the Critics’ Prize at the Venice Film Festival, for example—and set the stage for the most significant film of Bogdanovich’s career.
On Thanksgiving Eve in 2003, the time flew by, and before I knew it, I told Bogdanovich I had to put a new cassette in my tape recorder. I was prepared to ask one or two more questions and leave it at that.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said, as I fumbled with the machine, “if you want to talk to me some more on another day—that’s okay, you know.”
He almost sounded apologetic.
“When would be convenient for you?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I have some free time tomorrow, basically, but I don’t know how busy you are on Thanksgiving.”
Was he kidding? The stuffing and cranberries could wait—I wanted to talk some more to Peter Bogdanovich.
I told him I was not doing anything special and would be available whenever he was. We set a time. He was beyond solicitous—in fact, he was the easiest, most congenial interview subject I had yet encountered in my short career.
As we were about to hang up, he even managed to make me feel a little less funny about calling him from the bleak, snowy Midwest.
“You’re in Ohio?” he asked.
How did he know? Had his assistant told him?
“Yes,” I said, not volunteering much.
“Where?”
“Columbus.”
He repeated “Columbus”—and all I could think was “how far a-way” it was, as the song goes in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific.
But he went on: “There’s a nice theater marquee there. We used it in Noises Off. I didn’t go there, but they went and shot it for me. So I haven’t been to your hometown.”
He was referring to the Ohio Theatre, a 1920s-era movie palace in downtown Columbus that still runs prints of old movies in the summer. It was there that I first saw Bringing Up Baby, Stagecoach, Strangers on a Train, and so many others, on glistening 35mm prints—seeing most of them because Peter Bogdanovich had recommended them in books he had written or in interviews he had given. And the Ohio Theatre’s marquee does indeed appear briefly in Noises Off. (You can be sure that I double-checked as soon as we hung up.) I didn’t much care if Peter Bogdanovich had actually been here; what gave me a tiny thrill was that my theater was in one of his films. Two cheers for good old Columbus, Ohio.
He seemed curious about his far-flung fan.
“How old were you when you saw They All Laughed?” he asked.
I couldn’t remember, but I said I might have been about fourteen.
“Where did you see it?”
Was he conducting audience research? I cringed when I had to tell him I didn’t see it in a theater but instead picked it up on videotape—how amateurish!
“How interesting,” he said, mysteriously. “What made you decide to buy it?”
Good question.
“I must have read about it somewhere,” I said, and indeed I had: in an interview with Quentin Tarantino that had appeared some years earlier in the New York Times Magazine. “They All Laughed is a masterpiece, I think,” Tarantino had told the reporter. “It captures a fairy-tale New York. It makes New York look like Paris in the 20’s. It makes you want to live there.”47
The matter resolved, I thanked him again for his time and said how much I looked forward to talking with him again tomorrow—Thanksgiving Day. That’s when he said: “You seem to know the answers to some of this stuff.”
This took me aback. Yes, I had asked questions that I thought he would find engaging and surprising, but they were still questions. And his films left me with oodles of them. I began to think that the man who made them was speaking in a secret language that had little to do with characters or plot or even visual style. The language was discernable, but only to those who cared enough to listen for it, and even then …
You want questions? I’ll give you questions: Why was his production company in the early 1980s called Moon Pictures? Why does the lead character in Mask show a preternatural interest in and knowledge of Greek mythology? Why, in describing Audrey Hepburn in an article written in 1999, did Bogdanovich invoke the Irish goddess Brigit? Why does a wannabe songwriter in The Thing Called Love recite the poetry of Robert Graves? And what about that calendar? Why, for the better part of the 1990s, did Bogdanovich edit a calendar inspired by Graves’s The White Goddess? And why in nearly every one of his films are the women always winsome and the men a few steps behind? What was he getting at?
The first time we spoke, I didn’t ask every one of these questions, but I danced around them, and his closing comment to me—“You seem to know the answers to some of this stuff”—confirmed that he was grateful for my having done so. At last, he might have been thinking, someone noticed.
The answers begin—and end—with the model and actress Dorothy Stratten.
Bogdanovich met Stratten not long after his relationship with Cybill Shepherd had reached an end. They fell in love and in time were going to get married. “Dorothy was the finest, kindest, most decent human being I’ve ever known,” he said. “She made me change for the better.”48 She was not only one of the stars of They All Laughed—his follow-up to Saint Jack and also starring Audrey Hepburn, Ben Gazzara, and John Ritter—but its primary inspiration. Although he conceived the project before he knew her well, the love he had for her came to animate the film.
They All Laughed tracks the comings and goings of John, Charles, and Arthur (Gazzara, Ritter, and Blaine Novak, respectively), private eyes of varying experience and professionalism in the employ of the Odyssey Detective Agency in Manhattan. As the film opens, the trio has been retained to keep track of two married women suspected by their husbands of committing (or contemplating) adultery. John and Charles end up losing their hearts to the women they have been hired to track—Angela (Hepburn) and Dolores (Stratten)—which not only compromises their integrity but complicates their relationships with a bevy of other gal pals, including spunky country-western singer Christy (Colleen Camp) and carefree cabbie Sam (Patti Hansen).
The cast is ample, packed with Bogdanovich’s family, friends, and coworkers: his daughters, Antonia and Alexandra, were given roles, as was his secretary at the time (Linda MacEwen) and his assistant on the production (Sean Ferrer, Hepburn’s son with Mel Ferrer). The glistening New York locations have a lot to do with the film’s easygoing charm. The detectives weave their way through real crowds, on real sidewalks and streets, flitting in and out of such landmarks as the Plaza and Algonquin hotels, the Rizzoli Bookstore, and FAO Schwarz.
Yet it is Stratten, seemingly as beautiful inside as out, who dominates They All Laughed. In a film full of gesturing and motioning between detectives supposedly working incognito, Charles signals to Arthur early on that he is smitten with Dolores by placing his hand underneath his jacket and simulating a pulsating heartbeat. The shot of Stratten used to represent Charles’s point of view of Dolores is simply staggering: her profile nonpareil, her hair a striking sheath of white blond, and her smile reserved—the latter
