Peter Bogdanovich: Fool For Love

For the same $6,000 fee, Corman also asked Bogdanovich to direct a movie that restricted him to a $125,000 budget and the use of 18 minutes from a 1963 Boris Karloff-Jack Nicholson stinker, The Terror. Bogdanovich and Platt concocted a timely script about a washed-up horror movie bogeyman and a real-life monster, a Charles Whitman-ish psycho sniper. Platt discovered she was pregnant the day before the movie went into production, but alternately rewrote, hammered jerry-built sets, and calmed her mate's freshman movie panic. When Paramount released Targets, filmed in a rush in 1968, critics discovered "an original and brilliant melodrama."

Targets was the turning point for Bogdanovich, and he knew it. Years of interviewing Hollywood's quotable old lions had taught him how to turn up the jets for self-promotion. "A man, not a machine, makes a movie," he told an interviewer. "And that man is the director. There is one vision and that is his." The imperiousness worked. Robert Evans, high-rolling v.p. of production at Paramount-- who was also to champion Coppola and Polanski--signed Bogdanovich to a multi-picture contract in 1968. The following year, Jere Henshaw also proffered a nonexclusive multi-film deal at Warner Bros. Goodbye, Poverty Row.

But after the big Hollywood come-on, nothing happened for three years. Finally in 1971 the backers of Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces came to his rescue by offering him artistic carte blanche on The Last Picture Show, based on Larry McMurtry's coming-of-age novel about a group of high school seniors in a dying Texas town during the Korean War. Bogdanovich resonated to the period, and hired Platt, who had found the novel in the first place, to replicate it: "I saw the story as a Texas version of Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons, which was about the end of a way of life caused by the coming of the automobile," said Bogdanovich. "This was about the end of a way of life caused by the coming of television."

Despite nine months of preparation, once The Last Picture Show was underway Bogdanovich suffered "constant terror that I was screwing the film up, that I was winging it too much, that I should have planned more." In the end, he thought the tumult saved him "from becoming self-conscious." He had been rebuffed in his offer to James Stewart to play Sam the Lion, the movie's noble, grizzled conscience. He battled his leading boy, Timothy Bottoms, whom he called "a neurotic kid," accusing him of not learning his lines. (He had wanted John Ritter for the role and vowed never again to work with Bottoms.) And then, there was the ingenue. "I just never thought I could be good enough to get into the big time. But then, along came Peter," said Cybill Shepherd, whose gaze first beckoned to Bogdanovich from the cover of Glamour in a Van Nuys supermarket. When he signed Shepherd, a former Miss Teen-Age Memphis and $75-an-hour New York model, without a screen test--for $5,000--she had already turned down Pretty Maids All in a Row after sex kitten panderer Roger Vadim described a lengthy sex scene to her. On the set, Bogdanovich called her "Miss Shepherd"Von Stern-berg had addressed his great obsession as "Miss Dietrich" and in full view of the cast and crew, including Polly Platt, with whom by this time he had two toddlers, Bogdanovich and Shepherd fell, as he has put it, "overpoweringly" in love.

Critics embraced the brooding, laconic The Last Picture Show as a reassuring, Nixon-era antidote to the counter-cultural hooliganism of Easy Rider. "I have a perverse antagonism for the 'new' movie," said Bogdanovich, putting distance between himself and Dennis Hopper's maddeningly with-it The Last Movie, released the same year. "My films are not about cameras; they're about people." Frank talk, gloomy sex, and a sense of loss put over The Last Picture Show as a wised-up 70s picture, but its look and feel were cozily retro: a blend of vintage Ford, spiced with Sirk, cut with Kazan. It proved to be as much a watershed for new faces--Bottoms, Shepherd, Jeff Bridges, Randy Quaid--as a showcase for lived-in ones: Ellen Burstyn, Eileen Brennan, Cloris Leachman, and Ben Johnson (who won an Oscar for the role Stewart passed up). Called "the most impressive work by a young American director since Citizen Kane," and "a masterpiece," the movie won eight Oscar nominations.

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