Peter Bogdanovich: Loving Filmmaker and Fearless Film Genius | Peter bogdanovich

I remember Bogdanovich in 2018, frail and ill as he supposedly was then, dominating the Venice Film Festival with two major films screened there: his magnificent documentary on Buster Keaton (whose reputation and importance he generally boosted for the 21st century) and his edition, “Rescued” account of Orson Welles’s lost and sprawling film The Other Side of the Wind, in which Bogdanovich himself starred, satirizing the trauma of Hollywood’s old guard as they watched the young Turks snatch the baton from them. And Bogdanovich sat at Welles’s feet, as Truffaut sat at Hitchcock’s, and perhaps consciously assumed the role of a sorcerer’s apprentice, though he learned from the way all of Welles’s associates learned how capricious and hurtful he could. be Welles. But in his later years, taking creative solace in well-crafted classic Hollywood-style comedy, he found support and funding from young protégés like Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, who were as in awe of Bogdanovich as he was himself. sometime by John. Ford and Howard Hawks.

I myself met him only once, at lunch in London’s Soho to release his very good and underrated film The Cat’s Meow in 2004, about the mysterious true crime story “Hollywood Babylon” about the death of a movie mogul to aboard WR Hearst’s yacht in 1924. He was graceful, intelligent, a great London lover, and a lot of fun to be recognized for his role as a television actor as Dr. Jennifer Melfi’s therapist on HBO’s The Sopranos and, therefore, Therefore, the psychoanalytic grandfather of Tony Soprano himself.

Targets was a fascinatingly strange, experimental, underrated and misunderstood work that absorbed the defiant energy of countercultural cinema, with the pulp violence of Gun Crazy or In Cold Blood or Reservoir Dogs. In a plot thread, horror icon Boris Karloff plays something like himself; in the other plot, a boy becomes obsessed with weapons and creates a real horror. The simple association was elegant, witty, equal to the joy of meta-horror that became fashionable 30 years later.

The Last Picture Show is a glorious and authentic American film, set in a windswept Texas town where the city’s dying cinema (even in 1971, there was heartbreak over the death of theaters, when terrestrial television and televised sports Were the alleged culprits) shows Howard Hawks’ Red River as his last film. A boy has an affair with a melancholic old woman, magnificently played by Cloris Leachman. Cybill Shepherd (with whom Bogdanovich was to fall in love) has an unforgettable style. There is a lot of gossip and sexual tensions in the small towns, culminating in a rather extraordinary nude swimming scene, astonishing for its calm frankness, beyond eroticism, and unmatched for anything before or after.

In Paper Moon (another piece of black and white blazer) Bogdanovich gave us one of the strangest couples ever and the most poignant twist on a grown-up child since Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan. Ryan O’Neal and his real-life daughter Tatum O’Neal are the father-daughter scam team drifting through the Depression-era Midwest fooling people with long and short scams and revealing just his own self-deception and emptiness. lives. Bogdanovich got a surprisingly good performance from Tatum in particular.

Bogdanovich gave his love of comedy for free in What’s Up Doc? with Ryan O’Neal and Barbra Streisand, those quintessential ’70s movie stars, and he proved that he could build and control the energies of comedy (as difficult as anything he had done before, but less likely to be approved by critics, although this movie did very well.)

The lowest point in Bogdanovich’s life came with the murder of actress Dorothy Stratten, who starred in his movie They All Laughed (1981) with whom Bogdanovich was in a relationship, because of the man she was married to, but separated. Bogdanovich was nearly financially bankrupt finishing the film which was not surprisingly tainted in the public mind for its sad story, and Bogdanovich was criticized for being part of the misogynistic macho culture of film making that Stratten fell victim to, a sentiment not. entirely mollified by the fact that Bogdanovich married Stratten’s sister, Louise, who became his production partner.

Bogdanovich found his return, though perhaps nothing like the streak of sheer inspiration that began his career, in 1985, with the bold and heartfelt emotional drama, Mask, which gave Cher a chance to prove that she was an excellent actress. It was based on the true story of a boy with a challenging craniofacial disorder. Cher played his mother, standing up hard against those who fail to appreciate her son’s inner intelligence and humanity, and Eric Stoltz played the child in makeup (in 2022, there would be much more debate about the appropriate cast).

Though plagued with financial worries for much of the 1980s and 1990s, Bodganovich continued to teach, write, and work, and in the mid-1970s he took a friendly stab at the charade with his She’s Funny that Way. But his latest masterpiece was The Great Buster: A Celebration in 2018, his inspired tribute to Keaton and The Other Side Of The Wind, which almost deserves now to be considered a co-creation in the spirit of Welles.

Bogdanovich was a native film genius, making great movies as easy as breathing in his heyday.