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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
On a Wednesday evening in late February, Room 1057 at the New York University film school was crammed with young directors who were awaiting the start of a workshop with the director Peter Bogdanovich. Bodies in black turtlenecks packed the aisles; among film students, the legend of Bogdanovich has a dark glamour. He is their Icarus.
Like the students, Bogdanovich began his career by immersing himself in the history of film. After cultivating John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles, he learned their craft so well that, starting with his classic meditation on small-town America, "The Last Picture Show," in 1971, he had three hits in eighteen months and became the most sought-after director in Hollywood.But his decline was as decisive as his rise.
"There is this aspect of 'Peter Bogdanovich died for our sins,' " says Quentin Tarantino, who let Bogdanovich stay at his guesthouse for a spell in 1999, just as Bogdanovich had put up Orson Welles in his Bel Air mansion for nearly two years in the seventies. "Peter was so famous that his fall was equally notorious. Even as a little kid, I knew that he'd had three flops in a row."
When at last Bogdanovich entered, the room fell silent. He looked around doubtfully, then placed a water bottle in a black mesh pouch on the table in front of him, like an assertion of principles. Professor Boris Frumin, a Russian filmmaker, began to ask questions in a melancholy tone: "You are started how?" "What for you makes difference, good script, no good?"
"I'd rather tell stories," Bogdanovich replied, sliding into an anecdote about John Ford's distaste for Bogdanovich's own exhaustive film-buff questions forty years ago. He mimicked Ford's bullyragging tones perfectly -- "Jaysus Christ, Peter! I mean, Jaysus!" -- then said "Hilarious story," as a prelude to a nifty impression of Howard Hawks's strangled drawl. But the laughter was faint: both Ford and Hawks died before many of the students were born.
Bogdanovich is sixty-two. He salts his conversation with such remarks as "Hitch once told me" and "As Sal Mineo said -- dear Sal . . .," and his appearance, too, has a whiff of the grainy newsreel, the top hat in mothballs. His face is long and smooth, with a pendulous lower lip and unblinking brown eyes that are magnified by oversized horn-rims. A blue neckerchief hides his softening throat. That evening, he wore a blue Brooks Brothers shirt with the cuffs unbuttoned (Audrey Hepburn told him that loose cuffs were more comfortable), and Mephisto sneakers that cost two hundred and fifty dollars (Sidney Poitier recommended the style).
As he took the measure of his audience, Bogdanovich spoke increasingly in his own voice -- which in recent years has begun to sound like Burt Lancaster's -- and began delivering what the students had come for: tips and insights. When you film in black-and-white, he said, use a red filter to sharpen the contrast; placing the camera above eye level makes actors look better; if you cut on a character's movement, the audience notices the cut less. The students' pens scratched like a chorus of crickets.
Bogdanovich was always a meticulous craftsman, superb at getting performances out of actors and at making viewers feel at ease. While Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola were producing personal, experimental films about the splintered culture of the seventies, films that hinged on freakouts and assassinations, Bogdanovich was making black-and-white elegies, such as "The Last Picture Show" and "Paper Moon," that were set well before the Vietnam War, and were directed as if it had never happened. His films transported audiences to a time before drugs, race riots, and polyester pants -- a time when you drove your jalopy with high hopes to the spring dance.
A young woman stood up to ask, "What impact did the success of 'The Last Picture Show' have on you?"
Bogdanovich tugged his ear and sighed. "I'm still getting over it," he said. "Success is much tougher than failure." There were disbelieving snorts from the students. "You can kind of cozy up to failure, you can say, 'No one understands me.' But you can't say that if you're a hit. Success in Hollywood inspires a terrifying mixture of sucking up and hating. The bitch goddess, they used to call it -- it throws people, and I'm certainly one of them."
As Bogdanovich's friend Robert Evans, the longtime Paramount producer, told me, "Success went straight to Peter's head. But it left his head and went to his feet pretty quick -- they were in cement." In a throaty whisper, Evans added, "It's a dry-ice town, baby. Colder than cold."
In recent years, Bogdanovich has emerged as America's favorite...
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