Peter Bogdanovich : interviews

213 Pages·2015·1.19 MB·English

by  Bogdanovich

Peter Bogdanovich: Interviews
Conversations with Filmmakers Series
Gerald Peary, General Editor
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Peter Bogdanovich
i n t e r v i e w s
Edited by Peter Tonguette
University Press of Mississippi / Jackson
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American
University Presses.
Copyright © 2015 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2015
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bogdanovich, Peter, 1939–
Peter Bogdanovich : interviews / edited by Peter Tonguette.
pages cm. — (Conversations with filmmakers series)
Includes index and filmography.
ISBN 978-1-62846-184-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-62846-187-9 1.
Bogdanovich, Peter, 1939–—Interviews. 2. Motion picture producers and directors—
United States—Interviews. 3. Actors—United States—Interviews. I. Tonguette, Peter
Prescott, 1983– editor. II. Title.
PN1998.3.B64A3 2015
791.4302’33092—dc23
2014031698
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
Contents
Introduction vii
Chronology xv
Filmography xviii
Peter Bogdanovich 3
Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin / 1968
Without a Dinosaur 17
Gordon Gow / 1972
An Interview with Peter Bogdanovich 27
Martin Rubin / 1974
Dialogue on Film: Peter Bogdanovich 41
American Film Institute / 1978
Peter Bogdanovich Interview 63
Stephen Myers and Larry Estes / 1979
Peter Bogdanovich: “What Is the Point of Making Pictures?” 84
Michael Ventura / 1982
Dialogue on Film: Peter Bogdanovich 92
American Film Institute / 1986
Peter Bogdanovich Interview 98
Thomas J. Harris / 1988
Between Action and Cut: Peter Bogdanovich 107
John Gallagher / 1997
v
vi contents
Interview with Peter Bogdanovich 132
Gerald Peary / 2002
Peter Bogdanovich’s Year of the Cat 142
Alex Simon / 2002
Peter Bogdanovich 160
Stephen Lemons / 2002
Peter Bogdanovich 164
Peter Tonguette / 2005
Additional Resources 173
Index 175
Introduction
Near the beginning of his collection of interviews with directors, Who
the Devil Made It, Peter Bogdanovich recalls a vivid exchange he had with
John Ford in 1969.
“Oh, for Chrissake, Bogdanovich! Can’t you do anything but ask ques-
tions?!” Ford thundered. “I mean, Jesus Christ, haven’t you even heard
of the declarative sentence?”1 Since the director of Stagecoach, The Quiet
Man,andThe Searchers was frequently on the receiving end of Bogdanov-
ich’s questioning—having been the subject of lengthy interviews both
in print (in Bogdanovich’s book John Ford) and on film (in Bogdanov-
ich’s documentary Directed by John Ford)—it is not hard to understand
his good-humored mock outrage at his unremitting interlocutor.
As if to prove Ford’s point, the quote appears in the context of an in-
troduction to a book made up of nothing but questions asked by Bogda-
novich—about casting and acting, camera angles and cutting rooms—
and the answers proffered by Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, Edgar G.
Ulmer, and Howard Hawks, along with about a dozen others. In fact,
Ford once shared his bewilderment with Hawks (“Howard, does he ask
you all those goddam questions, too?”),2 as though Bogdanovich’s inter-
rogations represented a kind of secret handshake among directors of a
certain age.
As amusing as these two anecdotes are, however, in some ways they
are misleading. Bogdanovich was not a fresh-faced fan, who happened
to have a microphone at the ready, but—in time—a peer who was talking
shop. Although a number of the interviews gathered in Who the Devil
Made It were conducted before Bogdanovich (who arrived in California
as a film journalist) broke into moviemaking, many others took place
after he began directing in 1968, the year his debut film, Targets, was re-
leased. In other words, when Bogdanovich spoke with Cukor in 1969 or
Ulmer in 1970 or Hawks in 1972, he was doing so as a colleague.
By then, other interviewers—proto-Bogdanoviches, perhaps—be-
gan seeking Bogdanovich himself out to ask questions of their own, to
which he gladly, often at great length, and always intelligently replied.
vii
viii introduction
To put it another way, for nearly as long as he has been asking questions,
he has been answering them. It is not for nothing that he writes, in his
collection of memories of movie stars, Who the Hell’s In It, that one of
his big regrets about a youthful stint in summer stock is that he was too
talkative, even though one of his co-stars was legendary actress Sylvia
Sidney: “I wish now that I had talked less and asked more questions.”3
Reviewing that book for the New York Times, critic Stephanie Zacharek
picked up on this. “Reading these profiles,” she wrote, “you get the sense
