~ by bill teck ~

"Cut....We don't say print anymore do we?" asks Peter Bogdanovich with a small, wry smile. We were in an improbably tiny, and appropriately hot apartment in Hells Kitchen in the middle of a New York City summer. It was 2013. Bogdanovich was shooting his comedy, She’s Funny that Way, which was then titled Squirrels to The Nuts. That original title was borrowed from Lubitsch. Borrowed, not stolen, although that would be okay too. As the punchline to a story Bogdanovich is fond of telling goes, filmmaking at its best involves a ‘Touch of Larceny’, according to Leo McCary, and so here The Lubitsch Touch doubles as a Bogdanovich Touch, no great larceny really, the picture is all Bogdanovich - written by Boggy and his ex-wife, (and good friend) Louise Stratten.

“’Keep it’, is one I’ve heard people say,” pipes up a voice from the crew.

"Nobody says ‘check the gate’," offers Peter.

We're in this small apt for no other reason than he kind of hates sets – he says there’s something about being in the real place. If you've ever seen the ‘behind the scenes’ photos from Mask you can see that in the heartbreaking scene where Cher (as Rusty Dennis) finds that her son Rocky (Eric Stolz) has died in his sleep, the windows are open and the whole crew is packed into that little bedroom, in a real house, huddled behind PB and the camera.

“There's something about the real location - something that helps the actors somehow - grounds them,” he says.

Debbie Mazar certainly looks grounded and ready. She plays a madam and she's delivering her lines beautifully, acting as if she's on the phone with a client. Pete's sitting on the sofa in the apt set next to his Assistant Director.

“Are you shooting on film Peter?”, asks Debbie.

“No”, he answers, while conferring with his AD.

“Does anyone?” Debbie asks.

“A few people do, ” Peter offers.

"We don't say any of that stuff – ‘print’, ‘check the gate’, etc.,” comes another voice in the crew, who are continuing to dive into that conversation.

"We say ‘circle it’," says his very pregnant AD, "or ‘turn it around’".

“You're fast,” Mazar says. Peter, ever self deprecating, quickly pitches it back - "You're fast, Debbie."

Aware people see him as a legend, but with no time for nostalgia – PB is a thoroughly modern cat, as at home on digital as he will be on whatever is destined to succeed it. Despite what you might think about Pete being some kind of champion of retro, he simply wants what's best. In art, and in life. Like his pal Frank Sinatra sang, he wants the good life.

So emails and digital filmmaking and blogging sit next to Mozart and Renoir and silent films with no quarrels. Keep what's good, leave what's bad, “Two Shots of Happy, One Shot of Sad” - as Nancy Sinatra and Bono sang in the latter’s great song about Peter’s friend Frank. A song that could just as easily apply to PB.

Walked together down a dead end street
We were mixing the bitter with the sweet
Don't try to figure out what we might have had
Just two shots of happy, one shot of sad

I'm just a singer, some say a sinner
Rolling the dice, not always a winner
You say I've been lucky, well hell I've made my own
Not part of the crowd, but not feeling alone

Under pressure, but not bent out of shape
Surrounded, we always found an escape
Drove me to drink, but hey that's not all bad
Two shots of happy, one shot of sad

A few more scenes and Debbie is wrapped for the picture. She smiles at Peter.

“I love working with you.”

“Well, I love working with you,” smiles Peter back.

One of the younger people on the set approaches Bogdanovich, sweetly and with a great deal of respect. "You can still say ‘print’, Peter," she says.

This is a portrait of Bogdanovich, but it’s also about dealing with the rubbed off stardust that comes from an affiliation with a guy like that. As Jeff Bridges says in my documentary about Bogdanovich, One Day Since Yesterday, "Peter’s got the real magic: water into wine, lead into gold… you know... magic."

That’ll come up again at the end of this piece but a daily occurrence might be something like this: You step out and run into a relative of Marion Davies, and then down the street, a few feet later, Stela Adler’s granddaughter.

In fact, since the moment I started working on a documentary about what is arguably Peter’s best film, They All Laughed, it’s as if I step from one gorgeous, supernatural connection after another. A mind-blowingly enormous tapestry, where if you pull one thread all of the others move, which would be spooky if it weren't so romantic.

In the process of making that doc, which i worked on with my friends Victor, Fernando and Ina, I realized soon that we were being allowed to spend some time in Peter’s world – a world of sweet idealism and promise. And dignity. And fate.

