Like everyone else who knew him, considered him a friend, or otherwise fell into his orbit, I have with difficulty learned to live without phone calls, voicemails, or emails from Peter Bogdanovich.
The Oscar-nominated director—whose classic films include The Last Picture Show (1971), What’s Up, Doc? (1972), and Paper Moon (1973)—died on January 6, 2022, at the age of 82. Since we lived very far apart, in fact, in different worlds—I in Ohio, he, for most of the time I knew him, in southern California—the cessation of his communiques has been the most tangible evidence of his absence. He would have turned 86 this coming Wednesday, but I am certain that nothing, not even increasingly advanced age, would have gotten in the way of his wanting to talk about movies, especially his own.
We had reason to be in touch because, at the unlikely age of 20, I managed to arrange an interview with him for an ambitious, career-spanning article I was writing about his work. It took less effort than you might imagine to reach him: I knew a film critic, Bill Krohn of Cahiers du Cinema, who knew his longtime assistant, Iris Chester, who put me in touch with his office in New York, where he was then living (and was then shooting, including on the night I first called him, episodes of The Sopranos, in which he appeared as Lorraine Bracco’s psychiatrist). In my experience, far less notable celebrities—those who had not known Alfred Hitchcock, starred in a movie directed by Orson Welles, or directed the youngest-ever Oscar winner, Tatum O’Neal, as he had—could be far more difficult to reach.
I embarked on our first conversations with something of a mandate. Even at 20, I had spent about a third of my life studying his movies with the conviction that they represented something almost unprecedented in American culture, especially movie culture, which thrives on the new, the startling, the shocking: a conscious attempt to turn back the clock. He came to prominence in the late 1960s, but, in much the manner of a certain prominent magazine editor, he stood athwart movie history, yelling Stop. “I’m afraid it’s largely a twentieth-century critical fashion to value originality as the main criterion of a work of art,” he wrote in 1973. “And yet, Ecclesiastes tells us, ‘There is no new thing under the sun,’ and around 1785 a certain Mme. Bertin, milliner to Marie Antoinette, is supposed to have said, ‘There is nothing new except what is forgotten.’”
Peter Bogdanovich, though, didn’t forget, especially the movies he had cottoned to as a youth: the American sagas of John Ford, the Westerns of Howard Hawks, the comedies of Ernst Lubitsch. Enthusiastically, perhaps a bit naively, he attempted to make movies in the manner of his forebears. “I was just trying to pick up the ball for American movies that were made for the whole family,” he told me. In the freewheeling 1970s, he made three movies that received a G rating: the screwball comedy What’s Up, Doc?, the Henry James adaptation Daisy Miller (1974), and the Cole Porter musical At Long Last Love (1975). In an atmosphere in which his peers Scorsese, De Palma, Friedkin et al. were routinely traipsing over boundaries of form, content, and ordinary decency, Bogdanovich decided to hold himself to the good rules: tell a good yarn, elicit empathetic performances, leave the audience with a moral—or, at least, with a spring in their step. For a spell, it worked; What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon were among the megahits of their era.
Because I articulated all of this with some cogency, Peter seemed to feel he had found in me a kindred spirit. “You seem to know the answers to some of this stuff,” he said during our first conversation, and cheekily, I must admit that I did: My interview technique with him often consisted of making assertions about his work with which he would agree and on which he would elaborate. This pattern persisted for the next 18 years, during which time I interviewed him for a book (Picturing Peter Bogdanovich), worked with him on preparing a collection of interviews (Peter Bogdanovich: Interviews), and stored away information and observations for a biography of him, on which I am now working.
Near the end of his life, I had the satisfaction of knowing that a favorite filmmaker genuinely felt that I understood his intentions. When, in 2021, I wrote a 50th-anniversary appreciation of The Last Picture Show for this magazine, I remember him being politely quizzical about the outlet—“Where did this appear?” he asked me. Though a conservative in artistic temperament, he was not one in politics. But, ever eager to accept a kind word, he did not object to being celebrated in a magazine with that word in its title. I have no reason to believe he disagreed with my argument that Picture Show, though R-rated in ways I believe he eventually regretted, was conservative to the extent that it valorized the cowboy ethics of Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson) and lamented the aimlessness of its assorted teenage layabouts (Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd). That same year, unbeknownst to me, he recommended me to Sony Pictures Home Entertainment to write an essay to accompany a new 4K release of Picture Show. He died before he could read it.
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Of course, I learned early on that his personal life had nothing like the clarity and coherence of his movies. On the set, he may have channeled Howard Hawks, but in life, he too often fell victim to the sins of the world. He did not cover himself in glory in breaking his vows to his first wife and the mother of his daughters, production designer Polly Platt. Controversial affairs, financial desperation, and one truly grim tragedy followed: He had a romance with the model Dorothy Stratten, who was killed by her estranged husband.
The director Bob Rafelson, who was among the producers of The Last Picture Show, told me that his initial impression of Bogdanovich was that he was “a regular guy”—not a “Dennis Hopper-style, Jack Nicholson-style, dope-smoking-style member of the generation.” Yet, Rafelson said that he felt he had misunderstood Bogdanovich. “I can only say that, of all the people who worked for the company, his life has been as astonishing as anybody’s, perhaps more so,” Rafelson said, and I am certain he meant “astonishing” in the fullest sense of the word. What can I say except that it is impossible to reconcile the orderliness of art with the unruliness of men.
After Peter died, I interviewed the director Robert Benton, who met Peter in the 1960s and later co-wrote What’s Up, Doc? “Peter would call you when he needed to get something from you,” Benton told me. “When the phone rang, and it was Peter, I knew he wanted something—even if he wanted me to see a picture, whatever it was.” This is true. Peter often contacted me when he wanted me to read something he had written, listen to a podcast in which he was mentioned, or watch Turner Classic Movies or Netflix to see which version of one of his movies was being shown. Yet, now that such asks have ended, I have found myself missing them—and the man who made them.
