Director hailed as a leader of ’70s ‘New Hollywood’
Peter Bogdanovich, the ascot-wearing cinephile and director of 1970s black-andwhite classics like “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon,” has died. He was 82.
Bogdanovich died early Thursday morning at this 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 portrait of a small, dying town that 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 killing 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.
“Oh dear, a shock. I am devastated. He was a wonderful and great artist,” said Francis Ford Coppola in an email. “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. ... May he sleep in bliss for eternity, enjoying the thrill of our applause forever.”
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.”
Even with his Hollywoodsize ego, Bogdanovich remained deferential to those who came before.
“I don’t judge myself on the basis of my contemporaries,” he told the New York Times in 1971. “I judge myself against the directors I admire — (Howard) Hawks, (Ernst) Lubitsch, Buster Keaton, (Orson) Welles, (John) Ford, (Jean) Renoir, (Alfred) Hitchcock. I certainly don’t think I’m anywhere near as good as they are, but I think I’m pretty good.”