Peter Bogdanovich

From Critic to Full-Fledged Star

Peter Bogdanovich recorded every film he watched between 1952 and 1970 on index cards. He amassed thousands of titles. That almost obsessive devotion to classic Hollywood cinema (the hard shadows and rapid-fire dialogue) was his true education. He didn't attend an art school; he studied at the New York Film Archive.

In 1968 he made his debut with Targets thanks to Roger Corman's help. It was a cheap production that made use of Boris Karloff's final days under contract and a handful of leftover footage from other films. Yet the result was a pure exercise in tension, blending old-school Gothic horror with the real violence of modern snipers.

And success was quick to knock on his door in a violent way.

In 1971, he premiered The Last Picture Show, and the industry bowed down to him. Shot in black and white that was painful to watch in its rawness, the film dissected the spiritual death of a small town in Texas. It earned eight Oscar nominations and placed Bogdanovich on the same pedestal as Francis Ford Coppola or William Friedkin.

He was the new Orson Welles.

But the filmmaker wasn't interested in dry drama alone. In 1972 he shot What's Up, Doc? to revive the screwball comedy he had loved since the 1930s. It was a box office smash that confirmed his talent for handling frenetic rhythms. A year later, in 1973, he repeated the winning formula with Paper Moon and turned young Tatum O'Neal into the youngest Oscar winner in history.

The Collapse of a Personal System

Bogdanovich's downfall was as cinematic as his films. In the mid-1970s he churned out several projects that failed to connect with audiences or critics. Daisy Miller in 1974 and At Long Last Love in 1975 were met with a hostility the director never quite came to terms with. The press began to punish his arrogance and his private life.

His relationship with Dorothy Stratten ended in utter tragedy.

While filming They All Laughed in 1980, he fell in love with the Playboy model. Her husband murdered her shortly after filming wrapped. Bogdanovich was devastated and made a financially suicidal decision. He bought the film's distribution rights with his own money to keep the studio from mistreating it. The move led him straight to bankruptcy in 1985.

Because the Hollywood system does not forgive those who try to play gods outside the studio. He spent years working on minor projects or as a director for hire, trying to pay off his millions in debt. Only Mask in 1985 managed to restore some of the prestige he had lost (though he had brutal clashes with Cher throughout the shoot).

A Refuge in Memory

In the following decades he focused on preserving the legacy of the masters who came before him. He published essential interview books such as Who the Devil Made It in 1997. His conversations with Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and Fritz Lang are today required reading in film schools around the world.

And then he found a second life in front of the camera.

Between 1999 and 2007 he played Dr. Elliot Kupferberg in the series The Sopranos. His face (always accompanied by his inseparable thick-framed glasses and scarves around his neck) became familiar to a generation that had not seen his masterpieces of the 1970s. He acted with an intellectual composure that fit perfectly on the couch of modern television.

In 2014 he directed his last narrative feature, She's Funny That Way. It was an attempt to return to classic New York comedy, with a cast led by Owen Wilson. Critics were lukewarm. But he didn't seem to mind much, because he was already busy finishing the edit of The Other Side of the Wind, Orson Welles's unfinished film, which finally saw the light of day in 2018 thanks to his personal determination.

He died on January 6, 2022 at his Los Angeles home of natural causes at the age of 82.