Pete's day to day life is right out of a movie script, or a novel. But if it were a novel, there would be no tell-alls or paybacks, just sweet badinage – lighthearted and fun. Stories about people and relationships told in a way that is generous and forgiving to all and that brings to mind Nietzsche’s observation, “Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes.” But he probably doesn’t see it that way. His life’s credo is probably best summed up in the way he talked about the characters from They All Laughed, in his book The Killing of The Unicorn:

“If They All Laughed was going to be the way I wanted it to be, its characters would behave with politeness and good humor, there would be grace in their sadness, and stoicism in their dealings with life. Yet there would be a hope to better their own destinies. Against all odds, they would keep trying. And there would be little time for envy, jealousy or hate.”

It was fitting that his return to a movie set was timed to a moment when Boggy was being rediscovered. The blogosphere was filled with new appreciations of his work: tumblrs full of gifs singing praises, even of Nickelodeon (now in its intended B&W) and At Long Last Love (surprisingly appreciated by a new generation). This master was just coming out of exile - even as he was exalted – and just as his late 70’s work found a new appreciation. With the death of cinema around us and cinephilia in the full bore of its birth (as pronounced by Bogdanovich’s sometime colleague, oftentimes champion, Jonathan Rosenbaum in his The Death of Cinema and the Birth of Cinephilia) his oeuvre seemed more perfect than ever, because now, thanks to everything, all cinema was postmodern.

And Peter’s films then, more than any, seemed to link the past to the present - embracing older forms - to comment on present day mores more so than perhaps any other director in history. Yet he reversed course in the 80s/90s and began to incorporate the old masters’ styles into his own, to comment on his life within the bounds of the ‘For Hire’ – studio films he was working on, and also to comment on his past films, just as Ford/Hawks/Welles/ had before him. If you want to know the story of Peter’s life, just look at his pictures.

I’ve read the question raised about Bruce Springsteen, with whom Peter is often associated (Bruce’s music can be heard in Mask, Texasville, Hustle) “Is he the first of the new rock stars or the last of the old rock stars?” He’s both of course, reinventing history – while honoring it – playing in a traditional form – but making something new in the process because his forward looking work was so intellectually and stylistically informed by the past – and in that same way PB is both the first postmodern director, and the last of the classicists.

Peter has always been very fond of giving credit where due – even at the height of his being hailed and wunderkind, he was quick to defer. It would have been easy to not champion the accomplishments of years past at a time, the wildly forward-looking 70s, that was obsessed with moving toward the future, but Peter always went out of his way to do it. As Andy Sarris said to me "In a strange away, he was very humble," regarding the way Peter would write and talk about the great directors all the time. I'm sure he didn't set out planning to be the one guy that would champion the greats of the past, embody them, and also make films too. I’m sure he thought it would be great if someone else were around to pick up the torch and help out - but at the time there were none with his gravitas. He had to be the one to stand up for them.

Although, again, like Bruce, his genre homages crease the fringes. Even for a guy as un-rock and roll as Boggy, he pushed the boundaries with acting, intent and vision, while his camera style - in much the way the French New Wave did it - made you appreciate the art of what had been done before merely by invoking the past’s spirit with new content and new context.

Making the documentary on Peter was a lesson in purity and the beauty of the formal.

"Peter, do you have any notes for me?"

"I'm really flattered, Bill. Thank you for everything."

“PB please, some notes.”

“It's just lovely, what you've done.”

“Peter, please it would be great if you'd just throw me a note.”

“Well you know what Hitchcock used to say to me, 'Clarify , Clarify, Clarify'.”

And so (finally) there came a note - channeled from Alfred Hitchcock. To say I was in heaven is an understatement. On the rare occasion where he’d make a suggestion, the direction was so gentle. It was like a soft song.

As Cybill Shepherd said in one of our interviews, “Peter’s an old world European gentleman.” And his notes were the polite observations of an auteurist in that vein. “That one sequence drags for a second, I'd come in about 2 feet earlier.”

PB just gave me a note regarding feet of film.

I’d shot on film before. An indie I directed in the 90’s, full of homages to The Last Picture Show and They All Laughed but through the lens of my Cuban family in Miami. And naturally, part of my journey was to repeat Peter’s obsessions and compulsions - of course it's never gotten a proper release. I wanted to own it, release it myself, like Peter.

