Film director, born in Kingston, New York, USA. His particular interest was in reviving the film genre of the 1930s and 1940s. His second film, The Last Picture Show (1971), depicting social change in a 1950s Texas town, received critical acclaim, though the sequel, Texasville (1990), was less successful. Later films include Noises Off (1992) and The Thing Called Love (1993).
Peter Bogdanovich (born July 30, 1939) is an American film director, writer and actor born in Kingston, New York. An obsessive cinema-goer, sometimes seeing up to 400 movies a year in his youth, Bogdanovich prominently showcased the work of American directors such as John Ford, whom he subsequently wrote a book about based on the notes he had produced for the MoMA retrospective of the director, and the then-underappreciated Howard Hawks. In 1968, following the example of Cahiers du Cinéma critics Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Éric Rohmer who had created the Nouvelle Vague ("New Wave") by making their own films, Bogdanovich decided to become a director. At one screening, Bogdanovich was viewing a film with film director Roger Corman sitting behind him.
In 1970, Bogdanovich was commissioned by the American Film Institute to direct a documentary about John Ford for a tribute, Directed by John Ford. The resulting film is considered a classic Hollywood profile documentary. Out of circulation for years due to licensing issues, Bogdanovich and TCM released it in 2006, featuring newer, pristine film clips, and additional interviews with Clint Eastwood, Walter Hill, Harry Carey, Jr., Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and others.
Eruption into Stardom
The 32-year old Bogdanovich was hailed by a critics as a "Wellesian" wunderkind when his best known film, The Last Picture Show, was released in 1971. Bogdanovich, who had cast the 19-year-old model Cybill Shepherd in a major role in the film, fell in love with her, an affair that eventually led to his divorce from Polly Platt, his long-time artistic collaborator and the mother of his two children.
Bogdanovich followed up The Last Picture Show with the popular hit What's Up, Doc? (1972), a screwball comedy indebted to Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (1937) and His Girl Friday (1941), starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal. Despite his reliance on homage to bygone cinema, Bogdanovich had solidified his status as one of a new breed of A-list directors that included Academy Award winners Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin, with whom he formed The Directors Company.
Paper Moon, a Depression-era comedy starring Ryan O'Neal that won his 10-year-old daughter Tatum O'Neal an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress, proved to be the high-water mark of Bogdanovich's career. The Directors Company subsequently produced only two more pictures, Coppola's The Conversation (1974), which was nominated for Best Picture in 1974 alongside The Godfather, Part II (1974), and Bogdanovich's Daisy Miller, a film that had a lackluster critical reception.
Commercial Demise
An adaptation of the Henry James novella, Daisy Miller (1974) spelled the beginning of the end of Bogdanovich's career as a popular, critically acclaimed director. The film, which starred Bogdanovich's lover Shepherd as the title character, was savaged by critics and was a flop at the box office. Bogdanovich's follow-up, a film of the Cole Porter musical At Long Last Love (1975) starring Shepherd, was panned by critics as one of the worst films ever made and noted as such in Harry and Michael Medved's The Golden Turkey Awards: Nominees and Winners, the Worst Achievements in Hollywood History (1980).
Once again beholden to the past, Bogdanovich insisted on filming the musical numbers for At Long Last Love live, a process not used since the early days of the talkies. (Bogdanovich himself had produced a critically panned album of Shepherd singing Porter songs in 1974.) The public perception of Bogdanovich became that of an arrogant director hamstrung by his own hubris. Counseled not to use the critically unpopular Shepherd in the film, Bogdanovich instead used newcomer Jane Hitchcock as the film's ingénue.
The Dorothy Stratten Affair
After a three-year hiatus, Bogdanovich returned with the critically and financially underwhelming Saint Jack (1979) for Hugh Hefner's Playboy Productions Inc. Bogdanovich's long affair with Shepherd had ended in 1978, but the production deal making Hefner the film's producer was part of the settlement of a lawsuit Shepherd had filed against Hefner for publishing nude photos of her pirated from a print of The Last Picture Show in Playboy Magazine. Bogdanovich then launched the film that would be his career Waterloo, They All Laughed, a low-budget ensemble comedy starring Audrey Hepburn and the 20 year-old Playboy Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten. During the filming of the picture, Bogdanovich fell in love with Stratten, who was married to Paul Snider. (The film would prove to be Hepburn's penultimate role in a theatrically released motion picture.) The heartbroken Bogdanovich bought the rights to the negative so that it would be seen by the public, but the film had a limited release to weak reviews and lost Bogdanovich millions, driving him into bankruptcy.
Later Years
Bogdanovich turned back to his first avocation, writing, to pen a memoir of his dead love, The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten (1960–1980) that was published in 1984. While Bogdanovich never criticized Carpenter's article in his book, she had lambasted Bogdanovich and Hefner, claiming that Stratten was as much a victim of them as she was of Snider. In particular she criticized Bogdanovich for his "puerile preference for ingenues," and it's true that at least three of the actresses on They All Laughed (Colleen Camp, Patti Hansen and Dorothy Stratten) were either current or former lovers of the director. Carpenter's article served as the basis of Bob Fosse's film Star 80 (1983), in which Bogdanovich, for legal reasons, was portrayed as the fictional director "Aram Nicholas".
Bogdanovich's career as a noted director was over, and though he achieved a modest success with Mask in 1985, his sequel to The Last Picture Show, Texasville (1990), was a critical and box office disappointment. (The former film, Noises Off..., has subsequently developed a strong cult following.) Bogdanovich, drawing from his encyclopedic knowledge of film history, authored several critically lauded texts including Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week, containing the lifelong cinephile's erudite commentary on 52 of his favorite films, Who The Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors, and Who the Hell's in It: Conversations with Hollywood's Legendary Actors.
In 2001, Bogdanovich resurfaced with The Cat's Meow. Bogdanovich says he heard the story of the alleged Ince murder from director Orson Welles who in turn said he heard it from writer Herman J. In addition to helming some television movies, Bogdanovich has returned to acting, with a recurring guest role on the cable television series The Sopranos as Dr. Melfi's psychotherapist.
Bogdanovich's personal reputation suffered from gossip about his 13 year marriage to Dorothy Stratten's 19-year-old younger sister Louise Hoogstraten, who was 29 years his junior.
In 1998, the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress named The Last Picture Show to the National Film Registry, an honor awarded only to the most culturally significant films.
Bogdanovich hosted The Essentials on Turner Classic Movies but was replaced in May 2006 by TCM host Robert Osborne and film critic Molly Haskell.
In addition to his writing, directing and acting skills, Bogdanovich is notorious for doing impeccable impressions of Hollywood legends, such as Cary Grant, James Stewart and Jerry Lewis (all of whom were/are close friends).
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