He thus shared the dismissive attitude toward youthful protest that Judy expresses in What’s Up, Doc? After learning that Judy has been kicked out of college for blowing up a classroom, Howard asks, with a hint of concern, “Political activism?” “No,” she corrects him. “Chemistry major.”
In his documentary Directed by John Ford, there is a justly famous sequence in which Bogdanovich is heard firing questions at the director of Stagecoach and The Searchers, who is posed in front of a vista in Monument Valley but is in no mood to answer. I always loved one question in particular: “Would you agree that the point of Fort Apache,” he asks, “was that the tradition of the army was more important than one individual?” Well, as both Bogdanovich and Ford knew, there is more than this to Fort Apache, but still … even to ask such a question is so wonderfully out of touch with the zeitgeist of the early 1970s! “The tradition of the army”—what a phrase!
Better still are Bogdanovich’s on-screen conversations with Ford’s frequent collaborators, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda. Their thoughts are, of course, wonderfully insightful, but equally instructive are the glimpses we get of a youthful, dark-haired Bogdanovich, seen in over-the-shoulder shots at the edge of the frame before the camera moves in on the interview subjects—the slow dolly in being one of his signature visual tropes here and throughout his work. As Wayne tells an anecdote or Stewart cracks a joke, we see Bogdanovich chuckle, as if to confirm how close he is—how sympathetic, how understanding—to these men, each of whom is old enough to be his father.
Peter Bogdanovich shows Ryan O’Neal how it’s done on the set of What’s Up, Doc? Courtesy Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Material Store.
Wrote journalist Tad Friend in a New Yorker profile of Bogdanovich in 2002: “His films transported audiences to a time before drugs, race riots, and polyester pants—a time when you drove your jalopy with high hopes to the spring dance.”33 It is right to emphasize his films’ nostalgic disposition, which comes across in offhand, incidental details such as the radios playing Hank Williams’s song “Kaw-Liga” in The Last Picture Show and the copies of the Saturday Evening Post hovered over by characters in Nickelodeon. But he was no tortured soul finding distraction from life’s miseries by making escapist fare: Peter Bogdanovich was, at this point in his life, as footloose and fancy free as his films were. As proof, consider a wonderful publicity still from What’s Up, Doc?: on one side is Bogdanovich—smartly dressed in one of those candy-striped shirts Biskind mentions—acting out a scene for Ryan O’Neal, and on the other is O’Neal imitating him precisely. Why do I suspect that Bogdanovich would have been perfectly happy if O’Neal had called it a day and allowed the director himself to do the part?
The differences between Peter Bogdanovich and me were not insignificant. He had been a teenager in Manhattan in the 1950s; I was a teenager in Ohio in the 1990s and early 2000s. His father was a painter; my father was a banker. He had a younger sister; I had a younger brother. Undaunted, I followed in his footsteps as best I could. When I read in his book of interviews This Is Orson Welles that he was sixteen when he first saw Citizen Kane, I promised myself that I would see the film at the same age and preferably under similar conditions: in a musty old theater on a midweek afternoon, with the sound of raindrops gently tap-tap-tapping on the rooftop. Later, when I began interviewing him, I never asked if his first experience with Citizen Kane was anything like what I imagined it to be. What if I had it wrong? Could I stand the disappointment?
I was already fifteen and a half when I made my vow to see Citizen Kane at sixteen. I scanned the movie listings in the newspaper, hoping against hope to read that a print of Citizen Kane would be shown somewhere near where I lived. But I was fast running out of time, and when I saw that the film was going to air on the local public-television station one evening, I decided to sit down and watch. I had told my plans to my father, who wondered why I gave up on them so quickly. I said that Peter Bogdanovich would understand: it was important to see Citizen Kane as soon as humanly possible.
At some point, I learned that Bogdanovich had not actually graduated from the Collegiate School, where he had made such an impression with his column “As We See It.” “He left high school at sixteen years of age without a diploma, because of a failed algebra exam,” the author Andrew Yule writes in his biography Picture Shows: The Life and Films of Peter Bogdanovich. “At the graduation ceremony he was still duly summoned and solemnly presented with a bulky, face-saving envelope, just like the graduates. On opening it later, he found it contained a blank chunk of cardboard.”34 Well, my interest in movies outweighed my interest in homework—especially algebra—too.
In fact, history was repeating itself—as I now sought to emulate him, he had once sought to emulate others. “I just wanted to be like those people on the screen,” he said to an interviewer in 1972. “I didn’t think about their private lives or what it was like to have all that money. I just wanted to be the people. I wanted to look like Bill Holden, because I wanted to be a real American boy, and do all those wonderful things. And with a name like Bogdanovich, there wasn’t much of a chance. I wanted my name to be Jim.”35 I was a step ahead of him for a change: at least we had the same first name.
It took three tries, but we finally connected on Thanksgiving Eve in 2003. I wondered how much his assistant had actually told him about what I was doing—I had explained to her in some detail that the article I was writing would focus on his lesser-known films, but such things have a way of getting lost in translation—because he seemed pleasantly surprised when my first questions were concerned with They All Laughed, his most personal film, an ebullient look at lovers and love affairs, shot in his hometown and peopled with some of his favorite performers, including Ben Gazzara, Audrey Hepburn, John Ritter, and Dorothy Stratten. My singular focus on this film was, I confess, partly by design: I knew how highly he thought of They All Laughed and that he was rarely asked about it. Because I had studied him so intently and sought to model myself on him so closely, when I finally had a chance to talk to him, I knew how to push his buttons.
Later in our conversation, he said, responding to a comment I made about the film, “They All Laughed was my best picture.” Pause. Did he wonder if I would agree with such a statement? Without thinking about it, I said, “I think so, too”—though I instantly regretted blurting out the words so quickly. In rushing to share such an unconventional opinion, I feared appearing insincere, which I certainly was not. I adored They All Laughed—it was and remains my favorite film of his—even if I had calculated that asking him about it first, before The Last Picture Show or What’s Up, Doc? or Paper Moon, would get us off on the right foot.
I quickly turned my agreement into a question.
“So, it’s your personal favorite?” I asked, somewhat meekly.
“Oh God, yeah,” he said. “By miles.”
I moved on, upping the ante by prodding him to talk about his visual style—another topic I knew he felt passionately about, but most critics ignored. His photography is not flashy like Orson Welles’s or picture-postcard perfect like David Lean’s, but it is oh so very purposeful. If he dollies in here, he means to say, “Pay attention—what she is about to say is important”; if he cuts to a wide shot there, he means to say, “Look closely—this may be the end or the beginning of something.”
Because he is partial to deep-focus photography, the care he puts into his images is always in evidence. Everything in the frame is sharply rendered for all to see; there are no soft areas for him to ignore. A good illustration is found in Texasville, the sequel to The Last Picture Show, in which even over-the-shoulder shots are remarkably clear and distinct; in some angles, it seems as though we see