What can I tell you? Peter B. was the one of the true masters and the first of the moderns. He was and is at the vanishing point of cinema just as They All Laughed encompasses everything we know of the past of cinema and everything we know at the present and its future. What did time mean, when you were searching for something perfect?

I labored over the doc for years, just as Peter has over his films, but I'd have it no other way. Inserting a few seconds into They All Laughed, several minutes into Texasville, a few more minutes into The Thing Called Love, “Why? Why shave 10 secs off a scene 30 years later?” I asked him once.

"I was talking to Beryl Graves, Robert's widow, and she said, ‘taking a second or a beat out of a movie can make all the difference, is that right Peter?’
'Yes, it's like a song, Beryl.'
And she looked at me and said, ‘Sounds more a like a poem to me.’”

After meeting PB, after I'd begun work on the picture, filming the first interview (Ben Gazzara - on a date he suggested that wound up being what would have been Dorothy Stratten's 50th birthday), after traveling to interview some bloggers and journalists, I visited Peter and he indulged my long interview and we had a nice meal afterwards.

Over dinner I told him my story, my own fall from grace, which, while not as far, or as dramatic, made up for it in its quickness.

After pouring through the pieces of my personal tragedy with him that night - after having visited The Lilly Library at the University of Indiana (where a collection of Peter’s personal papers and effects are stored) I began to feel like an archeologist of the heart. And there, finally, like an anthropologist gazing at the skull of an early hominid, I saw myself. Encrypted and fossilized in paper and photography and film, was a mirror of my own story. I had the same ‘cash available, accounts receivable’ notes scribbled on the back of envelopes, the same heartfelt letters, the same promises and their failures to materialize. I'd kept the same things - in my own life. Every nuance. Every note. Every sweet thing.

As he listened to my tale, his eyes welled up with emotion, not in relief that he'd entrusted his story to another person who understood loss and pain, but simply because Peter embodies a great, gorgeous humanity and generosity of spirit. It is one of the main qualities that informs all of his work.

That night, after we finished our meal, I pulled over to drop him off and as he turned to get out of the car, he paused and shot me a look over his shoulder. "Well, I wouldn't bet against us Billy. I think we're gonna do alright." And he smiled. Then he said, “Groucho Marx exit!”, as he rocked himself out of my small and comfortable rent-a-car.

It's Macy's at midnight. This weeks shoots are mostly in the middle of the night. The store is closed of course, except for the movie being shot overnight.

Colleen Camp is here, and she and Peter are laughing and talking like it’s 1980. She has the same wild and jazzily uncorked energy she had on They All Laughed. She's big, she's monopolizing, and she's a living doll. She and PB are laughing and reminiscing about Oscar night 1981 - some inappropriate thing PB may have said to one of the Oscar winners - they are sharing stuff only the two of them seem to know in full detail - it's pure mischief. Co-conspirators to be sure, a movie necessity recommended by none other than Jean Renoir. And he is flanked by his soldiers, never far from him on the set are his daughter Antonia who’s an Executive Producer on the movie, and the brilliant Bernice Miller, his assistant at that time, always sharp and protecting Peter’s back.

“Rolling,” says Marlela Comitni, the First Assistant Director.

“Hold it a second,” says Pete.

And he walks over and fixes Colleen’s shirt. Then he goes back to his chair.

"Take it from the same place C.C.," Boggy yells, just before her scene starts with Owen Wilson, Jennifer Aniston and Imogen Poots.

Yaron Orbach (the Director of Photography) asks, "One more look?”

"One more look? How ‘bout two?" says Bogdanovich playfully - and he walks off to deliver some direction to Owen Wilson and have a chat. It may be 12:00 a.m., and they may be just starting the day's work but everyone is clearly very excited to be there.

The next night that June, it was a midnight shoot in front of the Intercontinental Barclay Hotel. Peter’s sitting outside watching his monitor - a pan, a simple pan with an ever so slight dolly-in is his tool this time - and the blocking and rehearsing of actors. What would take most directors quite a few cuts, he does simply with what used to be called a Oner – a long take with intricate blocking. A quick way to glide through a scene without multiple takes. But it takes a master to pull it off. Steven Spielberg is another modern director that uses them too, but Peter's technique may be even more invisible, calling no attention to itself, directing us only to the action. He'll watch the camera move, then he's off to see the actors and give an adjustment or two. It’s easy not to notice how much blocking there is in a PB movie, how few cuts, but watching something like that unfold in person – that’s pretty special. He's able to get the actors out the door, into a cab, and capture the sad reaction of the romantic lead left behind as the cab door closes - all in one shot.

