Peter Bogdanovich weathered professional triumphs (“The Last Picture Show”) and tragedies but remained devoted to the movies
The life story of Peter Bogdanovich, who died this week at the age of 82, reads like the kind of yarn spun in the classic Hollywood movies he loved so much, with triumph and tragedy, rejection and vindication, an outsider becoming an insider, a protégé becoming a mentor. Born in Kingston, New York, in 1939, Bogdanovich’s early career resembled that of the French New Wave directors who were coming of age at the same time — a bright young man with an obsessive love and knowledge of golden-age American cinema starts out as a film critic and journalist before becoming a filmmaker himself. In the early 1960s, Bogdanovich made a name for himself as a film curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where he showcased underappreciated but groundbreaking filmmakers like John Ford and Allan Dwan and wrote scholarly examinations of the films of Howard Hawks, Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. Moving to Los Angeles with first wife, Polly Platt, who would play a key role in his earliest cinematic successes, Bogdanovich befriended Roger Corman, who gave him his earliest directorial assignments: the cheesy “Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women” and the powerful “Targets.” The latter film not only provided Boris Karloff the opportunity to deliver a haunting, end-of-career performance as an over-the-hill movie star but also delivered caustic and cogent commentary about America’s gun culture. The early 1970s saw some of Bogdanovich’s greatest hits, from his immortal breakout films “The Last Picture Show” (1971), “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972), and “Paper Moon” (1973) — all homages to various classic movie genres with a contemporary pulse — to his friendship with Orson Welles, which would lead to Bogdanovich’s book “This Is Orson Welles” and his co-starring role (as a character not entirely unlike himself) in Welles’ final masterpiece, “The Other Side of the Wind,” which was finally completed and released by Netflix in 2018.
