Russia (bbabo.net), - An outstanding film director, film historian and writer Peter Bogdanovich died on Wednesday in Los Angeles at the age of 82, "What's the matter, doc?" and Paper Moon. These pictures were his tribute to the cinema in which he grew up. Contemporaries considered them masterpieces, Bogdanovich was called a child prodigy and compared him with Orson Welles, and The Last Picture Show - with Citizen Kane.
After such a brilliant start, Bogdanovich experienced a rather difficult life, full of hardships and failures. He even believed that the chain of his misfortunes began with the ridiculous tragic death of his older brother, who was accidentally scalded with boiling soup as an infant. Somersaults of fate lay in wait for him throughout his long career, similar to the seismogram of a volcanic island.
Peter Bogdanovich was born into a family of immigrants: his father was a Serbian artist, his mother was an Austrian Jew. As a child, his father often took Peter to the Museum of Modern Art to watch silent films.
The future director treated these films with trepidation, even started a catalog in the manner of a library one, where he wrote his reviews on each film viewed on the cards. He continued this tradition until the age of thirty, which allowed him to accumulate a solid dossier for the entire "golden age" of Hollywood: there were his reviews of films by Hitchcock, Cukor, Ford, the works of the largest Hollywood movie stars of that time. The stars became his idols, and then he admitted more than once that he dreamed of being like them.
“The first thing I did in my life was born, the second - I fell in love with cinema” - he later stated.
He wanted to become an actor and studied acting. He played small roles in small theaters Off Broadway, on television, at the age of twenty he staged his first play "The Big Knife" in an off-Broadway theater. At the same time he began writing articles and reviews for the French magazine Caye du Cinema, for the Saturday Evening Post.
He wanted to see his idols in person, and he started a series of monographs about such masters as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford - this allowed him to sit for a long time visiting great directors, recording interviews with them. He always believed that it was these master classes that became for him the main school in cinema. His most fundamental work in film studies was the solid tome This Is Orson Welles, which arose as a result of many hours of conversations with the author of Citizen Kane. The friendship that was born then continued throughout his life, at one time Bogdanovich even gave shelter to Wells, who fell into poverty and oblivion, in his California home.
Bogdanovich's real film career began in the 60s, when he and his first wife, Polly Platt, moved to Los Angeles and became the second director of the horror master Roger Corman. There he directed his first film "Targets" (1968) - a thriller about a young rebel who took up arms. In it, the debutant paid a generous tribute to his beloved cinema of the past, scattering many "tributes" to old classics throughout the film.
The author's cinematic erudition made a favorable impression, "Targets" were warmly received by the press and the public and became a good launching pad for Bogdanovich. It was then that the studio Columbia Pictures invited the talented debutant to carry out his script "The Last Picture Show" as a production director. The picture depicted the meager life of a poor Texas town in the early 50s, the characters led a monotonous existence, shop windows were closed, the only cinema with its diner and billiard room was the last refuge of local youth, but he also lived out his last days, showing Vincent Minnelli's comedies and westerns with an idol adolescents by John Wayne.
In the film, the career of then little-known Jeff Bridges began, the picture received eight Oscar nominations and won two. So Peter Bogdanovich was in the forefront of Hollywood directors, but soon became the object of scandalous chronicles, leaving his first family for the beauty of Sybil Shepard, whom he shot in The Last Picture Show as Jesse Farrow.
The success with the public was bolstered by the subsequent films What's Up, Doc? - stylized 30s comedy with Barbra Streisand and "Paper Moon" from the Great Depression. But then the "black streak" began. His "Daisy Miller" by Henry James and the musical "Finally Love" with Bert Reynolds and the ill-fated Sybil Shepard were hostile. Even 1976's Nickellodeon, its new nod to early cinematography, was booed by critics — unfair, in my opinion.Stormy and in his personal life: the director met a new heartbreaker, 20-year-old fashion model Dorothy Stratten, and she left her husband for the sake of a movie star. Bogdanovich even managed to shoot her in his new comedy with Audrey Hepburn, They All Laughed, but the abandoned husband, to the delight of the yellow press, shot the wrong one. As they wrote in the newspapers, the grief-stricken director then revisited the episodes of his picture with the participation of his beloved many times, but the audience did not share his feelings, the film at the box office was unsuccessful. Bogdanovich's attempt to rent the film on himself also became a financial disaster, and the director declared himself bankrupt.
"I have made many mistakes," he admitted in an interview, "but when someone detonates an atomic bomb under your feet, it is difficult to demand rational actions." Another madness was his marriage to the younger sister of the deceased Dorothy - Louise, who by 1988 also turned 20 years old. Around this event, the tabloid press made a sheer dance, accusing the director that he wanted to make Louise as much like his sister as possible and therefore forced her to face surgery - Bogdanovich vigorously denied this. He also shot Louise in several of his films for cinemas and television, designating her in the credits as LB Stratten.
In 1985, he directed the film drama "The Mask", which returned him to critical acclaim. It was a story about a boy called Rocky, whose face, due to a rare disease, was like a huge lion-like mask. The people around him treated him with disgust, laughed at him, but a kind heart and an inquiring mind allowed him to find his place among people. Cher played the role of his mother. The film was a success, but here, too, a scandal arose: the studio found it necessary to remove a couple of episodes and replace the soundtrack, and the director filed a lawsuit against her.
This was followed by several more failures of the films "Illegally Yours", "Texasville", "Crazy Stage" modestly passed and in the late 90s Bogdanovich again declared himself bankrupt. At the turn of the century, he shot a lot for television, returning to the big screen with Murder in Hollywood (as we called the thriller Cat Meow) about the scandalous story of the 20s with the yacht shooting of newspaper tycoon William Hirst. The film with the participation of Kirsten Dunst was received by critics quite warmly, as were the new books by Peter Bogdanovich about cinema, its directors and stars.
In 2018, he released a documentary about Buster Keaton "The Great Buster" - his last bow to old cinema and the last completed work of Peter Bogdanovich. His new picture One Lucky Moon, which was announced, will probably never be released again.
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