More than for other directors, Corman was essential in Bogdanovich’s career not only because he did everything with him, making the most of the small Cormanian technical teams as a learning factor: as an assistant director in “The Wild Angels” he ended up with a couple of broken ribs trying to command the horde of real bikers who acted in the film alongside Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra. Corman let him direct one of his productions but on an impossible condition: he had to include Boris Karloff, who owed him a few days for falling ill on the set of the Poe comedy “The Raven.” Thus arose one of the most glorious operas in the history of cinema “Targets” (“Watch them die”, 1968) in which a psychopathic sniper placed his rifle behind the drive-in screen where a Karloff film was premiered, achieving the paradox that it was the monster who stopped the villain.
Of course, Bogdanovich’s masterpiece came later with the brilliant “The Last Picture Show” (“The Last Picture Show, 1971) melancholic vision of old Hollywood that imposed the fashion to re-film in black and white. The film was applauded by global critics and achieved 8 Oscar nominations, two of which were for Bogdanovich himself, who simultaneously reached the scandalous pages of matters of the heart by abandoning his wife and partner, Polly Platt, for the protagonist. from the film, Cybill Shepherd.
In the following years he made two other great films, both critical and box office successes: one was the Howard Hawks tribute comedy “What’s up Doc” (1972) with Barbra’s crazy entanglements. Streisand and Ryan O’Neal grossing as much as “The Godfather” and “The Poseidon Adventure” and the subsequent police comedy drama “Paper Moon” (“Paper Moon, 1973) also returning to black and white with Ryan O’Neal and his 9-year-old daughter Tatum (who won the Oscar) as a father-daughter con artist duo in the Depression era. For many this is his best film, and not for nothing did he influence Fabian Bielinsky for “9 Queens”, to the point that one of the “tales” of the scammers is practically traced.
Bogdanovich had interviewed Fritz Lang, who claimed that the director should never date his protagonist, but ignored him, and thus his indulgent ode to Cybill Shepherd “Daisy Miller” was a failure on every level that almost ended his career. But the director, already separated from his star, was recovering in excellent films such as the sordid policeman with Ben Gazzara “Saint Jack” (1979), censored in the Argentina of the dictatorship, and even came to be again in top form in the solid comedy “They all laughed” (“Our love cheats”, 1981), which marked the debut of Playboy playmate Dorothy Stratten, another great love of the filmmaker. Only here tragedy struck him when the former playmate brutally murdered her in what was one of the most notorious police cases of the era (it was filmed by Bob Fosse in “Star 80”). They say that Bogdanovich, who strangely later married the deceased’s younger sister, Louise, was never the same again after that tragic episode.
Peter Bogdanovich, born in New York to a family that had fled from Nazism, never stopped filming, and he even became, along with Scorsese, one of the greatest defenders of the restoration of classic films. In 2016 he visited us in the framework of the Bafici. And in addition to “The Sopranos”, he also performed under the orders of his admirer Quentin Tarantino as a DJ in both parts of “Kill Bill”.
Source From: Ambito
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