![]() ![]() Bogdanovich had discovered staring seductively at him from the cover of Glamour magazine while he waited in a supermarket checkout line. The cast featured relative unknowns, among them Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms and Cybill Shepherd, a 19-year-old model whom Mr. ![]() His triumph led him to be hired to direct “The Last Picture Show” for Columbia Pictures. Platt, “Targets” drew wide critical praise. Scenes of Tim O’Kelly, who played the young man, scaling heights from which to shoot random strangers - a gas storage tank, a drive-in theater screen - are vivid homages to James Cagney’s last stand, high up in a gas plant, in “White Heat,” Raoul Walsh’s celebrated 1949 film.įor its stylish direction and brisk screenplay, by Mr. An aging, elegant Boris Karloff plays an aging, elegant version of himself. Inspired by the Charles Whitman Texas tower shootings of 1966, it was nominally a thriller about a troubled young man who embarks on a killing spree.īut it was really a paean to, and an elegy for, the Hollywood films that Mr. Bogdanovich directed his first feature, “Targets,” released in 1968. He was hired as a second-unit director and rewriter by the producer Roger Corman, whose movies - among them “Attack of the Crab Monsters” (1957) and “Teenage Cave Man” (1958) - strove for maximal shock value at minimal expense.įor Mr. Bogdanovich struck out for Hollywood in 1964, accompanied by his wife, Polly Platt, a production designer he had married two years before. Bogdanovich’s mansion in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles.) (In the 1970s, a down-and-out Welles lived for a time in Mr. (“Citizen Kane,” released in 1941, was Welles’s first full-length feature.) Both were later expelled from the Eden of A-list directors. Bogdanovich repeatedly disavowed the connection, critics liked to point out affinities between Welles’s career and his own: Both men began as directorial wunderkinds. Bogdanovich and Welles as co-authors, is “the closest we’ll ever come to a Welles autobiography,” The Orlando Sentinel said in 2002. The seminal book that resulted, “This Is Orson Welles” (1992), edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum and with Mr. He would become most closely involved with Welles, recording scores of hours of oral history before Welles’s death in 1985. “Hitch” and “Orson” were self-explanatory.) “Jack” flicked out conversationally denoted Mr. Bogdanovich would spend the rest of his career, interviewers often carped, dropping his teachers’ names. Those sessions, he said, were his de facto film-school education. It was a mission undertaken, he cheerfully confessed, so that he could meet and interview his idols. ![]() Bogdanovich wrote his series of monographs on great directors, including Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock and Orson Welles. Leaving the Collegiate School, a Manhattan prep school, “a failed algebra examination shy of a high school diploma,” as The New York Times wrote in 1971, he played small roles in summer stock, Off Broadway and on television.įor MoMA, Mr. And with a name like Bogdanovich there wasn’t much of a chance.”Īs a teenager, Peter studied with the famed acting teacher Stella Adler. “I wanted to look like Bill Holden, because I wanted to be a real American boy and do all those wonderful things. Bogdanovich told The Los Angeles Times in 1972. “I just wanted to be like those people on the screen,” Mr. Pictures from the heyday of Hollywood’s studio system - by directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, George Cukor and Alfred Hitchcock, starring actors like John Wayne, Cary Grant and James Stewart - beckoned to him above all. In the end, he had amassed some five thousand cards. From the age of 12 to about 30 he kept a file of index cards, one per picture, evaluating every movie he saw. Bogdanovich’s second film and widely considered his foremost - on its release in 1971, Newsweek’s critic called it “a masterpiece,” adding, “It is the most impressive work by a young American director since ‘Citizen Kane.’”īy this time Peter was irretrievably in love with motion pictures - sound and silent alike. Reviewing “The Last Picture Show” - only Mr. Bogdanovich was long recognizable by his soulful basset-hound face, outsize horn-rimmed glasses and trademark neckerchief.Īs a filmmaker, he was hailed for his ability to coax nuanced performances from actors, and for the bittersweet luminosity of movies that conjured a bygone past - bygone in American cinema, bygone in America itself. Originally trained as a stage actor (he was also a producer, a screenwriter, a film historian, a programmer and a critic, as well as a theater and television director), Mr. ![]() His daughter Antonia Bogdanovich confirmed the death but did not specify a cause. Peter Bogdanovich, who parlayed his ardor for Golden Age cinema into the direction of acclaimed films like “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon,” only to have his professional reputation tarnished in one of Hollywood’s most conspicuous falls from grace, died early Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. ![]()
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