By JOSEPH McBRIDE
Peter Bogdanovich may have always wanted to be Cary Grant. But I wanted to be Peter Bogdanovich.
My old friend Peter died at age 82 yesterday (January 6) in Los Angeles. Even before I saw my first Bogdanovich film in 1968, I was an admirer of his erudite, intrepid interviews with directors, the same legendary figures I wanted to meet, and I understood how Peter was using those as a platform to become a director. I had that mistaken ambition back then too, not realizing that my true métier and pleasure was writing books. But as Abraham Polonsky once advised me about doing Q&A events with directors, “If you stand beside a director often enough, people will start thinking of you as a director.” That notion served Peter well, and his early dreams of becoming an actor eventually gave way to his Ford-and-Welles-influenced passion for directing, which brought him great popular success for a few years before his oft-chronicled calamitous downfall.
In his later period of rebirth and climb out of bankruptcy, rather than giving up his career, he doggedly directed a string of mostly obscure TV movies and returned to acting, finding a new audience on The Sopranos and other TV shows and films. In his earlier glory days, Peter was one of the few American cinephiles who managed to become a director like French cinephiles such as Truffaut and Godard and Chabrol. While doing so, Peter kept up his dedicated work as a chronicler and appreciator of classic filmmakers in a series of valuable interview books, including his invaluable John Ford (1968), which helped make it possible for me to begin writing about Ford, and the long-in-the-works This Is Orson Welles. That seemed like a lost project after Welles and Peter had a falling out, but it was rescued by Oja Kodar and its editor, Jonathan Rosenbaum, for publication in 1992.
I always felt that one of the lesser-known secrets of Peter’s success as a journalist and author was identified by his editor at Esquire, Harold Hayes, who once observed that Peter had “a cast-iron stomach.” Peter would blithely put up with any kind of humiliation from the directors he admired, even Ford and Welles. His then-wife, Polly Platt, told me that Peter wept in Goulding’s Lodge on the first night on location in Monument Valley for the AFI documentary Directed by John Ford in 1969 because Ford had dragged him all the way out there and then refused to answer most of his questions. Polly suggested using Ford’s monosyllabic responses as “comic relief” to the beautiful film clips, so Peter forged ahead and began saying that was his idea.
Another example of that “cast-iron stomach” came when I witnessed Welles berating Peter during the shooting of The Other Side of the Wind in 1971. Welles was assembling his cast and crew in the parking lot of a Howard Johnson’s motel in Hollywood before heading out on the day’s shoot when Peter pulled up in his snazzy white convertible. He demanded that Orson record his narration for Directed by John Ford. Gesturing to his film company, Welles said evenly, “Peter, I’m trying to make a movie here.” Peter whined that the end deadline was fast approaching and he only needed the narration.
Welles glared at him in silence, grabbed the script pages and the box of audiotape, went into the HoJo’s with a sound man, and recorded the narration in twenty minutes. He came out, thrust the tape into Peter’s hands, and said, “You know, Peter, sometimes you can be a real shit.” That line would have reduced me to tears, but Peter simply walked past me with a Cheshire Cat grin, put the tape in his trunk, and sped away. The miracle is that Welles’s narration is so eloquently delivered, so heartfelt.
That kind of cocky dedication enabled Peter to combine a career as a filmmaker with a genuine devotion to film history, aided by his access to everyone who matters. Only Martin Scorsese in that generation of American filmmakers has long managed to combine filmmaking with a serious devotion to film history. Why did both succeed in overcoming the traditional American bias against blending the roles of directors and critics? Partly because Peter was not actually a critic (as he always was keen to point out), and Scorsese tends to express his passion more in documentaries and in home video interviews. Both are erudite enthusiasts, in the best sense of the word.