"If I can do it in one take there's no reason to cut. Really it’s the scene that dictates whether you need to cut or not,” he tells me, and it's true. At Macy's there were a hundred cuts. He was shooting it much the way They All Laughed begins, with short, quick cuts that create a ballet of movement - pure kaleidoscopic cinema.

I asked him why he varied his approach and in explaining it, he's quick to be humble about it. "Well, it's a whole store. How do you cover it? It’s fluid. You need the action. And then you need his reaction. And you need hers."

But that's not the only reason he's doing it (he can’t reveal all his tricks) he's doing it for energy, action, dance. He's doing it because for all its drama, Bogdanovich's life is a musical. It's got to be.

“How much do you and your DP talk about it?” I ask him.

“We may have talked about it when we scouted it. He looks for places to shoot it and ways we can do it all in one take.”

The camera dollies in on Will Forte's handsome, vulnerable face. He's a very funny actor, but in this picture, he’s playing it pretty straight. There’s a sweetness to him. It's real and Peter’s captured some tender New York heartbreak as the camera moves in to capture his expression as the cab pulls away.

PB has been quick to point out that he has never been a critic. He’s been, as he put it, a popularizer of things he’s enjoyed - directors, films, music, etc. I prefer to think of PB with the term ‘Enthusiast’. Of music he loves (Cole Porter, Johnny Cash, Earl Poole Ball) of women he loves, of friends… He's got a grand big heart and he's made a perfect film in They All Laughed, which is a film of enthusiasms, with no quarter given to anyone who does not cherish those enthusiasms - These are my friends! I love film! Isn't this wonderful? And even when it's shitty, ain't life grand?!

When I arrived in California to interview Louise Stratten, I booked a room at the Hollywood Sunset Tower. Naturally, it wound up being the hotel where PB had lived with Cybill, for a few years, before they bought their mansion Copa de Oro. By then I was used to the coincidences. And of course, through coincidence, I wound up staying on the same floor they’d lived on. I was having kind of a crisis of faith when I saw on the hotel library bookshelf, PB’s 1999 book, Movie of the Week. I took it back to my room and opened it to a random page. The movie being recommended that week was John Ford’s The Quiet Man, but what struck me was that I had opened the book to the recommended movie for that day’s date, Saint Patrick’s Day. I guess the sign was, ‘The time is now’. Stick to the plan and move forward.

Of course when Louise came in for the interview later in the day, she told me that she'd just run into Jason Ritter on the street, just the way John walks into little Jason Ritter’s pram as it’s being pushed by his mom Nancy Ritter in They All Laughed. Another coincidence.

The next morning, my colleagues and I did Frank Marshall’s interview in the only office at Kennedy/Marshall that was empty. Of course, a huge portrait of Orson Welles was hanging on one of the walls. “Those of us who care – are trying to get the rights to complete The Other Side of The Wind…” said Frank nodding to the photo of Welles. Well, of course, there’s a Welles photo watching over the interview. Like the Unicorn Tapestries, which wound up on exhibition at the Cloisters coincidentally with PB’s New York location filming of She’s Funny That Way/Squirrels to the Nuts. Just another lovely thing in the stars.

The Tapestries inspire the title of PB’s 1984 book about the tragic murder of Dorothy Stratten - The Killing of the Unicorn - the event that marked the beginning of a horrific downward spiral in his life. They’d not been displayed since the 1980s, and Peter hadn’t shot a movie in NYC since They All Laughed. Of course the tapestries wound up on display concurrently to him shooting the picture. Of course that’s how this works. We’d begun shooting on Stratten’s birthday and got into the Venice Film Festival on Bogdanovich’s birthday. We received a letter from a woman named Angela there. The name of Audrey Hepburn’s character in They All Laughed. “ Angela”, as Ben Gazzara says in the movie, “Means Angel doesn’t it?” I know it’s reaching, but… what can tell you.

