His tumultuous personal life was frequently in the spotlight, from his well-publicized affair with Cybill Shepherd, which began while he was married to his close collaborator, Polly Platt, while filming "The Last Picture Show," to the murder of his Playmate girlfriend Dorothy Stratten and his subsequent marriage to her younger sister, Louise, who was 29 years his junior.
"Peter always made me laugh!" commented Streisand on Twitter. He'll continue to make people laugh up there as well."
"I'll never forget attending a premiere for 'The Last Picture Show,'" Francis Ford Coppola said in an email. I recall the audience erupting in applause all around me at the conclusion, which lasted at least 15 minutes. I'll never forget thinking, despite the fact that I'd never had a reaction like that, that Peter and his picture deserved it. May he slumber peacefully for all eternity, savoring the delight of our acclaim."
"Peter was my paradise & earth," Tatum O'Neal captioned a photo of herself with him on Instagram. A figure of a father. A companion. He always made me feel protected, from 'Paper Moon' through 'Nickelodeon.' Peter, I adore you."
Bogdanovich, who was born in Kingston, New York, in 1939, began his career as an actor, film journalist, and critic before becoming a film programmer at the Museum of Modern Art, where he endeared himself to a slew of old guard filmmakers, including Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, and John Ford, through a series of retrospectives and monographs. He enthralled them with his knowledge of their films, learned from them, and recorded their talks for future publications.
In an interview with The Associated Press, he noted, "I've had some really crucial one-sentence indications like when Howard Hawks turned to me and said, 'Always cut on the movement and no one will notice the cut.'" "It was just a single line, yet it had a huge impact on everything I've done."
Welles became a personal friend and occasional rival of Bogdanovich, in addition to being one of his inspirations. Despite being from different generations, both experienced the highs and lows of early success, as well as the difficulties and jealousies that come with it. "This is Orson Welles," a book based on discussions with the elder filmmaker dating back to 1969, was released in 1992 by the younger director. Bogdanovich also had a key role in the completion and release of Welles' "The Other Side of the Wind," which he began in 1970 and finished in 2018.
Scorsese remarked, "Right up to the last, he was fighting for the art of film and the individuals who produced it."
His personal Hollywood education began when his father took him to watch Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton films at the Museum of Modern Art when he was five years old. He went on to direct his own Keaton documentary, "The Great Buster," which came out in 2018.
Bogdanovich and Platt married young and went to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, where they attended Hollywood parties and formed contacts with filmmaker Roger Corman and Frank Marshall, who helped get the film "Targets" off the ground. And for the following few films and years, the professional ascension proceeded. But after "Paper Moon," which Platt worked on after they split up, he would never be able to match the acclaim he received during his first five years in Hollywood.
Bogdanovich's affair with Shepherd ended his marriage to Platt, with whom he had two children, Antonia and Sashy, and led to productive artistic cooperation. The scandal was largely inspired by the 1984 film "Irreconcilable Differences." He later refuted the notion that Platt, who died in 2011, was a key figure in his early films' success.
He went on to work with Shepherd on two more films, an adaptation of Henry James' "Daisy Miller" and the musical "At Long Last Love," neither of which earned positive reviews from critics or moviegoers.
At the height of his career, he also passed up huge possibilities. He declined "The Godfather," "Chinatown," and "The Exorcist," according to Vulture.
"We recently got a new Mario Puzo novel called "The Godfather," Paramount remarked. We'd want you to have a look at directing it.' In the interview, he remarked, "I said, 'I'm not interested in the Mafia."
Bogdanovich would continue to make headlines for reasons other than his films. During the spring and summer of 1980, he had an affair with Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten while directing her in "They All Laughed," a romantic comedy starring Audrey Hepburn and Ben Gazzara. Paul Snider, her husband, killed her in August of that year. In his book ′′The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten, 1960-1980,′′ Bogdanovich condemned Hugh Hefner's Playboy empire for its suspected participation in events that led to Stratten's murder. Then, nine years later, at the age of 49, he married Louise Stratten, her younger sister, who was just 20 at the time. They divorced in 2001, but she and her mother continued to live together in Los Angeles.
Bogdanovich said that his connections had an influence on his career in an interview with the Associated Press in 2020.
Bogdanovich explained, "The entire stuff about my personal life got in the way of people's comprehension of the movies." "That's something that's been bothering me since the first few photographs."
Despite a few flops along the way, Bogdanovich's output remained prolific in the 1980s and 1990s, with films like "Texasville," a sequel to "The Last Picture Show," "The Thing Called Love," which was one of River Phoenix's final films, and "The Cat's Meow," a film about a party on William Randolph Hearst's yacht starring Kirsten Dunst as Marion Davies, and "The Cat's Meow," "She's Funny That Way," a screwball comedy starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston that he co-wrote with Louise Stratten and opened to mixed reviews in 2014, was his most recent narrative feature.
"Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week," "Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors," and "Who the Hell's in It: Conversations with Hollywood's Legendary Actors" are among the many books on movies he has written over the years.
He also acted on occasion, sometimes portraying himself (in "Moonlighting" and "How I Met Your Mother") and other times playing other characters, such as Dr. Elliot Kupferberg on "The Sopranos," and he influenced a new generation of filmmakers, from Wes Anderson to Noah Baumbach.
He told Vulture, "They nickname me 'Pop,' and I don't mind."
He was hard at work on a television program inspired by Dorothy Stratten at the time of the AP interview in 2020, which coincided with a podcast on his career with Turner Classic Movies presenter Ben Mankiewicz, and wasn't enthusiastic about the future of film.
"You know, I just keep going." With a giggle, he remarked, "TV isn't dead yet." "However, movies could have a difficulty."
Despite his colossal ego, Bogdanovich remained respectful of those who came before him.
In 1971, he told The New York Times, "I don't assess myself on the basis of my contemporaries." "I hold myself to the standards of filmmakers I like, such as Hawks, Lubitsch, Buster Keaton, Welles, Ford, Renoir, and Hitchcock. I don't believe I'm anything like as excellent as they are, but I believe I'm OK."
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