Peter Bogdanovich: Interviews

Peter Bogdanovich

Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin / 1968

From The Director’s Event: Interviews with Five American Film-makers (New York: Signet, 1972 [1969]). Reprinted by permission of the authors.

Eric Sherman and I interviewed Peter Bogdanovich at his home in Van Nuys, California, in November 1968, three months after the release of his first film Targets. Although we had never met him before, Peter was uncommonly generous, not only with his own time, but also with helping us to arrange interviews with other directors (Budd Boetticher, Samuel Fuller, Abraham Polonsky) that were included in our book The Director’s Event.

Those other directors were equally gracious toward us, but there was a difference with Peter. He was more of a peer, like a hip upperclassman or older sibling. Peter was much closer to us in age, his house was the kind of cluttered, family-friendly suburban domicile that we had grown up in, and, most important, he was an early adherent of the heady wave of 1960s auteurist cinephilia that had also captivated Eric and me. His MoMA monographs on Hawks and Hitchcock and his Esquire articles on such figures as John Ford and Jerry Lewis had been part of our education, and we eagerly solicited tips from Peter on films by lesser-known auteurs such as Joseph H. Lewis and André de Toth. He had seemingly seen everything, which in those pre-cable, pre-homevid days could be accomplished only by watching a lot of late-night commercial television and putting in time at New York’s museums and revival/repertory houses.

Peter was a wonderful storyteller, both in print and in conversation—articulate, humorous, with an encyclopedic memory of old movie dialogue and an ability to do spot-on imitations of everyone from Cary Grant to Orson Welles to Walter Brennan. Targets marked his first full-fledged opportunity to extend that storytelling flair to filmmaking and to combine it with the sophisticated sense of film history that he had already demonstrated as a critic and journalist.

—Martin Rubin

Peter Bogdanovich: I always considered myself a director who was making a living writing about pictures, not the other way around. In other words, I had always wanted to direct films, even when I didn’t know it. The writing was something I never really cared much about.

I was on the stage first. We’ve all sinned! I directed plays in New York. The first thing I did was The Big Knife by Clifford Odets. I directed and co-produced it off-Broadway in 1959-60. It was a successful production critically, but it didn’t last too long—a couple of months. I had never directed anything before that except a scene from The Big Knife for one of Stella Adler’s acting classes. From the time I was fifteen, I studied acting with Stella. I had also done some acting with the American and the New York Shakespeare Festivals.

Then I directed a season of summer theater in Phoenicia, New York, in 1961. I did four plays, among them Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, which was the best thing I ever did. I did Ten Little Indians a la Hawks or Welles—it was the fastest production you’ve ever seen. Every line overlapped with another. You know Agatha Christie—it was all exposition, dull as hell. The first act was forty-six pages, and it played in twenty-six minutes. The whole thing was just a set-up for a murder. I tried for a great effect in the last act. I killed every light in the theater, including the exit lights. It was absolutely black. The audience started to get screaming mad. Suddenly you heard this rustling noise on the stage, then a gunshot. Bang! You saw the actors for just one second, like a one-frame cut. It was very exciting.

In those years, I began to write a lot about movies. I wrote monographs for the Museum of Modern Art on Orson Welles in 1961, on Howard Hawks in 1962, and on Alfred Hitchcock in 1963. I was asked to do these because I had written some program notes for the New Yorker Theater [a New York movie house]. I helped Dan Talbot, the owner, program some films in the theater’s early months. That’s where I got to know who Hawks was. We booked a lot of pictures just so I could see them. In 1962, I started to write for Esquire. I did pieces on Jerry Lewis, Jimmy Stewart, John Ford, Humphrey Bogart, and others.

Q: Your film criticism is really different from most of that being written in this country. How did you develop your ideas? Was it through seeing films, or were there outside influences like Cahiers du Cinema and Andrew Sarris? Did you start out, like most of us, in the art-house cycle of Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa?

A: The main influences were Andrew Sarris and Eugene Archer. Archer was the four-string critic for the New York Times, and he was brilliant. He influenced a lot of Sarris’s opinions. He and Sarris opened my eyes to film. They got me to see films like Land of the Pharaohs [Howard Hawks, 1955] and Fort Apache [John Ford, 1948]. I was stupid about certain things, I didn’t like Psycho at the time. I thought it was brilliant but immoral, or something idiotic like that. I remember sitting over coffee one night, and they explained to me why Psycho was a great film. They had a big influence on me for about two years, opening things up. But I was ready for that, because I had already gone through my art-film cycle. I was past all that.