It was because of Peter’s interviews and his early (1961) Museum of Modern Art monograph The Cinema of Orson Welles that I was keenly aware of who he was before I saw my first of his films, Targets, in a big theater in Chicago during a break from being tear-gassed at the Democratic Convention in August 1968 (I had missed his Ed Wood-level 1968 Corman film, Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, released with the directing credit of Derek Thomas). Targets knocked me out with its Raoul Walshian, or Manny Farberish, elegance in a B-movie framework and its chutzpah in blending contemporary horrors (a mad sniper roaming the streets) with movie lore (in the most memorable scene, the sniper tries to kill Boris Karloff at a drive-in movie theater, but Karloff slaps the kid, reducing him to whimpering mush, an act of great symbolic meaning).
I determined to meet the director who made this wonderful film that largely escaped notice because Paramount ironically dumped it, worried over whether it would encourage the trend of escalating gun violence (my writer friend Mark Jacobson told me when he saw Targets in New York, the only other person in the theater was Truman Capote). But Targets captured the zeitgeist of 1968 as few American films did, and of course it looks prescient today when more acclaimed films of that time look forgettable.
I met Peter in August 1970 just as he was about to go to Texas to shoot The Last Picture Show, based on a Larry McMurtry novel I admired. I went to his small rented house in Van Nuys (this was before the $3 million mansion in Bel Air across the street from Ford’s old house), and Peter generously spent a long evening filling me in on arcane information about Ford and Welles. The evening ended only when Peter’s very pregnant wife, Polly, gently interrupted, carrying his daughter Antonia (a future director) on her hip (Alexandra Welles Bogdanovich soon would arrive).
Shortly after our first meeting, Peter and I spent the initial day of shooting on The Other Side of the Wind, August 23, 1970, playing two squabbling film critics, footage that mostly was jettisoned after The Last Picture Show made Peter a hotshot young director, causing Welles to base his roman à clef more around a bankable protégé’s edgy relationship with the struggling old director played by John Huston. The early footage Peter and I shot would not be seen until it appeared in Morgan Neville’s 2018 documentary composed largely of outtakes, They’ll Love Men When I’m Dead.
The night I met Peter, we talked about his decision to go with offbeat casting choices on The Last Picture Show rather than big-name actors, a decision that helped make the film so special. He said he had considered a movie-star cast of such actors as James Stewart, Dorothy Malone, and Vera Miles but decided to go with less familiar faces, including newcomer Jeff Bridges, new-to-me Cloris Leachman and Ellen Burstyn, and veteran Ben Johnson, who had never become a star as Ford had once hoped (partly due to Ford abandoning him out of pique). I admired Peter for adamantly refusing Welles’s fervent wish to play the role of Sam the Lion, which would have ruined the film (Welles told me before the filming, “Anybody who plays that role will win an Academy Award,” which came true for Johnson). When The Last Picture Show was acclaimed by opening-night audiences as the supposed debut of a first-rate new director, I sent Peter a note alluding to Targets and saying, “I knew it back then.”
I realized quite early that the multitalented Polly Platt was a major contributor to the films they made together. They co-wrote Targets (with uncredited help from Sam Fuller), and she vividly designed the shoestring production. She continued working with Peter on The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, and Paper Moon, and his work suffered for a while after they broke up due to Peter’s unfortunate romance with Cybill Shepherd, begun on location for The Last Picture Show. Polly was a brilliant woman who played a major part in every aspect of his work, as is so eloquently demonstrated in Karina Longworth’s 2020 You Must Remember This podcast series on Platt (“Polly Platt: The Invisible Woman”). Example: A crew member on Paper Moon told me that Peter was usually exasperated with the sulky, untrained moppet actress Tatum O’Neal, but that Polly would take Tatum off in the corner for an hour before each scene and patiently guide her in what to do (Tatum was rewarded with an Oscar).
