Initially, he worked as second unit director on Roger Corman’s Wild Angels (1966), before Corman allowed him to direct a Z-movie, Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968), hiding under the name Derek Thomas. After a stint as film critic for Esquire magazine, he moved in 1964 to Hollywood where, inspired by French critics such as François Truffaut, he hoped to turn to directing. Bogdanovich even had a leading role in Welles’s uncompleted The Other Side of the Wind (shot between 19), as an up-and-coming film director with a talent for mimicry. He also wrote books on Ford, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock and his friend Orson Welles, all of whose voices he could mimic brilliantly. In the early 60s, taking a lead from Henri Langlois’ eclectic programming at the Paris Cinémathèque, Bogdanovich showcased movies at the Museum of Modern Art, introducing audiences to neglected or forgotten American directors such as Allan Dwan, about whom he wrote a book, Allan Dwan: The Last Pioneer (1971). Although he both appeared in and directed a number of plays – including The Big Knife, Clifford Odets’s searing drama about Hollywood, in 1959 off-Broadway – Bogdanovich was always drawn to film, and began writing on the subject for various publications. After graduating from the Collegiate school, he studied acting at the Stella Adler Theatre Studio in the city. His mother, Herma (nee Robinson), came from a well-off Austrian Jewish family, and his father, Borislav Bogdanovich, was a Serbian Eastern Orthodox Christian painter and pianist. Photograph: Warner Bros/Sportsphoto/Allstarīogdanovich was born in Kingston, New York, after his parents fled from Europe and the Nazis, and grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. (In his documentary Directed By John Ford, 1971, revised in 2006, Bogdanovich disarmingly allowed himself to be put down by the great man.)īarbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal in What’s Up, Doc?, 1972, which was a massive box-office hit for Peter Bogdanovich. Both The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon lovingly evoke the spirit of John Ford, Howard Hawks, William Wellman and William Wyler and, despite their allusiveness, they still appeal to the non-film buff, while What’s Up, Doc?, graced by Ryan O’Neal and Barbra Streisand, is a homage to the screwball comedies of the 30s. His two best films were shot in black and white, a practice that had already become rare a decade before. In fact, the majority of his films are exercises in style – attempts to recreate the Hollywood past.

He bore it all with equanimity (externally, at least), making cameo appearances in friends’ films and TV shows – nicely dry in the role of Dr Elliot Kupferberg, Tony Soprano’s therapist’s therapist in the hit series The Sopranos (2000-07) – cropping up regularly on documentaries, commenting wittily on film directors and directing films himself from time to time, though he never returned to the glory days.īogdanovich belonged to the generation of directors who emerged in the 70s, brought up on the movies produced during the golden age of the major studios.

Bogdanovic the trojka