shot begins with six or seven people standing on a stage during a rehearsal. As most of them file out onto the stage, going to their places, the camera shifts to a two-shot with the show’s beside-himself director (Michael Caine) and one of his stars (Marilu Henner) as they gossip. In a swift camera move, we are taken from a public world to a private one. To borrow what director Wes Anderson said of another shot in another of Bogdanovich’s movies: “It’s kind of stagey, but you don’t mind at all because it’s such an elegant idea.”36
After a few questions on these topics, Bogdanovich expressed his appreciation.
“Nobody ever notices things like that, Peter,” he said. “None of the critics ever write about that kind of stuff, but to me that’s all about filmmaking.”
“I haven’t read too many interviews where you’re asked about things like this, either,” I said.
“They don’t have a clue. All they can do is ask me who I was doing an homage to.”
“I don’t think I’ve asked a single question about that!”
“Thank you very much—I noticed.”
Behind each shot in a Peter Bogdanovich film is a particular perspective. He did not invent the so-called shot reverse shot—that is, a shot of a character having a look at a particular person or thing and then a shot of that particular person or thing—but he took it to the nth degree. Think of the moment in Mask in which a close-up of Rusty Dennis (Cher) is intercut every few seconds with a medium shot of her intermittent boyfriend, Gar (Sam Elliott), as he rides his motorcycle past her. Cher’s head moves as Elliott speeds by, as does the camera when showing her angle of him. As an example of montage, this scene would have been the envy of Eisenstein—or Hitchcock. In fact, it often seems as though Bogdanovich took the principle at work in Hitchcock’s Rear Window—with all of those close-ups of wheelchair-bound Jimmy Stewart intercut with wide angles of the devious doings of Raymond Burr—and applied it writ large. “Most pictures don’t have a point of view in scenes,” Bogdanovich complained. “They just have shots.”37 Not his.
One of the best examples of looking and reacting in his films is found in a scene in the film that followed Paper Moon, the underappreciated Daisy Miller. Adapted from the short novel by Henry James, the story concerns a pair of Americans whiling away their days in nineteenth-century Europe. Although Frederick Winterbourne (Barry Brown) is beguiled by Annie P. “Daisy” Miller (Cybill Shepherd)—of Schenectady, New York—he misapprehends her character: Daisy affects a flirtatious manner in order to incite jealousy in Winterbourne and thus win his hand. In the process, however, she burnishes a reputation as a heedless, careless foreigner—and thus turns off her would-be beau.
Things do not end well for either one of them, but we get a glimpse of what might have been when early in the film Daisy sings Winterbourne the song “When You and I Were Young, Maggie.” At her family’s room in a hotel in Rome, Daisy is accompanied on the piano by her Italian friend Giovanelli (Duilio Del Prete), and we see the two of them in a loosely framed two-shot as she begins to sweetly sing.
At the end of the second line in the song, Bogdanovich cuts to Winterbourne, who is sitting opposite Daisy and Giovanelli. The camera dollies in to a close-up of him. Bogdanovich holds on Winterbourne’s rapt-looking face for a long moment before returning to an angle of Daisy and Giovanelli.
As Daisy continues to sing, Bogdanovich again cuts on a line change—finally giving Daisy a close-up of her own when she sings the next lines. The slight distancing effect of the long lens indicates that we are seeing Daisy from Winterbourne’s enthralled point of view.
Up to this point, Daisy has been looking in the distance, singing to no one in particular, but on the word daisies in the song, she glances toward Winterbourne, and the heavens melt. A very tight close-up of Winterbourne confirms that his eyes and Daisy’s have met. Their largely unspoken longing for each other is elegantly evoked in this beautiful ballet of glances.
To watch an entire film made up of such carefully worked-out moments spoiled other films for me—they seemed so slovenly by comparison. When Pauline Kael compared Robert Altman’s Nashville (a great film, no doubt) to a movie orgy, she meant it as a compliment, but what is an orgy but messy and unruly—and so is Nashville. Looking at an Altman film after a Bogdanovich film is akin to opening your mouth underwater in a swimming pool: too much, too fast.
In hindsight, though, it is no mystery why Daisy Miller broke the streak that began with The Last Picture Show, accelerated with What’s Up, Doc?, and concluded with Paper Moon. Although Daisy Miller was warmly reviewed in the New York Times (critic Vincent Canby called it “something of a triumph for everyone concerned”), and decades later it was included in The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made,38 the film lacked the obvious commercial appeal of Bogdanovich’s earlier films. It featured a much less sympathetic group of characters, too. In fact, Winterbourne is flat-out unlikeable—a milksop who is constitutionally incapable of seizing the day. Daisy, of course, is loveliness personified, and, as played by Shepherd, she is not merely a rogue commoner from across the ocean. She has manners, curtsying primly after singing “When You and I Were Young, Maggie,” and her hesitation in blatantly pursuing Winterbourne speaks to her propriety.
At the film’s end, Daisy is taken ill and perishes, further dimming its box-office chances. Yet the story’s tragic turn inspired some of Bogdanovich’s finest filmmaking. After learning that Daisy is ailing, Winterbourne enters the lobby of her hotel. The camera stays outside, observing the action that follows through a lace curtain hanging on a door. Winterbourne is halfway up the stairs when a desk clerk rushes over to tell him the news about Daisy—well, we assume that’s what he tells him. We can’t be certain because the voices are drowned out by Verdi’s “La donna e mobile,” which is being played by an organ grinder somewhere off-camera. Shell-shocked, Winterbourne turns around and walks toward us, opening the door with the lace curtain and letting it swing quietly back into place.
Just one scene later, Winterbourne is seen standing calmly—too calmly—above Daisy’s grave. He even manages to look her intuitive younger brother (James McMurtry—son of Larry) in the eye. In fact, Bogdanovich seems more affected by the situation than Winterbourne. He grasps, as Winterbourne never will, the gravity of losing a woman like Daisy Miller. The director’s camera flees the scene, receding from the graveyard until everything grows dim in a cloud of white smoke—which could easily be mistaken for Daisy’s spirit. “I’m a classicist,” Bogdanovich told critic Rex Reed, stating the obvious. “I like well-made films with beginnings, middles and ends, in which acting and writing are important instead of camera angles.”39 He seemed to delight in needling his contemporaries for their devotion to faddish film techniques. “I’m afraid it’s largely a twentieth-century critical fashion to value originality as the main criterion of a work of art,” he wrote in the early 1970s.40
Some saw such proclamations as signs of his arrogance, but they were, in truth, merely indicators of his self-assurance. From watching the great films and studying what it was that made them great, he trained himself how to make them. “I think that Peter had so much confidence,” Louise Stratten told me, “and that he had such a knowing from a very young age of what he wanted to do and that he was so brilliant at it that he could direct things with his left hand and backwards and with his eyes shut. He could direct circles around so many people.”
That confidence—particularly in his ability to tell a story with visuals alone—led him to decline the services of film composers on all but a handful of his films: his images would sink or swim on their own. In the most literal sense of the word, there is a lot of silence in his films. Instead of a full orchestra, we hear the wind in The Last Picture
