The Bodganoff brothers have just left our heads in the stars and it is around an almost namesake who, him, familiar with the American stars, to disappear: the filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich died this Thursday of natural causes at the age of 82 years old. After meteoric beginnings of wonder boy in New Hollywood and at least one classic on the clock (the last session, 1971), his career had many ups and downs. It is also a rare case across the Atlantic of a director-critic-passer-cinephile, the equivalent of a Bertrand Tavernier. The two also had in common a divergent eye and the fetish of the neck warmer – scarf for the American, scarf for the French.
This New Yorker of Austro-Serbian origin first dabbled in acting but quickly branched out into theatrical direction and the programming of Hollywood classics at Moma, including retrospectives of John Ford and Orson Welles that he would cook. then in long talks. Ford the grumpy will give him one of the best answers of his colleague (to his question “You have realized Three sublime scoundrels with very elaborate shots, how did you film them? ” and Ford replies: “With a camera, other questions”). With Welles, it will be a long mentor-student relationship, culminating in a book of interviews from 1968 to the 80s, Me, Orson Welles and in the thunderous stays Falstaff as a permanent guest at Bogdanovich’s, watching Kojak on TV and skimming her fridge (a great photo of them shows them posing in a supermarket, with Welles’ hands hanging from a food cart, probably his own).
On the strength of Bogdanovich’s articles in Esquire, it’s Roger Corman, the pope of the B series, who puts Bogdanovich in the saddle to rewrite and shoot a part of the biker movie the wild angels (1966), then his first feature, target (1968), devilishly precursor with his story of a former Vietnam soldier launched in a rifle killing in his neighborhood. But it is with the look in the retro that he shines: at only 32 years old, his Last session scoop eight Oscar nominations – numbers echoing Welles’ success when he pops up with Citizen Kane. This fifties teenage column is filmed in black and white on Welles’ advice. Set in a small Texas town, the film delighted at the time by its way of capturing the primary American experience: youth, melancholy, football, girls and cinoche. Or in one scene: a young Jeff Bridges with his head in Cybill Shepherd’s lap, languidly feeding him fries at the drive-through. The film will be a commercial success, as will the following two, We pack our bags, Doctor (1972, energetic screwball comedy contemporary in homage to the talkative hunted crossroads of Howard Hawks, with Barbra Streisand) and cotton candy (1973, road movie set in the 1930s, with Ryan O’Neal and his daughter Tatum). Hollywood obliges, the falls are as sudden as the ascent and his fixture for the past is no longer successful. Its adaptation in costumes of Henry James, Daisy Miller (1974), will be a failure.
The rest is more erratic, with the wire of his invariably blond muses (Sheperd first, then the playmate Dorothy Stratten, murdered dead, whose younger sister he will then marry), of returns (the melodrama Mask in 1985, with Cher), flops which pushed him away from the plateaus (Texasville, 1990, continuation of the last session) and personal bankruptcy. Bogdanovich maintains his smuggling energy by presenting classic TV broadcasts, always with a bit of that air of wanting to be as important as his idols. His snobbish phrasing and his physique of a cinégénique university made him, late in the day, the actor he did not want to be and we saw him pass in series, Simpsons at How I Met Your Mother, but especially as psychiatrist of the psychiatrist of the mafioso Tony in the Sopranos. His ultimate film as a filmmaker, Broadway Therapy (2014) with Owen Wilson, will still flirt with the screwball with very mixed results. His last project was above all to oversee the finish in 2018 of On the other side of the wind, labyrinthine cursed film started by Welles in the 70s and finally left aside before the latter’s death. “There are no old movies, he said. Only those that you have seen and those that you have not seen ”.
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