Hits, flops, wealth, bankruptcy, divorce, murder ...Peter Bogdanovich's story has 'em all, writes Donald Clarke.
Being Peter Bogdanovich must be a troubling business. For the first 30 years of his life, this New York-born child of Serbian immigrants zealously cultivated his enthusiasm for the movies - first as a fan, then as an actor, then a critic - to the point where it so overwhelmed producers that they almost felt obliged to let him direct. Success followed. Then, from 1975 or so, following the release of his disastrous musical, At Long Last Love, his career went into the sort of spectacularly colourful decline - bankruptcy, divorce and murder all came into it - that was more-or-less de rigueur for that era's movie directors.
How disturbing to have your life story constantly defined in terms of a brief golden period. Whatever Bogdanovich may do with the rest of his time, he will still be spoken of as the man who, between 1971 and 1973, delivered three great films: The Last Picture Show, What's Up Doc? and Paper Moon. Everything else is bubble wrap.
He has continued to work. There have been some good films (2001's The Cat's Meow, 1992's Noises Off), a number of decent acting performances (he plays analyst Lorraine Bracco's own shrink in The Sopranos) and plenty of books. The latest weighty tome to hit the shelves is Who The Hell's In It?, a study of some of his favourite movie actors. Like its companion volume, Who The Devil Made It?, which examined the men behind the camera, the book has little bad to say about anybody.
"No, not really," he says on the phone from his office in New York. "But I don't really see much point in writing about people you don't like. A couple of people have said that it is a relief that there is so little negativity in the book."
He often feels the need to point out quite how highly his idols regarded him. "Jimmy Stewart's wife told me that Jimmy always enjoyed my visits and so did she," he writes in a typically unnecessary aside. It is this aptitude for self-aggrandisement that made Bogdanovich one of the least popular men in the new Hollywood of the early 1970s. Peter Biskind's muckraking classic, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, perhaps makes rather too much of this than is decent, but some of the Bogdanovich-related bile quoted there makes for breathtaking reading.
"People loathed Peter," David Newman, co-writer of Bonnie and Clyde, says in Biskind's book. "His ego was just so monstrous. He was the great I Am, The Second Coming." Understandably, Bogdanovich, who comes over as helpful and charming, sees things differently. He believes that the antagonism directed against him and his lover of the time, Cybill Shepherd, one of the stars of The Last Picture Show, stemmed largely from jealousy.
"We had a good time then," he says wistfully. "But it was complicated by very vicious vibes we were feeling. I think I quote Cary Grant in the book this_is_a_left_sq_bracketdoes poor Grant impersonation]: 'Petah, for Christ's sake, stop telling people you are happy. Stop saying you are in love. People don't like to hear that'. I really didn't understand the depths of jealousy and envy directed against me."
Bogdanovich, whose father was an eccentric painter of gloomy abstracts, first attracted attention when writing a column for Esquire magazine. He went on to make a fine documentary on the director Howard Hawks (followed later by a classic one on John Ford) and, in 1968, directed the magnificently taut thriller Targets for low-budget producer Roger Corman. The film was not a commercial success, but attracted enough attention to make The Last Picture Show a possibility.
Many have said that the partnership between Bogdanovich and his first wife, production designer Polly Platt, was crucial to the young director's success. Yet - like Cynthia Lennon or Anne Sellers - Platt found herself sidelined when her husband achieved fame.
"It's complicated what happened," he says. "I met Polly when she was young and she trained under me. I already had published a book and done a retrospective on Orson Welles. It was a learning process that she shared in for a few years. We got along together well, work-wise. The rest was a little bit complicated." It has been said that Polly knew that Bogdanovich was falling for Shepherd even before the director himself did. "That was sort of the way it was," he says cautiously.
So when did he realise she was right? "When it actually happened. Then it just hit me like a ton of bricks." Shepherd and Bogdanovich became a classic golden couple. No première was complete without an appearance by the sleek blonde and her droopy-faced companion. The director, so obsessive a movie fan that he kept a set of index cards detailing his opinions on every film he had ever seen, began to cultivate friendships among the Hollywood elite. Who the Hell's in It? contains endless descriptions of evenings spent exchanging pleasantries with the likes of John Wayne, Jerry Lewis and Jack Lemmon. Yet, when the bad times set in, most scattered. "Cary Grant was the only one who called."
The first signs of an end to Bogdanovich's purple patch came with the lacklustre performance of his 1974 Henry James adaptation, Daisy Miller. Featuring Shepherd as the eponymous American abroad, the film is not quite as grisly as its reputation suggests.
"I think largely what happened to my career was that it was a domino effect," he says. "Because Daisy Miller wasn't a money-maker, people forget that it got some really great reviews. It wasn't a commercial movie. If I could have my life over again I wouldn't have made it, because nobody wanted to see that sort of film then." Though he still stands up for it, the catastrophic At Long Last Love, in which Burt Reynolds and Shepherd sing so badly you almost miss their acting, made Daisy Miller look like The Seventh Seal. "It's like watching a musical unfold within Night of the Living Dead," Frank Rich wrote at the time.
Things got much worse. In the late 1970s Shepherd ran off with the manager of a Mercedes dealership and Bogdanovich got together with the Playboy model Dorothy Stratten. Clearly besotted, the director cast her in his chaotic private eye comedy, They All Laughed (a work eccentric enough to be listed by Quentin Tarantino as one of his 10 favourite films of all time). One evening in 1980 Hugh Hefner phoned Peter to tell him that Stratten had been brutally murdered and sexually assaulted by her estranged husband. The killer had then turned the gun on himself.
"I made a series of mistakes after she was killed that were based on me ricocheting off walls and not knowing what the f**k I was doing," he says. "I completely turned away from film-making for a decade. My psychiatrist later said that I somehow connected the murder and movies together in my mind." Those who had been antagonistic towards Bogdanovich could not help but sympathise after Stratten's murder. But opinion turned against him again when he took up with the murdered girl's teenage sister, L.B. Stratten. He must surely understand why people found this a little creepy.
"Well, nobody really understands anybody else's relationships," he says. "We were very close all of us; we became family. It was sort of natural what happened. Songs have been written about that. You remember that line from Nancy with the Laughing Face: 'You can't resist her. Sorry for you she has no sister'? You know the cliché: is there another one like you at home?"
Eugh! People don't necessarily act on such impulses though, do they? "I think they do. You have that person between you in common and that brings you together. People didn't understand the relationship and why should they? What irritates me slightly - though I have gotten past it - is people making sage comments about this when they don't have a clue." At any rate, the couple stayed married for 12 years, which is pretty good going by Hollywood standards. They remain on reasonable terms and Bogdanovich, whose last feature was a bog-standard TV biopic of Natalie Wood, is currently developing a script they wrote together.
Peter Bogdanovich sounds pretty grounded now. But, as I said earlier, it must be a troubling business being who he is. "After being in The Sopranos, I have people recognise me who don't even know I have directed a movie," he says by way of agreement. "I had a bunch of 16-year-old guys stop me on the street the other day and say: 'You're the guy from The Sopranos. You're a great actor.'" So does he enjoy being famous? "I have been famous for so long it is almost second nature. It's better than a kick in the head I guess."
Who The Hell's In It? is published by Faber and Faber at £20 (in UK). Peter Bogdanovich presents a season of his favourite classic films on Sky Cinema from Thursday, November 25th, at 6 p.m.