Picturing Peter Bogdanovich. Peter Tonguette
sixteen when he first saw Citizen Kane, I promised myself that I would see the film at the same age and preferably under similar conditions: in a musty old theater on a midweek afternoon, with the sound of raindrops gently tap-tap-tapping on the rooftop. Later, when I began interviewing him, I never asked if his first experience with Citizen Kane was anything like what I imagined it to be. What if I had it wrong? Could I stand the disappointment?
I was already fifteen and a half when I made my vow to see Citizen Kane at sixteen. I scanned the movie listings in the newspaper, hoping against hope to read that a print of Citizen Kane would be shown somewhere near where I lived. But I was fast running out of time, and when I saw that the film was going to air on the local public-television station one evening, I decided to sit down and watch. I had told my plans to my father, who wondered why I gave up on them so quickly. I said that Peter Bogdanovich would understand: it was important to see Citizen Kane as soon as humanly possible.
At some point, I learned that Bogdanovich had not actually graduated from the Collegiate School, where he had made such an impression with his column “As We See It.” “He left high school at sixteen years of age without a diploma, because of a failed algebra exam,” the author Andrew Yule writes in his biography Picture Shows: The Life and Films of Peter Bogdanovich. “At the graduation ceremony he was still duly summoned and solemnly presented with a bulky, face-saving envelope, just like the graduates. On opening it later, he found it contained a blank chunk of cardboard.”34 Well, my interest in movies outweighed my interest in homework—especially algebra—too.
In fact, history was repeating itself—as I now sought to emulate him, he had once sought to emulate others. “I just wanted to be like those people on the screen,” he said to an interviewer in 1972. “I didn’t think about their private lives or what it was like to have all that money. I just wanted to be the people. I wanted to look like Bill Holden, because I wanted to be a real American boy, and do all those wonderful things. And with a name like Bogdanovich, there wasn’t much of a chance. I wanted my name to be Jim.”35 I was a step ahead of him for a change: at least we had the same first name.
It took three tries, but we finally connected on Thanksgiving Eve in 2003. I wondered how much his assistant had actually told him about what I was doing—I had explained to her in some detail that the article I was writing would focus on his lesser-known films, but such things have a way of getting lost in translation—because he seemed pleasantly surprised when my first questions were concerned with They All Laughed, his most personal film, an ebullient look at lovers and love affairs, shot in his hometown and peopled with some of his favorite performers, including Ben Gazzara, Audrey Hepburn, John Ritter, and Dorothy Stratten. My singular focus on this film was, I confess, partly by design: I knew how highly he thought of They All Laughed and that he was rarely asked about it. Because I had studied him so intently and sought to model myself on him so closely, when I finally had a chance to talk to him, I knew how to push his buttons.
Later in our conversation, he said, responding to a comment I made about the film, “They All Laughed was my best picture.” Pause. Did he wonder if I would agree with such a statement? Without thinking about it, I said, “I think so, too”—though I instantly regretted blurting out the words so quickly. In rushing to share such an unconventional opinion, I feared appearing insincere, which I certainly was not. I adored They All Laughed—it was and remains my favorite film of his—even if I had calculated that asking him about it first, before The Last Picture Show or What’s Up, Doc? or Paper Moon, would get us off on the right foot.
I quickly turned my agreement into a question.
“So, it’s your personal favorite?” I asked, somewhat meekly.
“Oh God, yeah,” he said. “By miles.”
I moved on, upping the ante by prodding him to talk about his visual style—another topic I knew he felt passionately about, but most critics ignored. His photography is not flashy like Orson Welles’s or picture-postcard perfect like David Lean’s, but it is oh so very purposeful. If he dollies in here, he means to say, “Pay attention—what she is about to say is important”; if he cuts to a wide shot there, he means to say, “Look closely—this may be the end or the beginning of something.”
Because he is partial to deep-focus photography, the care he puts into his images is always in evidence. Everything in the frame is sharply rendered for all to see; there are no soft areas for him to ignore. A good illustration is found in Texasville, the sequel to The Last Picture Show, in which even over-the-shoulder shots are remarkably clear and distinct; in some angles, it seems as though we see every strand of hair on the back of Jeff Bridges’s head. And in Noises Off, his hilarious film version of Michael Frayn’s farce about a maladroit theatrical troupe, one striking shot begins with six or seven people standing on a stage during a rehearsal. As most of them file out onto the stage, going to their places, the camera shifts to a two-shot with the show’s beside-himself director (Michael Caine) and one of his stars (Marilu Henner) as they gossip. In a swift camera move, we are taken from a public world to a private one. To borrow what director Wes Anderson said of another shot in another of Bogdanovich’s movies: “It’s kind of stagey, but you don’t mind at all because it’s such an elegant idea.”36
After a few questions on these topics, Bogdanovich expressed his appreciation.
“Nobody ever notices things like that, Peter,” he said. “None of the critics ever write about that kind of stuff, but to me that’s all about filmmaking.”
“I haven’t read too many interviews where you’re asked about things like this, either,” I said.
“They don’t have a clue. All they can do is ask me who I was doing an homage to.”
“I don’t think I’ve asked a single question about that!”
“Thank you very much—I noticed.”
Behind each shot in a Peter Bogdanovich film is a particular perspective. He did not invent the so-called shot reverse shot—that is, a shot of a character having a look at a particular person or thing and then a shot of that particular person or thing—but he took it to the nth degree. Think of the moment in Mask in which a close-up of Rusty Dennis (Cher) is intercut every few seconds with a medium shot of her intermittent boyfriend, Gar (Sam Elliott), as he rides his motorcycle past her. Cher’s head moves as Elliott speeds by, as does the camera when showing her angle of him. As an example of montage, this scene would have been the envy of Eisenstein—or Hitchcock. In fact, it often seems as though Bogdanovich took the principle at work in Hitchcock’s Rear Window—with all of those close-ups of wheelchair-bound Jimmy Stewart intercut with wide angles of the devious doings of Raymond Burr—and applied it writ large. “Most pictures don’t have a point of view in scenes,” Bogdanovich complained. “They just have shots.”37 Not his.
One of the best examples of looking and reacting in his films is found in a scene in the film that followed Paper Moon, the underappreciated Daisy Miller. Adapted from the short novel by Henry James, the story concerns a pair of Americans whiling away their days in nineteenth-century Europe. Although Frederick Winterbourne (Barry Brown) is beguiled by Annie P. “Daisy” Miller (Cybill Shepherd)—of Schenectady, New York—he misapprehends her character: Daisy affects a flirtatious manner in order to incite jealousy in Winterbourne and thus win his hand. In the process, however, she burnishes a reputation as a heedless, careless foreigner—and thus turns off her would-be beau.
Things do not end well for either one of them, but we get a glimpse of what might have been when early in the film Daisy sings Winterbourne the song “When You and I Were Young, Maggie.” At her family’s room in a hotel in Rome, Daisy is accompanied on the piano by her Italian friend Giovanelli (Duilio Del Prete), and we see the two of them in a loosely framed two-shot as she begins to sweetly sing.
At the end of the second line in the song, Bogdanovich cuts to Winterbourne, who is sitting opposite Daisy and Giovanelli. The camera dollies in to a close-up of him. Bogdanovich holds on Winterbourne’s rapt-looking