Comprehensive information and links about Peter Bogdanovich

Peter Bogdanovich (born July 30, 1939Peter Bogdanovich is an American film director and writer, born in Kingston, New York.

The son of immigrants fleeing the Nazis, his father a Serbian painter and pianist and his mother descended from a rich Jewish Austrian family, Bogdanovich was conceived in Europe but born in America. He originally was an actor in the 1950s, studying his craft with the legendary acting teacher Stella Adler, and appearing on television and in summer stock. In the early 1960s, Bogdanovich achieved notoriety programming movies at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. An obsessive cinema-goer, sometimes seeing up to 400 movies a year in his youth, Bogdanovich prominently showcased the work of American directors such as John Ford, whom he subsequently wrote a book about based on the notes he had produced for the MoMA retrospective of the director, and the then-underappreciated Howard Hawks. Bogdanovich also brought attention to such forgotten pioneers of American cinema as Allan Dwan.

Bogdanovich was influenced by the French critics of the 1950s who wrote for , especially critic-turned-director François Truffaut. Before becoming a director himself, he built his reputation as a film writer with articles in critics Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Éric Rohmer whom had created the Nouvelle Vague ("New Wave") by making their own films, Bogdanovich decided to became a director. With his wife Polly Platt in tow, they packed their bags, took a grocery carriage full of books and loaded them into their car and headed for Los Angeles, skipping out on their rent in the process. Intent on getting into the industry, Bogdanovich's persistence paid off when he would bug publicists for movie premiere and industry party invites. In one subsequent screening, Bogdanovich was viewing a film when film director Roger Corman was sitting behind him. The two struck up a conversation when Corman mentioned he liked a cinema piece Bogdanovich wrote for Esquire. It was in this conversation that Corman offered him a directing job which Bogdanovich didn't even blink when accepting. He went onto work with Corman on the critically praised . Bogdanvich later referred to Corman and his company as the best film school he could ever have when he made his first feature film in a period of getting laundry to cutting a feature film in three weeks.

Turning back to journalism, Bogdanovich struck up a life-long friendship with the legendary Orson Welles while interviewing him on the set of Mike Nichols's adaptation of Joseph Heller's . Subsequently, Bogdanovich has played a major role in elucidating Welles and his career with his writings on the great actor-director, most notably his book , an indispensable tome that establishes Bogdanovich along with Kevin Brownlow as one of the premier English-language chroniclers of cinema.

Bogdanovich is also frequently featured in introductions to movies on the famed Criterion Collection DVDs.

The 32-year old Bogdanovich was hailed by a critics as a Wellesian wunderkind when his most famous film, , was released in 1971. The film received eight Academy Awards nominations, including Bogdanovich as Best Director, and won two of them, for Cloris Leachman and Ford film veteran Ben Johnson in the supporting acting categories. Bogdanovich, who had cast the 19-year-old model Cybill Shepherd in a major role in the film, fell in love with the young beauty, an affair that eventually led to his divorce from the film's set-designer Polly Platt, his long-time artistic collaborator and the mother of his two children.

Bogdanovich followed up (1941), starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal. Despite his reliance on homage to bygone cinema, Bogdanovich had solidified his status as one of a new breed of A-list directors that included Academy Award winners Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin, with whom he formed The Directors Company. The Directors Company was a generous production deal with Paramount Pictures that essentially gave the directors carte blanche if they kept within strict budget limitations. It was through this entity that Bogdanovich's next big hit, the critically praised , a Depression-era comedy starring Ryan O'Neal that won his 10-year-old daughter Tatum O'Neal an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress, proved to be the high-water mark of Bogdanovich's career. Forced to share the profits with his fellow directors, Bogdanovich became dissatisfied with the arrangement. The Directors Company subsequently produced only two more pictures, Coppola's critically acclaimed , which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture of 1974 and garnered Coppola an Oscar nod for Best Director, and Bogdanovich's , a film that had a quite different critical reception.

An adaptation of the Henry James novella, (1974) spelled the beginning of the end of Bogdanovich's career as a popular, critically acclaimed director. The film, which starred Bogdanovich's lover Shepherd as the title character, was savaged by critics and was a flop at the box office. Bogdanovich's career follow-up, a film of the Cole Porter musical (1975) starring Shepherd, was acclaimed by critics as one of the worst films ever made, noted as such in Harry and Michael Medved's (1980). The film also was a box office bomb despite featuring Burt Reynolds, a hotly burning star who would achieve supernova status at the end of the 1970s.