I was not as fond as most people of What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon, heavy-handed nostalgia pieces that don’t hold up well today, despite their great box office success at the time. But I have always admired his 1975 film maudit At Long Last Love, a beautifully crafted, daringly conceived homage to Ernst Lubitsch. The widespread critical derision paid to it was largely due to Peter’s mistaken decision to cast Shepherd as a leading character in a musical, even though her talents are limited to singing and not dancing or acting.
But the film’s virulently over-the-top rejection by reviewers and audiences, I have come to realize, had as much to do with the scandal of Peter’s making a romantic film in the Lubitschean vein at a time when romance was sneered at and Lubitsch was mostly forgotten. The restored version of the film allows its many virtues to shine forth, beginning with the startling long-take musical number that now opens the film, starring Madeline Kahn, a genuinely great musical performer and actress who should have played the lead opposite the amiably singing and gamely hoofing Burt Reynolds.
But the damage was done to Peter’s career. After the misconceived Nickelodeon, he foundered for years in a kind of internal exile in Hollywood. His disastrous affair with another non-actress, Dorothy Stratten, on They All Laughed ended in horrendous tragedy. Peter chronicled their time together and his reaction to her murder by her estranged husband in The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten 1960-1980 (1984), a book whose flaws and virtues are inextricable, making me think of what Tennessee Williams once said, “A writer should never be embarrassed.”
Peter’s decision to blow his fortune of several million dollars in an attempt to revive the box office fortunes of They All Laughed as a homage to Stratten ruined him financially for decades, but when you watch it today, it is obvious that it was an awkward, indulgent vanity project from the word go. Although the film inexplicably has devoted admirers, its painful archness makes me think of what Howard Hawks once told me about Peter: “His trouble is that he’s no good at writing and directing dialogue.”
Peter began redeeming himself and disproving Hawks’s view of his limitations in what I think of the “real Peter” phase of his career, the long twilight years in which he put his considerable Polly influence behind and began doing quirky films more in his own sensibility. Most of his later films, like Targets, draw on genre influences in a revivifying way while not being so squarely aimed at pleasing mass audiences. The relatively modest films Saint Jack, Mask, Texasville, Noises Off, The Thing Called Love, and The Cat’s Meow are among Peter’s finest, as, indeed, are his last picture show, The Great Buster: A Celebration (his loving 2018 documentary homage to Buster Keaton) and one of the TV movies, Blessed Assurance (aka The Price of Heaven, 1997).
One of my friends, on Peter’s passing, wrote me that he liked all of Peter’s films, even the bad ones. But as often happens in film history, some of the so-called “bad ones” have turned out to be the best ones. Peter Tonguette demonstrates that in his charming homage, Picturing Peter Bogdanovich: My Conversations with the New Hollywood Director (2020), which pays welcome critical attention to Bogdanovich’s TV movies. They were snobbishly and predictably ignored as make-do hackwork when they came out but deserve the renewed attention that Tonguette pays in his book.
When I presented Bogdnaovich with a special award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association in 1998 for his book Who the Devil Made It; Conversations with Legendary Film Directors, my speech discussed how felicitously he had managed to blend his passions for such directors as Ford, Welles, Allan Dwan, and others with his films made under their influence (even if Peter became better when he stopped imitating other directors so obviously).
I noted that Texasville was underrated because it broke the rule about sequels by deviating drastically from the much-loved original. It did so in ways that reflect the changes in Peter’s own life, and it is intelligent and full of keen social commentary as well as mordantly comedic and more formally complex than the original. I pointed out that in those regards the film bore affinities with Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game. And I mentioned that Blessed Assurance (which hardly anyone has even heard of) has some of the warmth and passion of Ford’s equally modestly-scaled masterwork about Southern race relations, The Sun Shines Bright. As I drew those comparisons, I heard a snicker and muffled outburst, “The Rules of the Game!!??” from a certain film reviewer who will not be mentioned here, but I think my point remains valid. As a filmmaker, Peter Bogdanovich never reached the lofty heights of the masters he so admired, but he made honorable works in their classical tradition while helping keep their legacies alive in his books as well, as François Truffaut did with equal devotion.
