Picturing Peter Bogdanovich. Peter Tonguette
Bogdanovich agreed to direct Paper Moon, he came close to pulling off what would have been his greatest feat: to go along with his coming-of-age drama and his screwball comedy, he planned to direct a Western of unusual ambition. The news was heralded on the front page of Variety in February 1972: “Superstar western planned by Peter Bogdanovich for first of three pix for Warner Bros. will be his own original script, ‘The Streets of Laredo’ … with cast including John Wayne, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Ryan O’Neal, Ben Johnson, Cybill Shepherd, and the Clancy Bros., Irish singing group.”23 After John Wayne got cold feet, and Bogdanovich saw no point in recasting a role conceived for a legend, the project was over—although the coauthor of the screenplay, Larry McMurtry, eventually spun a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Lonesome Dove, out of the material.
So Bogdanovich made Paper Moon—and as replacements go, he could have done much worse. An adaptation of Joe David Brown’s novel Addie Pray, the film is—not unlike What’s Up, Doc?—the story of one person in pursuit of another. Having made up her mind that lying, cheating, paternity-denying scalawag Moses Pray (Ryan O’Neal) is her father, orphaned eight-year-old Addie Loggins (Tatum O’Neal) spends the entire film trying to win his affection. Paper Moon takes the unfashionable but entirely convincing position that a daughter needs a father. That Moses is such a scoundrel certainly complicates the film’s current of patriarchy. But for Addie, any father—even one as unreliable as Moses—is better than none at all.
Of course, it is clear from the start that Moses leaves a great deal to be desired. He meets his purported daughter for the first time at the burial of her mother, a prostitute with whom he had a liaison. Standing with Addie at the gravesite are a minister with a voice that hymns were written for (“Rock of Ages” is sung at the makeshift service) and a coterie of kind-hearted old ladies who stew over what will become of Addie. Pointedly, Moses is not among the initial mourners. He shows his face late, bearing flowers pilfered from a nearby tombstone, and initially hesitates when it is suggested that he look after Addie until she can catch a train to St. Joseph, Missouri, where a distant relative is said to live. With his cheap suit, wide-brim hat, and insincere smile, the character is quickly, and brilliantly, sketched by Bogdanovich and O’Neal.
Not long after Moses has been shamed into caring for Addie, we learn how he puts food on the table: as the proprietor of the respectable-sounding Kansas Bible Company, he pawns copies of the Good Book to poor souls who have never placed an order in the first place. Scouring newspaper obituaries, he shows up at the doors of women recently widowed, claims that a late husband had ordered a customized Bible, and insists that a balance is due. The moment when Addie realizes what Moses is up to is a gem of visual storytelling. Waiting in the car while Moses does his usual song and dance for a widow named Pearl, Addie spots a folded newspaper in the driver’s seat. The name “Pearl” is circled in Pearl’s husband’s obituary, and when Addie snoops around in a trunk, she finds a stamp-and-ink set used to personalize the Bibles. The look of revulsion on Tatum O’Neal’s face as she puts it all together is not only very funny but reflects her character’s fundamental goodness.
Of course, Addie soon becomes Moses’s willing and energetic partner, pulling off quick-change maneuvers in front of unsuspecting dime-store cashiers, but she also injects an element of fairness into their schemes. For example, Addie assesses the socioeconomic status of their dupes before determining how much is to be charged for a given Bible. A well-fed elderly woman clutching a strand of fat pearls ought to pay more; a gaunt mother surrounded by a half-dozen scrawny children will get a discount.
