Peter Bogdanovich, 1939-2022
He may have been even more valuable as a historian
More than one tribute to the late Peter Bogdanovich referred to the man as a surrogate professor of film, and that may be where his greatest value truly lay.
HIs hefty volumes Who the Devil Made It and Who the Hell’s in It contain his personal interviews with an absolute murderer’s row of actors and directors: Henry Fonda. Cary Grant. John Wayne. Audrey Hepburn. Fritz Lang. Alfred Hitchcock. Howard Hawks. Sidney Lumet. Most film aficionados would be thrilled to have talked to just one of those legends. Bogdanovich talked to them all and then some, making film history vital and accessible. It’s fitting that his final completed film turned out to be a documentary on Buster Keaton, another director whom the system chewed up and spat out.
The narrative of Bogdanovich’s directing career goes more or less like this: Brilliant start with Targets, The Last Picture Show, What’s Up Doc and Paper Moon. Besotted by Cybill Shepherd and buys into his own press. Laid low by his own hubris, by a string of commercial failures and then by Dorothy Stratten’s devastating murder, from which he never fully recovers, personally or professionally. Is it any wonder that late in life, he was out of fucks to give, particularly in this Vulture profile where he threw deadly shade at everyone from Billy Wilder to his former wife and collaborator Polly Platt?
And yet, for all the pent-up frustrations of Bogdanovich’s life and career, his love of motion pictures never faltered, and it must have brought him immense satisfaction to help facilitate the completion of his friend Orson Welles’ long-lost final film, The Other Side of the Wind, in which Bogdanovich co-starred. You can find it on Netflix, and that streamer also has a Welles documentary with Bogdanovich, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, a title that only seems all the more poignant now.
I’ll leave it to others to extol the virtues of Bogdanovich’s greatest hits, the most widely available of which seems to be Paper Moon on Prime. So I’d like to highlight other Bogdanovich works of personal interest:
NOISES OFF: The play, a backstage comedy where everything that can go wrong does go wrong and then some, was my favorite production staged by my alma mater, Bellbrook High School. Bogdanovich made a movie out of it a few years later, available on the library streamer Hoopla. Leonard Maltin’s film guide summed it up well: “This kind of door-slamming comedy doesn’t ever work on film, but Bogdanovich comes closer than anyone has before, with the help of a willing cast.”
HUSTLE: This Pete Rose biopic (no, really) isn’t particularly distinctive on its own, and if it’s available anywhere, I sure can’t find it, but I’ll never forget the three-way ESPN interview with Bogdanovich, Cincinnati Red Rob Dibble and Dayton Daily News sportswriter Hal McCoy, who minced no words about the movie.
THE CAT’S MEOW: If the two sides of Bogdanovich, director and film historian, had their perfect synthesis, it was this delightfully entertaining piece of speculative fiction about how early Hollywood producer Thomas Ince really died on a yacht. Starring Kirsten Dunst as Marion Davies, Eddie Izzard as Charlie Chaplin, Edward Herrmann as William Randolph Hearst and Cary Elwes as Ince. It’s available with ads on Tubi and IMDB TV.
THE MYSTERY OF NATALIE WOOD: Not bad at all TV biopic of one of my favorite actresses. A healthy peppering of film clips - a very Bogdanovich touch - certainly helps.