Peter and I had our ups and downs over the more than fifty years we knew each other. I was always grateful to him for putting me in Other Wind, after Welles tasked him with rounding up amusing film-buff characters, and I had a chance to tell him so when we and Frank Marshall held our Q&A about Other Wind after its 2018 North American premiere in Telluride. I had long since put behind me the blow I felt when Peter and Oja Kodar fired me as a producer on the film in 1998. The late cinematographer Gary Graver and I had pooled our efforts to try to raise end money and seemed to succeed with Showtime, when Peter and Oja decided they didn’t need me anymore. I chose not to make an issue about it because I didn’t want to cause any more trouble for that film.
In retrospect, I am glad I was fired because I didn’t envy Filip Jan Rymsza spending years negotiating for the rights with Kodar. Nor did I envy Filip, Peter, Frank, and editor Bob Murawski having to labor with prodigious technical efforts to restore a film that almost was lost with time and the vagaries of storage. But I was pleased to be asked to be a consultant on the final project with Rosenbaum. And I was delighted by Peter’s richly nuanced performance as the wealthy young director Brooks Otterlake, whose ambivalent relationship with Jake Hannaford reflects and interrogates Peter’s own uneasy history with Welles. Other Wind finally enabled Peter to realize his dream of becoming a movie star.
The film’s triumphant release, as if returning from the dead, helped bring my involvement with the film and Peter full circle. But I had put my resentment behind me years before that, since Peter and I kept intersecting in various ways and he seemed oblivious to the old problem. He was unfailingly generous toward my work as an author of film books. I also felt that since Dorothy’s death had shattered his former arrogance, Peter became a sadder but wiser person, warmer, humbler, more appealing, a quality well-captured in Tonguette’s book.
I only met Cybill Shepherd briefly once in the 1970s, but I can’t shake the memory of Peter’s reaction during their Q&A at the Castro Theater in San Francisco, during a 2008 double bill of The Last Picture Show and At Long Last Love, when she casually mentioned having screwed Elvis Presley upstairs in their mansion while Peter was downstairs. Peter reacted to that public disclosure with apparent shock, evidently had never read her account in her sleazy autobiography, Cybill Disobedience: How I Survived Beauty Pageants, Elvis, Sex, Bruce Willis, Lies, Marriage, Motherhood, Hollywood, and the Irrepressible Urge to Say What I Think (2000). I had adored Polly Platt and always wished Peter would have had the sense of stay with her, but in later years when I came to know his second wife, Louise Stratten, Dorothy’s sister, I liked her too and admired Louise’s devotion to Peter all the way to the end, even after their marriage ended and in the face of people speaking ill of their relationship. I was glad to hear after his death that even though Peter had looked frail for years, he had kept working on book and film projects and always remained sharp.
Peter and I had our last chances for good talks at a Lubitsch event I did with the director’s daughter, Nicola Lubitsch, at UCLA in the summer of 2018 and soon after that year at the festivities in Telluride and New York for The Other Side of the Wind, but we kept up a friendly email correspondence. The last time I saw him was in March 2020, right before the pandemic hit hard, and we crossed paths very briefly — I mean for about three minutes — as I was leaving Hillsdale College in Michigan and he was arriving for our respective talks on Ford. We were being rushed in and out, and I feared it might be the last time I would see him, but it was a warm and cordial moment to be cherished. In later years he had taken to signing books and notes to me with, “We have heard the chimes at midnight.” And eventually he would end with, “Love, Peter.”
******
Joseph McBride plays Mister Pister in The Other Side of the Wind. He has written three books on Welles. An updated edition of his 2006 book What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career, including a new epilogue on Other Wind and Too Much Johnson, is being published in paperback on January 11 by the University Press of Kentucky.
Post your comments on the Wellesnet Message Board.