Peter Bogdanovich, the Ultimate “Movie Nut Makes Good” Story — Until It Turned Into Something Else

They called them “The Movie Brats” at the time. Later on, after a best-selling book both celebrated and dished on them, they were the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls generation of American filmmakers. Movie nuts making good, white male tyros with encyclopedic knowledge of cinema and unreasonable passion to remake the art form. 

Peter Bogdanovich, who died today at age 82, while in his way was no less ambitious than Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, initially stood apart and distinct from those ostensible peers. Not just because he never was a part of their social circle, but because for a time — believe it or not — Bogdanovich seemed more stable, less volatile, and more easily self-assured than the other fellows. As it happened — and as a subsequent career and life that encompassed farcical hubris, genuine tragedy, and a remarkable body of work (not just as a director, but as an author and actor) testify — this turned out to be a case of us not knowing him quite well enough yet. 

In terms of firsts, Coppola had Bogdanovich easily beat in the directing department. It can be argued, though, that Bogdanovich was the first film scholar of his generation to become a moviemaker of note.  Born into an artistic immigrant family in 1939, film-addicted and theater-besotted New Yorker Bogdanovich was a high-school actor who got enough kudos to get sent to a summer theater in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Thus began the knowing-everybody-in-the-world phase of his life, a phase which never really ended. The high-school freshman worked with Edward Everett Horton, Veronica Lake, and Sylvia Sidney, among others. While not a film critic in the journalistic sense, once back in New York he programmed at and wrote program notes for the Museum of Modern Art. He forged crucial friendships with critics including Andrew Sarris and Eugene Archer. A monograph he wrote on Orson Welles got the attention of the great man himself. When he moved to California in the late ‘60s, he did a book length interview with Hollywood pioneer Allan Dwan. (I imagine a conversation with a Millennial: “Yeah, I loved Bogdanovich in The Sopranos.” Me: “Sure, but have you read his Allan Dwan book?”) 

And he became friends with Orson Welles, for real, a relationship that had implications and complications that extended far beyond Welles’ death in 1985. He tried to get blood out of the interviewer stone that was John Ford. And he got in with frugal producer Roger Corman, who, among other things, had him cobble together bottom-of-the-bill U.S.-oriented B fare out of Russian sci-fi pictures Corman had bought and couldn’t figure out what to do with. Soon Corman bankrolled a real picture for Bogdanovich and let him have screen legend Boris Karloff for the handful of days left on a contract for a different picture. The ingenious and still disturbing thriller Targets, about gun violence, mental illness, and celebrity worship gone way wrong, was the result. 

But it was with 1971’s The Last Picture Show that Bogdanovich made a real impact, one of the sort that none of his subsequent films would be able to match. Indeed, some critics compared it to Welles’ Citizen Kane, a claim that elicited both pride and irritation from the both of them at different times, it seemed. Adapted from a novel by Larry McMurtry, the story of a more bitter than sweet coming of age in a dying Texas town both honored its cinematic antecedents (Bogdanovich cast John Ford regular Ben Johnson, whom nobody, least of all Johnson himself, considered much of an actor, in the pivotal role of Sam the Lion; Johnson earned a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his efforts) and implicitly counseled against nostalgia by casting a gimlet eye on the so called “good old days.” 

The movie also marked the screen debut of the beguiling Cybill Shepherd. Bogdanovich left his wife Polly Platt for the actor. Platt had been his close collaborator. and continued to be for a short period after their marriage dissolved. And in interviews conducted before her death, she detailed her contributions to her former husband’s work. In his own interviews, Bogdanovich countered by flat-out calling Platt a liar. (The hyphenate “scholar-writer-director-actor” is not sufficient to cover all of Bogdanovich’s achievements; “jaw-dropping-interview-subject” and “impressionist” also need to be in there, too.) 