Once again beholden to the past, Bogdanovich insisted on filming the musical numbers for live, a process not used since the early days of the talkies, when sound engineer Douglas Shearer developed lip-synching at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The decision was widely ridiculed as none of the leading actors were known for their singing abilities. (Bogdanovich himself had produced a critically panned album of Shepherd singing Porter songs in 1974.) The public perception of Bogdanovich became that of an arrogant director hamstrung by his own hubris.

Trying to recapture the lightning in the bottle that was his early success, Bogdanovich once again turned to the past, his own and that of cinema, with , a comedy recounting the earliest days of the motion picture industry, reunited Ryan and Tatum O'Neal from his last hit with Reynolds. Counseled not to use the critically unpopular Shepherd in the film, Bogdanovich instead used newcomer Jane Hitchcock as the film's ingénue. Unfortunately, the magic of could not be repeated and the film died at the box office. Bogdanovich's discovery Hitchcock would make only one more film before calling it a career.

After a three-year hiatus, Bogdanovich returned with the critically and financially underwhelming (1979) for Hugh Hefner's Playboy Productions Inc. Bogdanovich's long affair with Shepherd had ended in 1978, but the production deal making Hefner the film's producer was part of the settlement of a lawsuit Shepherd had filed against Hefner for publishing nude photos of her pirated from a print of , a low-budget ensemble comedy starring Audrey Hepburn and the 1980 Playboy Playmate of the Year, Dorothy Stratten. During the filming of the picture, Bogdanovich fell in love with Stratten, who was married to an unstable hustler, Paul Snider, who relied on her financially. Stratten moved in with Bogdanovich, and when she told Snider she was leaving him, he killed her and sodomized her corpse before committing suicide.

could not attract a distributor due to the negative publicity surrounding the Stratten murder, despite it being one of the few films made by the legendary Audrey Hepburn after her provisional retirement in 1967. (The film would prove to be Hepburn's last starring role in a theatrically released motion picture.) The heartbroken Bogdanovich bought the rights to the negative so that it would be seen by the public, but the film had a limited release to weak reviews and lost Bogdanovich millions of dollars, driving the emotionally devastated director into bankruptcy.

Bogdanovich turned back to his first avocation, writing, to pen a memoir of his dead love, that was published in 1984. The book was a riposte to Teresa Carpenter's "Death of a Playmate" article written for that had won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize. Carpenter had lambasted Bogdanovich and Hefner, claiming that Stratten was as much a victim of them as she was of Snider. The article served as the basis of Bob Fosse's film (1983) in which Bogdanovich was portrayed as the fictional director "Aram Nicholas".

Bogdanovich's career as a noted director was over, and though he achieved a modest success with (1990), was a critical and box office disappointment. He directed two more theatrical films in 1992 and 1993, but their failure kept him off the big screen until 2001's . Returning once again to a reworking of the past, this time the supposed murder of director Thomas H. Ince by Welles' was a modest critical success but a flop at the box office. In addition to helming some television movies, Bogdanovich has returned to acting, with a recurring guest role on the cable television series as Dr. Melfi's analyst. Bogdanovich directed a fifth season episode of the series.

Bogdanovich's personal reputation suffered from gossip about his 13 year marriage to Dorothy Stratten's 19-year-old kid sister Louise Hoogstraten, who was 29 years his junior. Some gossip held that Bogdanovich's behavior was akin to that of Scottie Ferguson, the James Stewart character in Alfred Hitchcock's necrophiliac masterpiece (1958), with the director trying to remold Hoogstraten into the image of her late sister. The marriage ended in divorce in 2001.

There has been speculation that Peter Bogdanovich's ruin as a director was guaranteed when he ditched his wife and artistic collaborator Polly Platt for Shephard. Platt had worked with Bogdanovich on all his early successes, and some critics believe that the controlling artistic consciousness on to the National Film Registry, an honor awarded only to the most culturally significant films.

Today, he hosts "The Essentials" on Turner Classic Movies every Saturday Night, and plays Dr. Melfi's shrink in