In fact, we feel that Addie, in teaming up with Moses, is motivated less by nascent criminality than by a fervent wish to be near her sole surviving parent. Having been orphaned once, she cannot let it happen again. Similar motives inspire Addie to outwit a loose woman with whom Moses has shacked up, Trixie Delight (Madeline Kahn, as jiggly as a bowl of Jello in her satin blouse). In a brilliantly orchestrated sequence, Addie frames Trixie in the hotel where Moses has temporarily installed the gang. With the assistance of Trixie’s streetwise helpmate Imogene (P. J. Johnson—almost as good as Tatum O’Neal), Addie manages to entice a dopey front-desk clerk (Burton Gilliam, a one-of-kind bit comic player later reused in At Long Last Love) to meet Trixie in her room. When Moses finds the two of them in a compromising situation, he dumps Trixie, heartbroken over the betrayal.
Of course, we wish that Addie had a parent worthy of her—one like Byron Orlok or Sam the Lion or even “Frank D. Roosevelt,” as Addie calls the thirty-second president of the United States. She goes on and on about FDR—not, we suspect, for his policies or programs but for his warm parental manner. But Addie takes what she can get, and when she is finally deposited in St. Joseph, we understand why she is not tempted by the care of a benevolent relative or the comforts of a normal home: she wants her pa, even if it means a life of crime.
While the characters in Paper Moon treat the Bible with a notable lack of reverence—as a floppy black book to be written in and thrown about—few films better or more entertainingly illustrate the Fifth Commandment to honor thy mother and thy father.
When Tatum O’Neal won an Academy Award for her performance in Paper Moon, her acceptance speech encapsulated the ascent of the film’s maker: “All I really want to thank is my director, Peter Bogdanovich, and my father,” she said—as though no one else really mattered. Was she wrong or just imprudent?
To be sure, over the course of his first four films, Bogdanovich had assembled a top-flight crew (including cinematographer László Kovács, designer Polly Platt, editor Verna Fields, and production associate Frank Marshall) and a lively group of actors (including both O’Neals, Madeline Kahn, Randy Quaid, Duilio Del Prete, and John Hillerman), and it is impossible to overstate the importance of their contributions. Yet audiences were coming to see the work of one artist, not a collective, and the studios knew that he was their biggest selling point.
When What’s Up, Doc? opened in New York, the marquee gave the game away, as Bogdanovich later recalled: “The biggest kick I got was seeing my name on the marquee when I hadn’t even asked for them to put it there. My name circled the marquee: PETER BOGDANOVICH’S COMEDY.”24 The message was loud and clear: the director was the one who mattered to the public. The same thinking accounts for the prominence Bogdanovich was given in the trailers for What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon (and later for Daisy Miller and Saint Jack). There he is, front and center in behind-the-scenes footage—setting up shots, showing his performers how to play a given scene, and generally mugging for the camera.
“Hello,” he says to the camera in the trailer for What’s Up, Doc?, “I’m Peter Bogdanovich”—before pretending to forget the title of “this little picture we’re making today.” But none of the pictures were “little” as long as this was the guy who was directing them. The trailer for Daisy Miller, too, gets mileage out of the evolving Bogdanovich legend. A snippet from Paper Moon is shown before a voice-over solemnly intones: “Last year Peter Bogdanovich gave you the moon.” We see a shot of the director behind the camera of his latest film, as the voice-over continues: “This year, Peter Bogdanovich has made a movie in color: Daisy Miller, starring Cybill Shepherd.”
Paper Moon was the inaugural release of the Directors Company, a production company that Paramount Pictures put together for Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, and William Friedkin, affording them total control over their films if they kept their budgets reasonable. The idea, said studio president Frank Yablans, was to combine “such forceful talents as these with a climate where their creative skills can be utilized to their highest degrees.”25 Well, Coppola’s contribution to the Directors Company was the interesting but commercially underwhelming film The Conversation, and Friedkin departed before making a film. In the end, Paper Moon was by far the transitory company’s biggest hit.
Of course, there is more to Bogdanovich’s story than the triumphant narrative sketched here so far: films that didn’t go over with the public, films that were recut by studios, and even films that never found their way to the screen. In his book of interviews with directors, Who the Devil Made It, Bogdanovich quotes Josef von Sternberg on the subject of careers that start off smashingly