Truffaut wrote: “It all began when we broke the ice.”2
For Peter Bogdanovich and me, it all began with another phone call, about seventeen years ago ….
PART 1
“Call Me Peter, Peter”
The Giants were my delight, my folly, my anodyne, my intellectual stimulation.
— Frederick Exley, A Fan’s Notes: A Fictional Memoir
But how seldom two imaginations coincide!
— Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
I dialed the number his assistant had given me.
Brrring.
No answer.
Brrring.
No answer.
Brrring.
No answer.
For some reason, calling Peter Bogdanovich for the first time for an interview made me feel like Tom Sawyer.
Could it have been because I was so young? Not Tom Sawyer young, but close enough. When I called Peter Bogdanovich on the night before Thanksgiving in 2003 (the date must have some sort of cosmic significance, but for the life of me I cannot imagine what it might be), I was several months’ shy of my twenty-first birthday. I had a right to be nervous. If I measured myself against Peter Bogdanovich, as I often did, I was supposed to have done something by that age.
When he was twenty-one, he was already well on his way to the fortune and glory he would later gain as the director of a batch of extraordinary films that were all the rage—with both the critics and the public—in the early 1970s. The native New Yorker—born on July 30, 1939, to Borislav (a painter) and Herma (a homemaker and maker of frames)—started early. At the age of fourteen, while a student at the Collegiate School, he began penning frighteningly perceptive movie and theater reviews in his column “As We See It.” This anticipated his subsequent career writing feature articles for Esquire and New York, among other august publications.
But the prodigy was not consumed with writing alone—oh, there was more.
Acting was his first passion. His “earliest performances,” he wrote, were recitations of poetry and stories at dinner parties thrown by his parents: “After the meal they would ask me to recite … poems like Poe’s Annabel Lee’ or ‘The Raven,’ or Whitman’s ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ or Robert W. Service’s ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’—or to read a short story like Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’”1
Soon, though, he moved out of the dining room and onto the boards.
In an introduction to Bogdanovich’s collection of essays Pieces of Time, his editor at Esquire, Harold Hayes, noted with pride that Bogdanovich was all of fifteen when he became an acting student of Stella Adler—“having lied about his age and cut his gym class to make time available.”2 His classes with Adler—no matter the, ahem, fraudulent means through which they were obtained—resulted in appearances on stage and on live television, making him a seasoned trouper when he was not yet out of short pants.
More: “In 1959, at nineteen,” Hayes continued, “he somehow managed to raise the money to stage an off-Broadway production of Clifford Odets’ The Big Knife.”3 Are you keeping track? Good: journalist, actor, stage director—and barely old enough to drive. He was not tranquil with his success, either. Hollywood beckoned. It would not be too many more years before he and his first wife—production and costume designer Polly Platt—headed from New York to California, armed with a little money, a plethora of contacts obtained through his writing career, and the general notion that they wanted to make movies—not just see them or write about them.
By the time he was twenty-one, then, Peter Bogdanovich had done his share of Big Things and was destined for even Bigger Things. Me? In between shoveling snow in my suburb of Columbus, Ohio, I was just trying to launch my writing career—not exactly the sort of thing that Harold Hayes would have considered worth commemorating in print.
Nonetheless, on that Thanksgiving Eve in 2003, I found myself dialing Peter Bogdanovich’s number and waiting for him—or anyone—to pick up. I imagined the phone ringing off the hook in his handsome Upper West Side apartment, the one I had seen in a photograph when the New Yorker profiled him the previous year, just as his most recent film, The Cat’s Meow, was about to come out.
On this night, however, it seemed that no one was home—or answering, anyway. I hung up. What to do? I had a backup plan. In case he did not pick up when I called at the appointed time, his assistant had given me a second number to try. It was, she told me, the number to his cell phone. I leaned back in my chair for a long moment. I grabbed the receiver and thought, What the hell—why not?
Brrring.
Brrring.
This time—improbably, because he still felt out of reach to me—he answered. “Yeah?” he said. He sounded impatient—a little testy. I did not know then that this was how he almost always answered the phone—“Yeah?”—no matter his mood, and that his tone was not unfriendly but quizzical. It suggested that he had … things … going on … important things. He simply wanted assurance that he was being interrupted for a damn good reason.
So: “Yeah?”
I gulped and began: Who I was. Why I was calling. When—ahem—we had been scheduled to talk.
He listened patiently, without saying a word in response, and I began to wonder if any of what I said rang a bell. Had his assistant bungled our phoner? When I finally stopped talking, he calmly explained that he was being driven home from the New York set of The Sopranos, the popular HBO television series on which he had the plum role of the Lorraine Bracco character’s psychiatrist. Could I call him when he got home in fifteen minutes? He was, it turned out, perfectly polite, asking only that I give him some time—you know—to walk in the door and turn on the lights and have a sip of water before I started grilling him.
Shoot, I thought to myself. I should have just waited.
You may be wondering why I was calling Peter Bogdanovich in the first place.
Ostensibly, I was interviewing him for an article I was writing about his films, but I have to level with you: this was a bit of a ruse. In truth, I had loved his movies for years, and I simply wanted to talk about them with him. My mind was overflowing with questions: How did he cajole Ben Johnson into taking the part of Sam the Lion in The Last Picture Show? Why did he open Paper Moon with a close-up of its young star, Tatum O’Neal? Was it just the way I saw it, or was They All Laughed more personal—more him—than anything else he’d ever done? If the only way I could ask him these (and many other) questions was by becoming a professional journalist and talking my way into an assignment to write an article about his work—well, so be it.
Let’s face facts: I began writing about movies in the hope that my job would one day give me an excuse to talk to Peter Bogdanovich. There are worse reasons to select an occupation, right?
I was, to put it bluntly, a fan—but if you knew all that I did, you would be, too. What was there not to like? Following his detours in print and on stage, Bogdanovich jumped into moviemaking with gusto, and he met with such instantaneous success—laudatory reviews, big box office—that it was as though the public and industry had been waiting for him. What took you so long? they might have been asking.
By 1971, when The Last Picture Show was released, it had been a rough few years for anyone who prized classical filmmaking and its attendant virtues. Tapping into the antiestablishment mood of some in the country, films such as Midnight Cowboy and Woodstock seemed to be multiplying—like a virus. For all their differences, they had much in common: they were morally incoherent and visually ugly, bearing