Peter Bogdanovich still loves old Hollywood FAMOUS FRIENDS and films

By Josh Rottenberg

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES

Peter Bogdanovich has countless stories, and he tells them with the sort of flair you’d expect from a man who wears a neck scarf. Over the years, the director befriended an array of Hollywood legends – including John Ford, Cary Grant, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks – and though they’re nearly all gone now, he keeps their memories alive by recounting these anecdotes, peppering them with uncannily accurate impressions.

On a bright afternoon, Bogdanovich sat in the dining room of ex-wife Louise Stratten’s apartment in the San Fernando Valley. His hair neatly combed, his eyes slightly melancholy behind large glasses, he was reminiscing about a period in the mid-1970s when he was riding high off a string of early hits and living in a lavish Bel-Air home with then-girlfriend Cybill Shepherd. Orson Welles was a frequent houseguest.

“Orson was very funny,” Bogdanovich said, speaking in the languid, refined tone that became familiar to viewers who watched him as a therapist on HBO’s “The Sopranos.” “He had a little wing to himself, and to get to the TV room, he would go through my office. He’d be tiptoeing through not to disturb me and he’d whisper, ‘“Dick Van Dyke” is on.’ He loved ‘Dick Van Dyke’ reruns, and he loved the one with Telly Savalas with the lollipop, ‘Kojak.’ He loved his chutzpah.”

Bogdanovich’s own story has been a remarkable if often tumultuous one – a story not entirely unlike Welles’ own in its extremes of success and failure. Bogdanovich rocketed to fame in his 30s with a trio of beloved classics – “The Last Picture Show,” “What’s Up, Doc?” and “Paper Moon,” all of which were steeped in an adoration for Hollywood’s past – and then saw his career plummet to Earth in the late ’70s after a string of bruising flops. He was eventually forced to declare bankruptcy and move out of the Bel-Air estate.

He suffered personal tragedy when his then lover, Playboy playmate-turned-actress Dorothy Stratten, was killed by her estranged husband in 1980, then faced public scandal when he later married her younger sister, Louise.

“It’s been a very up-and-down kind of existence,” Bogdanovich said, sounding somewhat weary but not beaten down.

But even with all he’s been through, the filmmaker has never stopped working, driven by a passion for the cinema that stretches back as far as he can remember. Now, at age 76, he is returning to the big screen with “She’s Funny That Way,” his first feature movie in 14 years. The Lionsgate Premiere release – which boasts a surprisingly starry cast considering its modest budget, a testament to many actors’ desire to work with a director of Bogdanovich’s stature – opened yesterday in limited release and VOD.

A throwback to the screwball comedies of Hollywood’s golden era, the fast-paced farce centers on a prostitute-turned-actress (Imogen Poots) who becomes entangled with a philandering Broadway producer (Owen Wilson), a foul-mouthed therapist (Jennifer Aniston) and an obnoxious matinee idol (Rhys Ifans), among other colorful characters, on her way to fame.

He began writing the film with Louise Stratten in 2000, when their marriage was falling apart. “Louise and I were having a very tough time,” said Bogdanovich, who has an apartment in New York but stays with Stratten when he’s in Los Angeles. “We were broke. I was working, but it was not an easy time for us. And we just said, ‘Let’s write a comedy.’”

Working on the film helped the pair survive that difficult stretch. “Our marriage was toward the end, and we didn’t want to completely admit it,” Stratten said. “But writing this movie, we were making each other laugh. It really got us through that time.” The two divorced in 2001 but remain close friends.

Growing up in New York in the 1940s, the son of immigrant parents from Austria and Serbia, Bogdanovich recognized early that movies had a special ability to help people transcend their everyday troubles. Throughout his childhood, he would see up to 400 movies a year, studiously recording his opinions of each one on a note card. He began his career programming films for the Museum of Modern Art and writing about movies for Esquire before moving to Los Angeles in the late 1960s and breaking into the business.

As he sees it, James Cameron’s 1997 “Titanic” marked a critical turning point. “Moviemaking is out of control thanks to Jim Cameron,” he said. “Everybody was saying, ‘My God, he’s going to spend $150 million! This movie is going to flop! Is he out of his mind?’ Then the picture was a huge hit, and everyone said, ‘That’s the solution: Spend $150 million.’” He sighs. “It’s become so boring.”

Although “She’s Funny That Way” is Bogdanovich’s first feature film since the 2001 period drama “The Cat’s Meow,” he is quick to point out that he has hardly been idle. He has published two well-regarded books, “Who the Devil Made It” and “Who the Hell’s In It,” collecting his conversations with great filmmakers and actors of the past. He also found a surprising measure of fame in front of the camera as Dr. Elliot Kupferberg on “The Sopranos.” He directed a number of TV movies and a four-hour documentary about Tom Petty.

Still, there’s no question that film remains Bogdanovich’s first love. He has a number of movies he’s hoping to make, including a comedy about an aging filmmaker called “Wait for Me” that he began writing shortly after Dorothy Stratten’s death. “I really need to make that picture,” he said. “I think it’s the best thing I ever wrote.”

Over the years, Bogdanovich has experienced both soaring success and crushing failure. It’s safe to say he preferred the former. But what really matters most in the end, he says, is simply trying to connect with that moviegoer sitting out there in the dark.

“My mother used to say to me, ‘If you have a thousand people watching your movie and one of them understands what you’re trying to do, you’re lucky,’” he said. “That sounds almost pretentious, but I know what she meant.”