Peter Bogdanovich on the Movies
Nickelodeon and The Last Picture Show - An Unlikely DVD Duo
Apr 20, 2009
Peter Bogdanovich has intrigued movie fans for more than forty years. He is a film historian and author of dozens of books on Hollywood (including "Who the Devil Made It: Conversations With Robert Aldrich, George Cukor, Allan Dwan, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Chuck Jones, Fritz Lang, Joseph H. Lewis, Sidney Lumet, Leo McCarey, Otto Preminger, Don Siegel, Josef von Sternberg, Frank Tashlin, Edgar G. Ulmer, Raoul Walsh." NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).
He was a close friend and biographer of Orson Welles, an actor and inconsistent, oddball filmmaker. But Bogdanovich’ headline grabbing love life has at times overshadowed his cinematic accomplishments.
He fell in love with his gorgeous leading lady, newcomer Cybil Sheppard, on the set of The Last Picture Show, which he was making with his wife Polly Platt. The sweeping small town epic of bygone times is clearly a valentine to Sheppard. He left his wife for her and they became Hollywood’s “It” couple for most of the seventies.
Years later, his new muse, Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten was savagely murdered by her jealous husband. Bogdanovich was devastated. He eventually wrote a book about it, The Killing of the Unicorn, and married Dorothy’s sister Louise Stratten.
He spoke over the phone from his Los Angeles hotel room about the reintroduction of two of his best known films – the critically savaged Nickelodeon and the critically adored The Last Picture Show, recently released on a double DVD set. Nickelodeon is a kind of slapstick free for all about Hollywood’s infancy and The Last Picture Show looks at life in a dying Texas town fifty years ago.
AB - Why did you release the vastly different films The Last Picture Show and Nickelodeon in the same package?
PB - They’re both owned by Columbia. As simple as that. They have one thing in common besides the fact I directed both of them. One is about the beginning of the movies, the very beginning, and the other is about the end of a certain era of movie going. They are very different, Picture Show was closer to what I had in mind, and Nickelodeon was a compromise. I wanted to make it in black and white, but the studio wouldn’t release it that way. Finally it's available in black and white. It only took 30 years.
AB - Everything thing looks better in black and white?
PB - Sure does. Black and white covers a multitude of sins. Everything is in there. The events may seem made up, but they are all based on true stories. These were all real anecdotes that happened to Alan Dewan, Leo McCarey or Raoul Walsh. They were pioneers. I am very fortunate to have met them and I know it. I count my blessings.
AB – The Last Picture Show is bittersweet, the debut of Cybill Sheppard who looks so angelic in a story about the collapse of hope. Why did you want to tackle it?
PB - It interested me and I thought it would be challenging how to tell that story. I’m often challenged into action by not knowing how to do it. I’ve often said that film is a document of the moment that’s why I often like to carry a scene in one shot, a true record of hat happened. That’s why I am so against the loose filmmaking that is so synthetic now. It came from MTV.
AB - You began your Hollywood career as an actor, and then became a historian and scholar, then a screenwriter and director. Why were you so keen to be inside films?
PB -I started as a theatre actor hoping I’d be discovered. I wasn’t. I wrote about films to learn about them. It was a twofold learning, a way of learning about them for my own purposes and communicating to the public things I liked and as a way of meeting legendary figures. I did and I published 12 books on them. But I prefer acting and directing to writing. It’s more fun than working by yourself. Everything has its place and I wouldn’t give any of it up, I prefer directing then acting and then writing. A lot of writing.
AB - How did you catch the Hollywood bug?
PB - My father took me as a child to the silents at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. So these films weren’t weird to me, they were welcome. Today these films are not familiar, they’re alien and the kids aren’t adventurous. Also pictures need to be seen on the big screen and in black and white. If you’ve never seen a black and white on a big screen, you have never felt its power.
In the Great Depression, people didn’t go to cineplexes. They went to movie palaces, 2000 people shared the experience, under the painted sky ceilings above and the clouds and the frou frou. I think they’ll hold up; there will always be someone who wants to see them. It’s a romantic way of movie watching.
AB – Your work often refers to Old Hollywood.
PB - I’ve done a few show business things but not many. I have covered the Old Days of Hollywood in Cat’s Meow and Nickelodeon and others. I succeeded, partially, I’ve done the era but not as well as I’d like to. I’m working on a couple of pictures, screwball comedies that I like very much , a love story, a sad love story about a woman who gets Alzheimer’s, a ghost picture I’ve been working on many years and a modern western. I don’t know which one will go first.
AB - The movie experience has changed so much since you were small. From big screens and big ideas to cineplexes, big business and small ideas. Does that give you pause?
PB - Everything gives me pause. Everything is different than it was when was growing up, when I started making pictures. I’m not happy about it, but there it is.