Truthfully, my best days as a film-goer were around the time I was ten. My taste was purest then. My favorite films were Red River [Hawks, 1948] and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon [Ford, 1949]. I saw the first about five times and the second about ten times. Then, as I grew older, I was influenced by critics, as we all are, and my taste went bad. I used to sit in the Thalia [a New York art-house] and look at all those boring foreign films. My taste was really formed when I booked all those films at the New Yorker. We had a series called The Forgotten Film, and in the first two weeks we had about ten Hawks pictures. That was a revelation to me. You see, I really always loved Hawks. When Rio Bravo came out, I loved it, but I didn’t know about Hawks. Then I said, "Wait a minute! He did Red River!" I put it all together. I had liked all his films, but I hadn’t known who he was.

I think too many critics write about a movie as though it exists alone in time. This is crazy. You have to take every movie not only in the perspective of the other films of that director, but also in the whole context of film history—which isn’t very long, so I don’t know why it isn’t done. The worst thing we have in film writing is a lack of film scholarship and the fact that the first thirty years are virtually lost.

A whole school of critics think they like movies, but they don’t. They think it’s all very nice to like films—within limits. You can’t have a passion for them, because after all, it’s still a bit juvenile to sit in a movie theater for six hours. Something’s not quite right about it. However, people who read books for hours are eggheads, geniuses. It’s really a kind of Victorian anti-movie theory.

After my off-Broadway production of Once in a Lifetime flopped in 1964, Frank Tashlin [the film director] came to see us. I was depressed. He said, What are you going to do now? I said, I don’t know. He said, What do you want to do? I said, I want to make pictures. He said, Then what are you doing in New York? If you want to make pictures, come to the West Coast. That’s where they’re made.

He planted the idea in my head. Three months later my wife, Polly, and I moved out here with the expressed purpose of continuing to write and hopefully to make a movie. It never occurred to me that I’d be directing a film in less than two years. To sum up, I always wanted to direct, but I must say that being a critic led me into it. My first job on any picture was a direct result of my having written, and that was with Roger Corman.

In 1965, I went to a screening of Bay of Angels. Sitting behind me were Roger Corman and a mutual acquaintance. He introduced me to Roger, who had heard of me through my Esquire articles. Roger called me a couple of days later and said, You’re a writer. Wouldn’t you like to write for pictures? Sure, I’d love to. He said, "I’m looking for something along the lines of Lawrence of Arabia or Bridge on the River Kwai. I said, Oh! Well, that’s not too difficult!" So Polly and I started to work on a story about World War II.

In January 1966 Roger called me again and said, "I’m going to start a picture called The Wild Angels. Would you like to work on it? I said, Sure. What do you want me to do? He said, I don’t know. Just be around." I asked him how long it would take. He said six weeks. So I went to work for Roger. The Wild Angels was quite an odyssey, it stretched out to twenty-two weeks.

First I had to find locations for the picture. Then, about ten days before the start of shooting, believe it or not, the script came in. I read it, and it was terrible. It had all these ridiculous sequences like: horse’s point of view, cut to frog, motorcycles, cut to frog’s point of view as the motorcycles go by. I said to Roger, This is a Disney picture! Roger said, I know. What am I going to do? I said, Why don’t you rewrite it? He said, Oh, no. I don’t have time. Jumping in, opportunistic bastard that I am, I said, I’ll do some work on it. He said, Well . . . O.K.

I rewrote about 80 per cent of the script, although a lot of the dialogue was changed on the set. The actors wouldn’t pay any attention to it. They each added about forty mans to every line. In a way that helped, because the actors had spent some time with the Hell’s Angels and knew their dialect. Afterwards, somebody called me up and said, Didn’t you work on the script for that picture? I said, Yes. How did you know? You see, I didn’t receive any official credit for the screenplay. He said, "Well, it has a line that’s right out of Rio Bravo! When Peter Fonda and the others go into a garage to get back The Loser’s stolen bike, he says, One of you guys here stole a bike. The other guy says, Nobody here stole nothin’. Fonda says, I’ll remember you said that." He didn’t say it quite as well as John Wayne