He loved cinema, he loved Hollywood. Peter Bogdanovich, who died at the age of 82, was one of the leading directors of the 1970s. If his filmography became uneven thereafter, he nevertheless established himself as an essential figure in the seventh art, in particular thanks to his books on the subject. He was close to Orson Welles and was an authority on him. Much loved in the community, he readily accepted to play actors for others, especially in the series The Sopranos, where he played Doctor Kupferberg.
Peter Bogdanovich was born in Kingston, New York, the son of an Austrian Jewish mother and a Serbian Orthodox Christian father. For his part, it was at the local cinema that he got into the habit of receiving communion. Very early on, he developed a passion for John Ford, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, ignoring that they would one day become his friends and that he would devote books and collections of interviews to them.
After studying acting, he became a film critic and film programmer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York around 1960. Like his French counterparts François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol, he made the leap from criticism to directing, moving his home to Los Angeles in 1966.
Like many other filmmakers of the “ New hollywood Like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich first found work with B-series producer Roger Corman. For the latter, he produced in 1968, under a pseudonym, the nanar Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, based on extracts from a Russian film.
The same year his first official film appeared, Targets, where the destinies of an aging horror film actor (Boris Karloff, the life of the job) and a young mad shooter intersect. Shot with little money, the film received critical acclaim. Already, Bogdanovich showed his taste for cinematographic homage.
The ups and downs
Shot in black and white, a decision then deemed risky, The Last Picture Show (The last screening) premiered in 1971 and remains the filmmaker’s masterpiece. Choral film imbued with melancholy in which, among others, Jeff Bridges, Ellen Burstyn and especially Cloris Leachman stand out, The Last Picture Show met with great critical and popular success, winning numerous awards. Set in 1951, this adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s novel deals with “a city no longer having a reason to exist and people no longer having a reason to live there,” to quote critic Roger Ebert.
In 1972, Bogdanovich signed a film-made love letter to Howard Hawks with What’s Up Doc? (Shall we pack our bags, doctor?), disheveled comedy in the style of “ screwball »Of the years 1930-1940. Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal are a mismatched couple, she a charming troublemaker and he, a stuck musicologist. Another success.
Rebelote the following year with the dramatic comedy Paper moon (Cotton candy), or the adventures of a crook forced to take care of an orphan during the Great Depression. Bogdanovich found Ryan O’Neal there, who this time gave the reply to his daughter Tatum O’Neal, 9, and who won an Oscar. Returning to black and white, the filmmaker here summoned the rural America of the 1930s as evoked in John Ford’s cinema.
A ill-advised adaptation of Henry James released in 1974, Daisy miller was Bogdanovich’s first failure. Cybill Shepherd, then the filmmaker’s lover, plays a rich American who experiences various social and sentimental tribulations in Europe.
Ensued At Long Last Love (Finally love, 1975), a pastiche of 1930s musicals featuring Cybill Shepherd and Burt Reynolds singing their thwarted love, Nickelodeon (1976), a tribute to silent cinema where Reynolds plays an uneducated actor and O’Neal a beleaguered director, Saint Jack (Jack the Magnificent, 1979), on the splendours and miseries of an American mackerel in Singapore, and They All Laugh (And everyone was laughing, 1981), or the love stories of three private detectives: all failures.
They All Laugh, in particular, proved to be very painful for the filmmaker. Indeed, he was at the time in a relationship with Dorothy Stratten, who plays in the film and who was murdered by her ex-partner shortly before the release.
The Welles sector
After a four-year hiatus, Peter Bogdanovich bounces back with the moving Mask (M asque, 1985), biographical drama about Rocky Dennis (Eric Stoltz), a teenage boy with cranio-diaphyseal dysplasia. Cher won the Interpretation Award at Cannes for her poignant composition of Mother Courage.
Attempt to repeat the magic of What’s Up Doc?, Illegally Yours (Illegally yours, 1988), on the other hand, was difficult to see, just as Texasville (1990), unnecessary follow-up to The Last Picture Show. Also forgettable: the theatrical farce Noises Off (Backstage noise, 1992). As for The Thing Called Love (1993), it will be remembered especially as the last completed film of River Phoenix and one of the first of Sandra Bullock.
Then, when nothing more was expected of him, Bogdanovich returned with The Cat’s Meow (Scandal scent, 2001), which speculates on the mysterious death of businessman Thomas H. Ince on board the yacht of tycoon William Randolph Hearst, inspired by the character of Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane, Orson Welles. During one of their many interviews, Welles had reported the episode to Bogdanovich (see This is Orson Welles, published in 1992).
In this regard, when in 1971, the criticism of New Yorker Pauline Kael questioned Welles’ contribution to the screenplay of Citizen Kane in his essay Raising Kane, it was Bogdanovich who, point by point, invalidated the thesis in his own essay The Kane Mutiny. Note further that Welles directed Bogdanovich in The Other Side of the Wind, film remained unfinished until the second completed it in 2018.
His final production was the documentary The Great Buster: A Celebration, about actor and director Buster Keaton.
Invited to at the Venice Film Festival in 2014, Peter Bogdanovich confided to the Guardian : “When I was younger all my friends were older: John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. I loved talking to these people. And now they’re all dead. I cried a lot of friends, more than I should have at this point in my life. It was a different world. It was a better world. “