Peter Bogdanovich RIP
A lifetime ago, when I was working for The A.V Club, I had the honor of interviewing Peter Bogdanovich in connection with 2001’s The Cat’s Meow. It was a comeback movie for Bogdanovich, his first theatrically released film since 1993’s A Thing Called Love.
The quintessential cinephile worked prolifically in the intervening years in the decidedly lesser film of television movies, directing small screen joints like To Sir With Love II, Naked City: A Killer Christmas, and the Disney Channel body-switch comedy A Saintly Switch.
These forgotten TV movies might have represented a big step down for a man who once reigned as one of the most famous, powerful and successful auteurs of New Hollywood but at that point in his career he just seemed grateful for work.
The Cat’s Meow represented a return to form for the movie-loving, name-dropping director of The Last Picture Show, Targets and What’s Up, Doc. He was back on the big screen, telling a story with deep meaning for him, a truth-based yarn about a love triangle between Charlie Chaplin, William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies that accidentally turned deadly, costing the life of Western pioneer Thomas H. Ince.
To me Bogdanovich was a god, a legend, a titan of the big screen. Interviews invariably made me nervous, particularly if they were in person. The stakes for in-person interviews were much higher than interviews conducted over the phone.
If you connected with an interview subject in person, it was the best feeling in the world. It was incredibly gratifying and ego-boosting to feel like you were in a good, tight groove with someone you admired, even revered. But if.an interview is awkward or strained that awkwardness is magnified by being in close proximity to the famous person you are very aggressively not hitting it off with.
I did not have to worry about that with Bogdanovich because the filmmaker was very famously a talker. Bogdanovich LOVED to talk. Whether he was interviewing one of his heroes or being interviewed himself, Bogdanovich was a famous chatterbox.
Sure enough, Bogdanovich more than lived up to his reputation. I’m pretty sure he was wearing a neckerchief, and halfway through the interview a package was delivered to our table and the critic turned filmmaker explained that he was helping a young friend join The Academy named Wes Anderson.
It was Bogdanovich in his essence. I was grateful just to be there. I could officially check “Interview the great Peter Bogdanovich” off my bucket list.
In his early days, Bogdanovich wasn’t a cinephile. He was the cinephile. He owned that shit. He was a student of film and film history who learned from doing but also from sitting reverently at the feet of masters and soaking up their wisdom, for his own sake as well as humanity’s.
He was an egghead and a geek who ascended to the giddy heights of super-stardom. He famously romanced movies stars and Playboy Playmates, and, in Louise Stratten, the younger sister of a Playboy Playmate.
He lived a life as dramatic, poignant, tragic and filled with highs and lows as any of his films. Bogdanovich would go on to direct only one more narrative film before his death at 82 from Parkinson’s earlier this year, 2014’s She’s Funny That Way, which, sure enough, was Executive Produced by his protege and friend Wes Anderson as well as Noah Baumbach, who cast him as an actor in Mr. Jealousy.
In honor of the filmmaker’s passing, January will be Peter Bogdanovich Month here at the Happy Place. Because I’ve written so much about Bogdanovich for my Fractured Mirror column February will ALSO be Peter Bogdanovich Month.
It’s the least I can do to honor a giant of the big screen and a man who made that epic leap from loving movies with his whole soul and the entirety of his being as a fan and a critic to creating timeless masterpieces as a writer and director.
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