that Bogdanovich is a talker who learned to be a listener.”4
So, to reply to Ford’s joshing query: Bogdanovich has heard of the de-
clarative sentence, thank you very much, and he was never shy about
using it, either.
<space>
Assembled in Peter Bogdanovich: Interviews are thirteen interviews with
Bogdanovich, conducted between 1968 and 2005, and even the earliest
among them offers ample evidence of Bogdanovich’s precocious verbos-
ity. In 1968, Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin paired Bogdanovich with
Budd Boetticher, Samuel Fuller, Arthur Penn, and Abraham Polonsky for
their interview book, The Director’s Event. Which of these is not like the
other? Boetticher, Fuller, and Polonsky were widely admired veterans of
Old Hollywood, while Penn was an already prolific participant in the
American New Wave. On the other hand, Bogdanovich had not yet even
started production on The Last Picture Show. The future classic comes up,
but only as one of several potential projects he has idling on the back
burner. The truth of the matter is that when Sherman and Rubin spoke
to him—as Thomas J. Harris (author of the critical study Bogdanovich’s
Picture Shows, and of a fine interview included here) put it—“by contrast
to the other filmmakers included, he had produced only one feature
to date.”5 Yes, Bogdanovich had just one lonely film of his own to talk
about—but talk about it he did.
In a new introduction written expressly for this book, Rubin refers to
Bogdanovich as a peer—“like a hip upperclassman or older sibling”—
which is understandable since they were in the same age group and
were, at least some of the time, engaged in the same activity: interview-
ing directors. Yet the way Sherman and Rubin framed their interview
suggests that they already sensed that their friendly, accessible contem-
porary was destined for great things. At the start of the interview, Bogda-
novich went on for several pages about, among other things, his abortive
career as a theater director (though his off-Broadway staging of The Big
Knifewas, he said, “a successful production critically”); his fate-altering
introduction ix
encounter with Roger Corman (“Roger called me a couple of days later
and said, ‘You’re a writer. Wouldn’t you like to write for pictures?’”);
and what his favorite films were at age ten (Red River andShe Wore a Yel-
low Ribbon). There is chutzpah in the way Bogdanovich assumed that
someone, someday, will care about this highly detailed backstory, and
prescience in his interviewers’ tolerance for it. Subsequent conversa-
tions—especially those with critic Gerald Peary and filmmaker-writer
John Gallagher—delved even more deeply into his early days, but here
he was talking to Sherman and Rubin about them while he was still in
them.
Sherman and Rubin were also the first, but far from the last, to ask
Bogdanovich about his purported “homages” to other directors, when
they bring up several allusions to Hitchcock in Targets. This was, Bogda-
novich told Peary more than three decades later, “the standard Bogda-
novich review.” As he explained, “So, The Last Picture Show was my hom-
age to Orson, Targets was my homage to Hitchcock, and Daisy Miller was
my homage to Cukor, and so on. It was all a lot of crap.” To Sherman and
Rubin, Bogdanovich admitted “stealing” a shot here or a sequence there
(albeit unconsciously), but even with one film under his belt, he clari-
fied his position articulately. Far from pilfering Hitchcock just for the
hell of it, he saw his work—modest as it was in 1968—as part of a thread
that reached back to the roots of the medium. “I don’t think it’s pos-
sible for anyone who’s starting to make films today not to be influenced
by what’s gone before,” he said. “Ford, Hawks, Dwan, and these other
directors have already done everything, and they were all influenced by
Griffith.”
Maybe it was a little early in the day for Bogdanovich to answer ques-
tions by referring back to the creator of The Birth of a Nation. But his com-
ments in The Director’s Event disprove the notion that he was more at
home asking questions than answering them.
<space>
Everything about Bogdanovich’s station had changed when Gordon
Gow interviewed him for Films and Filming in 1972. Given the success of
The Last Picture Show—a film beloved by audiences, critics (one famously
likened it to Citizen Kane), and Oscar voters (two wins out of eight nomi-
nations)—Gow could begin his article with a knockout of an opening
line. “In the American cinema,” Gow wrote of Bogdanovich, “he is the
man of the hour.”
If anything, this turned out to be an understatement, since Gow was
speaking with Bogdanovich as the director was absorbed in making his