While the other Movie Brats made deliberately iconoclastic, untidy pictures, Bogdanovich followed Picture Show with films that put a new coat of paint on what his favorite old Hollywood directors had done. (Although he never paid direct homage to Welles; his frequent use of black-and-white notwithstanding, Bogdanovich kept his film grammar at an inspired and eloquent meat-and-potatoes level, never really going in for elaborate camera moves or unusual angles.) What’s Up Doc was an elaborate, Streisand-fueled screwball comedy, while Paper Moon crossed The Grapes of Wrath with The Sting and featured Tatum O’Neal (then the very young daughter of lead actor Ryan) as a too-wise kid who, aside from her swearing, could have come straight out of a Hal Roach or W.C. Fields picture. 

Turning back to Shepherd, now his partner and muse, he cast her in the lead of his 1974 adaptation of Henry James’ Daisy Miller. The crowned Golden Boy of Hollywood, now a genuine celebrity — he and Cybill graced a cover of People magazine together — was ripe for a fall, and he took one. The movie was slaughtered critically and bombed at the box office. The film is actually not bad. But, as his friend Welles had told him, it was time.  

And yet movie jail was not for him, at least not just yet. He cast Shepherd again, opposite Burt Reynolds, a noted non-singer, in the ambitious At Long Last Love, a musical featuring Cole Porter tunes. (Rock critic Robert Christgau on Shepherd’s album of the time, titled Cybill Does It…To Cole Porter: “Her voice is surprisingly pleasant, but you’d never know how these songs sparkle. Since Cole didn’t like to . . . do it with (or ‘to’) women very much, maybe the ‘do’ is as hostile as it sounds.”) His relationship with Shepherd ended in the late ‘70s. “I was dumb. I made a lot of mistakes,” he told Gene Siskel subsequently. 

Even Orson Welles got in on the schadenfreude, roasting Bogdanovich a bit, on a Tonight Show appearance with Reynolds. While no director ever has it easy, Bogdanovich never had it this easy again. And yet there’s fascinating work to be seen: 1979’s Saint Jack, an adaptation of Paul Theroux’s novel about a Good Pimp, so to speak. It was Bogdanovich’s first collaboration with actor Ben Gazzara. The second was 1981’s They All Laughed, a romantic comedy of great energy and wit — if you can stand to watch it, because in a sense it portends (through no fault of its own) something awful. It was on the set of this film where Gazzara and Audrey Hepburn fell for each other. And where Bogdanovich fell for supporting player Dorothy Stratten, who was brutally killed by her estranged husband Paul Snider in a murder-suicide before the film’s release. 

Her death shattered Bogdanovich. He wrote a book, The Killing of the Unicorn, excoriating a number of people in Stratten’s life, including Hugh Hefner, who Bogdanovich claimed had sexually assaulted the Playboy Playmate Stratten. He became close to Stratten’s family — so close that he married Stratten’s younger sister, Louise, in 1988; at the time of their nuptials, Louise was 20 to Bogdanovich’s 49. In recent years, Bogdanovich kept house with both Louise and her mother, despite Louise and Bogdanovich having divorced in 2001. 

The various collapses in Bogdanovich’s career and life made him a bit of a nomad, not in just the working sense. In one interview he talks about being put up by director Brett Ratner, one of the second or third generation of the Movie Brats. His filmmaking efforts fizzled in animosity of various kinds (he famously despised Cher, the star of his 1985 Mask, and sued that film’s studio over music substitutions). He returned to film scholarship, completing two absolutely essential books: Who The Devil Made It, compiling his interviews with old Hollywood directors, and This Is Orson Welles, a near-definitive portrait of the artist in all his ragged glory. (Who The Hell’s In It, a survey of actors, is also worth owning.) He returned to acting, in, yes, The Sopranos. And also in his friend Noah Baumbach’s Mr. Jealousy, an episode Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and more. He was upfront about it: he needed to make a living. So he made a documentary about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers despite never having been known as any kind of rock and roll maven — and that exhaustive film is quite good, too. He also poked fun at himself in appearances on The Simpsons and Documentary Now! 

And he did his old friend Orson Welles the inestimable favor of bringing Welles’ final, uncompleted film, The Other Side of the Wind, home. Supervising an edit of the movie to be shown on Netflix, Bogdanovich demonstrated both personal devotion and artistic gravitas in huge measure. His acting work in that movie, as New Hollywood hustler Brooks Otterlake (who’s the film’s narrator as well) is Bogdanovich’s most poignant and knowing performance. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.