bogdanovich, who has died aged 82, was part of the vanguard of New Hollywood film-makers who helped reinvigorate American cinema, gaining wide popularity with 1970s movies such as The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon before suffering a string of personal and professional calamities.
Boyishly handsome, with neatly combed hair, horn-rimmed glasses and a signature bandanna worn knotted around his neck, Bogdanovich was alternately celebrated and despised, acquiring a reputation for making friends with vaunted old directors as quickly as he made enemies with younger colleagues.
‘‘I don’t judge myself on the basis of my contemporaries,’’ he said in
1971. ‘‘I judge myself against the directors I admire – Hawks,
Lubitsch, Buster Keaton, Welles, Ford, Renoir, Hitchcock. I certainly don’t think I’m anywhere near as good as they are, but I think I’m pretty good.’’
He started out as a film critic and journalist, then broke into the movie industry as a protege of B-movie maestro Roger Corman, who produced his feature-film debut – the taut crime thriller Targets (1968) – and who also helped launch the careers of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.
Like them, Bogdanovich brought a bold new energy to Hollywood, shaking up a studio production system increasingly out of touch with younger audiences and shifting tastes. But while others raced to distance themselves from cinematic tradition, he sought to revive some of the glories of the old Hollywood. ‘‘Noone makes old movies better than Bogdanovich,’’ Scorsese once said.
Film historian Jeanine Basinger described him as a bridge between old and new Hollywood. ‘‘His work reflected the very best of the past, put into a modern format and updated.’’
Bogdanovich directed 20 feature films, writing many of them himself, but remained best known for The Last Picture Show (1971), a coming-of-age 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 evoked older films such as Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons and Howard Hawks’s Red River, but was ‘‘so good’’, wrote New York Times film critic Vincent Canby, ‘‘that, in 1971, everything about it looks absolutely original’’. The film was nominated for eight Oscars, and won two, for supporting actors Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman.
Bogdanovich received further acclaim for the screwball comedy What’s Up, Doc? (1972), which starred Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal, and Paper Moon (1973), a Depressionera road movie that featured O’Neal and his real-life daughter, 10-year-old Tatum, who became the youngest person to win a competitive Academy Award.
Yet by the mid-1970s, Bogdanovich was making headlines as much for his personal life as his movies. His marriage to screenwriter and production designer Polly Platt, one of his closest collaborators, ended when he started an affair with Cybill Shepherd, one of the stars of The Last Picture Show.
A few years later, Bogdanovich had an affair with Dorothy Stratten, a Playboy model he cast in They All Laughed (1981). Soon after filming wrapped, she was murdered by her estranged husband. Her killing inspired another movie, Bob Fosse’s Star 80, and also led Bogdanovich to grow closer to Stratten’s younger sister, Louise. They married in 1988, when he was 49 and she was 20.
By then, big box-office failures had tarnished his reputation. He declared bankruptcy twice in 12 years. Still, he pressed on, continuing to make movies and befriending younger directors such as Quentin Tarantino, with whom he lived for a time in the 2000s.
‘‘I’m not bitter,’’ he said in 2002. ‘‘I asked for it. Success is very hard . . . You think you’re infallible. You pretend you know more than you do. Pride goeth before the fall.’’
‘‘No-one makes old movies better than Bogdanovich.’’
Martin Scorsese
Peter Bogdanovich was born in Kingston, New York, and grew up in Manhattan, where movies served as an escape from a family haunted by the accidental death of an older brother. His father was an artist from Serbia, and his mother a homemaker from a wealthy Jewish family in Austria.
He saw up to 400 films a year while also trying his hand in theatre, taking acting classes as a teenager and directing an offBroadway production of a play at age 20.
He married Platt in 1962 and soon moved to Los Angeles. They had two daughters and divorced in 1970, although they continued collaborating through the release of Paper Moon. He and Stratten also divorced.
Although he struggled to find a wide audience, he remained prolific, directing Mask (1985), and Texasville (1990), a sequel to The Last Picture Show that reunited him with Shepherd. He also acted, playing a therapist in The Sopranos.
‘‘Movies used to be something powerful. It’s been a bit ruined now,’’ he told the Los Angeles Times in 2015, lamenting the rise of blockbuster juggernauts. ‘‘My mother used to say to me, ‘If you have a thousand people watching your movie and one of them understands what you’re trying to do, you’re lucky.’ That sounds almost pretentious, but I know what she meant.’’ – Washington Post