Bogdanvich and Louise Stratten wrote a new scene to be shot at the Tapestries exhibition, I suppose because the timing of it was so otherworldly, so spectral. I could explain what they represent - but maybe what the Tapestries depict is less important than what they embody. The interconnectedness of it all. The inseparability. Every thread wedded to every other. The fear was the lie. The Love – the Love is the truth that vanquishes all.

That summer you could feel how the heart that had traveled to the outermost reach of its coldest arc from the sun and been drawn back to Love’s warmth again.  And it returned on fire, re-entering our orbit to write in the sky – in all the great movies he's made since and all the dignified, high road moments where he refused to give in to boorishness, or being crass, and the way he still behaved like a character in one of his films.

Peter will forever be associated with his great friends and mentors Welles and Ford, and their oeuvres may be favorably compared, but for me it’s what I know about another of his mentors and friends, Howard Hawks, that most reminds of Peter. When I read Peter on Hawks, it occurs to me that the same could be written about Bogdanovich himself.

“Howard was always sharply, tastefully dressed; and could quietly rivet your attention talking about a great picture, a great sequence, a great moment. He was as understated in his speech as Hemingway’s dialog; he was his own greatest hero, and he played it better than his actors. Howard was cool, and quite the ladies man. Women really liked him”, and he wrote, “The good directors, it was said, were just like their movies, and certainly this was true of Hawks”. Or Peter.

And then it was fall, and I was again in New York.

Bogdanovich, Andrew Sarris and Eugene Archer had all been early champions of French Film Magazine, Cahiers du Cinéma where the dialog about Auteur theory first appeared and took hold. And Peter had written beautifully about his old pal Archer in his wonderful book on directors, Who The Devil Made It.

When I visited New York on a cool fall morning for one of my last interviews – with Sarris & his wife Molly Haskell, Andy mentioned three separate times, to tell Peter how much he appreciated a kind gesture Peter had arranged for Eugene Archer. In fact, he mentioned it twice in the interview, once again as I was packing up my gear, and again when I was walking down the hall, sticking his head out the door to say, “Good luck with this film, Bill, and please don't forget to tell Peter about how much I wanted to thank him for what he did for Archer.”

Things always get hairy in the end - and so you tend to remember even the little things that eased the pain or provided even the briefest respite. And so later, back at my hotel, I called Peter to tell him about the interview and how well it had gone. I told him how sweet Mr. Sarris had been about everything, “And he asked me to tell you how grateful he was for what you'd done for Archer. In fact, he mentioned it four separate times. Oh, and he also wanted you to know that it hadn’t been him who’d written that headline in the Village Voice all those years ago, it had been an editor.” (Sarris’ review of PB’s At Long Last Love, had a less than generous headline.)

Boggy laughed louder and longer than I'd ever heard him laugh before.

"Oh my God, he's still thinking about that?! Jesus!, I can’t believe he’s still thinking about that! My God. Dear Andy."

It’s just past midnight on the streets of Manhattan.

The late George Morfogen was walking quickly down the street - into a hotel and following Imogen Poots - and it’s another ‘one take miracle’ of Bogdanovich ballet – seamless and graceful.

Then, getting a quick note from the director, Morfogen, his one-time best man and loyal pal - a lifetime of shared works joining them - and Peter huddle. Cuddling at his side is Louise Stratten - and on the other side, his daughter Antonia. Now it’s closer to 1:00 AM. Late in the city, or early i guess, depending on your perspective. Sure there are eight million people out there in the night, but tonight it’s from Antonia, George, Louise and Peter’s perspective – and the moon looks on approvingly from between the skyscrapers.

Moonlight spells will always be associated with Bogdanovich for me. In North Carolina, heading out to dinner one night, he bowed to the moon a few times. I followed his lead. It was a habit he picked up from Robert Graves I bet, and Graves’ writing on worship for the Goddess. But I could feel a bit of Peter’s own incantation too. He’s not some bearded Tolkien wizard with flowing robe and staff – he’s just a dapper filmmaker, but he’s a bit of a conjurer nevertheless.

Not the kind who casts spells. More the kind whose very presence involves magic. This part will be in the present tense. Because, as Peter would say, ‘it’s cosmic’. Pete is art and wit, class and grace. A bit of Welles, a dash of Cole Porter and a pinch of Mandrake.  A vision, a song, and a wish. To me, he is simply Peter Bogdanovich - my favorite director.  A movie director. The movie director.