This Month

5 Movies | April 22nd & 23rd  

When Peter Bogdanovich died on January 6, 2022, the world lost not just a writer-director-producer-actor responsible for a handful of the most memorable films of the last half century but a scholar who made great contributions to cinema history. In both his writing about films and the works he created for the screen, Bogdanovich recalled for readers and audiences the styles, stories, motifs and artists of Hollywood’s past. In the process he also captured bygone periods of American life with a reverence and curiosity that transcended mere nostalgia.

“I think one learns from the past,” the young Bogdanovich told Gordon Gow in a 1972 interview. “It inspires me.”

His own history reveals a determination to study and create narrative art through a range of pursuits that led to his multi-hyphenate status. Born in Kingston, NY, in 1939, just two months after his parents fled the Nazi threat in Europe, by the age of 13 he had begun compiling a card file of every film he had seen. He trained in his teen years as an actor, and at the age of 20 he directed his first off-Broadway production, Clifford Odets’ The Big Knife, which had been made into a 1955 film by one of Bogdanovich’s future research subjects, Robert Aldrich.

Shortly after, he traveled to Los Angeles for the first time to make connections and do research on noted directors for planned film articles. By 1963 he had published monographs on Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, with whom he would maintain a long, if rocky, professional and personal relationship. During this time, he also met and married stage costume designer Polly Platt and began making regular contributions to Esquire magazine. 

In 1964 he and Platt moved west, where he met independent producer-director Roger Corman, who gave him his first jobs in the film industry. Bogdanovich was credited as Corman’s assistant on the Peter Fonda biker picture The Wild Angels (1966), but he also functioned as a second-unit director, cameraman and editor and completely rewrote the screenplay, all of it uncredited.

In 1968 he directed his debut feature film, Targets, a story about a psychotic mass killer that first revealed Bogdanovich’s fascination with movie history to film audiences. Horror film legend Boris Karloff plays an elderly horror movie star, and Bogdanovich cast himself as a young director with abundant knowledge of and enthusiasm for classic movies. Although not a box office success, Targets received several positive reviews that gave him a leg up to produce his breakthrough feature, The Last Picture Show (1971), a film that was wrapped up in both film lore and his attraction to the American past.

“The main reason I wanted to do The Last Picture Show was because the novel is set back in the 1950s,” he told Gow. “The book was rather more amorphous than the movie is: it wasn’t specifically 1951 and 1952 in the book, and when we started to do the movie, we fixed that specific period rather than just the fifties as a whole.”

The story of a decrepit, fading Texas town whose one small movie theater is about to close for good has a look highly reminiscent of the Westerns of John Ford and Howard Hawks, along with the elegiac sense many of those films convey of a vanishing way of life. (The same month as he released this film, Bogdanovich also premiered his documentary Directed by John Ford, 1971.) The Last Picture Show functions as a kind of historical bookend to those earlier Westerns’ tales of the coming of civilization to the frontier with its images of the parched and lonely wilderness overtaking the dying town and the crushed dreams of the people who live there. The cast even includes Ford regular Ben Johnson (She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, 1949; Rio Grande, 1950) as the theater owner whose last picture show is Hawks’ Red River (1948). Johnson won an Academy Award for his supporting work, as did Cloris Leachman in the role of a neglected housewife who has an affair with one of her husband’s high school players.

The film introduced several young performers to wider audiences, including Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd and Randy Quaid, and provided a breakthrough role for Ellen Burstyn after more than a decade of small roles and television guest spots.

The Last Picture Show received high praise from critics for its sensitivity and emotional and visual impact (much of that thanks to Platt’s production design). Its connection to movies of the past did not go unnoticed; Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called it "the most considered, craftsmanlike and elaborate tribute we have yet had to what the movies were and how they figured in our lives."

It also fueled the decade’s emerging taste for nostalgia, a trend that was not lost on Bogdanovich. 

“Perhaps people have discovered something that I’ve suspected for a while, which is that the future’s rather bleak and the present is not terribly pleasant,” he said in an interview not long after the film’s release. “So where else can we look but to the past? It interests me.”

He rode that wave for the next few years, continuing his love affair with classic Hollywood. Younger audiences may have been unaware of the references in his next feature, What’s Up, Doc? (1972), but those familiar with the screwball comedies of the 1930s knew it was heavily inspired by Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby (1938). A comedy about the social and romantic collision of a zany charmer (Barbra Streisand, in the Katharine Hepburn role) and a repressed, nerdy academic (Ryan O’Neal, subbing for Cary Grant), it was a huge success, earning more than 16 times its $4 million budget to become the third highest-grossing release of the year.

Bogdanovich later claimed that critics wouldn’t have noticed the similarities to Hawks’ comedy if he hadn’t pointed it out (highly unlikely). In a 1979 interview first published in the book Peter Bogdanovich: Interviews (ed. Peter Tonguette, 2015), he said it was much more connected to the obvious reference of its title, with Streisand as Bugs Bunny and O’Neal as Elmer Fudd. “It’s a cartoon more than it is a movie,” he said, acknowledging his debt to animator Chuck Jones and, in the chase scenes, silent comedy genius Buster Keaton.

