Peter Bogdanovich Film director
PETER BOGDANOVICH, who has died at 82, was a maverick Hollywood director who was at the top of his game in the 1970s, turning out black-and-white classics like The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon.
Considered part of a generation of young “New Hollywood” filmmakers, Bogdanovich was heralded as an auteur from the start, with the chilling lone shooter film Targets and soon after,
The Last Picture Show, where his evocative and melancholic portrait of teenage angst and middle-age loneliness in a small, dying town earned eight Oscar nominations and two statuettes. Bogdanovich was just 32 at the time.
He followed it with the screwball comedy What’s Up, Doc?, starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal, and then Paper Moon, a Depression-era road trip film which won 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal an Oscar as well.
Bogdanovich was born in Kingston, New York, in 1939, and started out as a film journalist and critic, working as a programmer at the Museum of Modern Art, where, through a series of retrospectives, 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 had started at age five when his father took him to see Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton movies at the Museum of Modern Art. He would later make a documentary on Keaton, The
Great Buster, which was released in 2018.
He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s and struck up friendships with the director Roger Corman and producer Frank Marshall, who helped get Targets off the ground. But after Paper Moon, he would never again reach quite the same level of success.
In addition, his turbulent personal life was also often in the headlines. He had a wellpublicised affair with the actress Cybill Shepherd which began during the making of
The Last Picture Show while he was married to his close collaborator, Polly Platt.
Later, after the murder of his Playmate girlfriend Dorothy Stratten he married her younger sister, Louise, who was 29 years his junior. 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.