Bogdanovich was by this time the leading light of an emerging period in American motion pictures that would be dominated by the strong, personal visions of a crop of new young directors, many of them well-versed in film history. With the clout he earned on his last two releases, he next turned from the contemporary urban setting of What’s Up, Doc? back to the heartland and an earlier period, in this case the Depression, for the comedy Paper Moon (1973). He also returned to the black-and-white cinematography that had worked so well in The Last Picture Show but which was unusual at the time.

“I thought it would give us the period quicker without any problems,” he said later. “I thought we would be able to get better photography. I had been down to Texas, and I had photographed a lot of those little towns in color. These were bleak, sad little places you’d drive into and you’d think it was the end of the world. And then when you saw it on the screen in color, they didn’t look so bad. Because color has a way of glamorizing things, romanticizing. … I felt the acting was everything in this picture and that the actors would seem better in black-and-white.”

Ryan O’Neal was cast again, this time as a con artist who sells Bibles to the recently bereaved. He becomes saddled with a little girl who may or may not be his daughter, keeping her on the road with him when he realizes she can help him in his con game. For the part of the girl, Bogdanovich cast O’Neal’s real-life daughter Tatum, who was not quite nine when filming began. Working with an inexperienced child of that age, particularly an undisciplined Hollywood kid, was daunting; both her father and her director spent a lot of time yelling at the girl. But it paid off with a winning performance, earning her the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award, the youngest person ever to win a competitive Oscar.

Tatum O’Neal had strong competition in her category from Madeline Kahn, whose feature debut in What’s Up, Doc? had brought her a great deal of attention. As she had in that earlier movie, Kahn imbued her winning comic performance with pathos as Trixie Delight, a carnival dancer and likely prostitute who briefly becomes the conman’s girlfriend. Kahn’s contribution helped Bogdanovich realize the mix of tones he was going for.

“[Kahn]’s so touching. That scene on the hill, she’ll just break your heart,” he told interviewers. “People say, ‘What a funny, charming movie.’ I thought it was one of the saddest movies I made because this girl is nine years old and she’s put through the mill. All she wants is for the father to say that he loves her and that he’s her father.”

At this point, Bogdanovich’s personal life began to overshadow his professional achievements. During filming of The Last Picture Show, he began an affair with his young star Cybill Shepherd and separated from his wife, who nevertheless continued to work as his production designer on his next two pictures. He and Platt divorced around the time of Paper Moon’s production, and he built his next two films – period pieces again – around his new love. 

Daisy Miller (1974), adapted from Henry James’ 1878 novella, and At Long Last Love (1975), an attempt to recreate the sophisticated romantic comedies of the 1930s, both failed miserably with critics and audiences, bringing about the end of the couple’s working and, not long after, personal relationship and curtailing the trajectory of Bogdanovich’s rising star. The situation wasn’t helped by the release of his third bomb in a row, Nickelodeon (1976), a comedy set at the dawn of motion pictures based on stories he had been told by veteran directors Allan Dwan and Raoul Walsh.

He finished out the decade with a totally different kind of film. Saint Jack (1979) is a crime drama shot entirely on location in Singapore. Ben Gazzara’s performance was highly praised, and many critics hailed Bogdanovich’s return to character-driven drama. However, it failed to find a wide audience. Years later, he told The New York Times that this and his next picture, They All Laughed (1981), “were two of my best films but never received the kind of distribution they should have.”

Except for the success of the 1985 drama Mask, Bogdanovich never again attained the heights of his early 1970s career. But he remained one of our foremost film historians and custodian of knowledge that may have otherwise been lost. His landmark 1997 book Who the Devil Made It? brought together the in-depth interviews he had done over the years with Hawks, Ford, Hitchcock and more than a dozen notable and influential Hollywood directors. He followed that with a book on Hollywood’s acting icons, Who the Hell’s in It: Portraits and Conversations (2004). 

His last directorial effort was a labor of love squarely in the vein of his cinema scholarship. The Great Buster (2018) compiled dozens of interviews and clips to shed light on the remarkable achievements of silent film great Buster Keaton. Critics hailed it as essential viewing for both cineastes and general audiences, and it won the Best Documentary on Cinema prize at the Venice Film Festival.

This scholarly aspect of his career was well noted in his obituaries, along with the “orgy of film-industry schadenfreude” that The New York Times said accompanied his “critical and box-office failures, personal bankruptcies, [and] the raking of his romantic life through the press.” They also noted his long acting career, beginning with the early Corman pictures and continuing until shortly before his death, most notably his work on the TV series The Sopranos.

“I don’t judge myself on the basis of my contemporaries,” Bogdanovich told the New York Times in 1971. “I judge myself against the directors I admire — Hawks, Lubitsch, 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.”

With this tribute, TCM viewers have the chance to judge for themselves.