Peter Bogdanovich: Fool For Love

"I was never particularly humble," he said when his career appeared to be slipping precipitously. Despite the town's growing suspicions that the boy wonder was a flash in the pan, Bogdanovich declined The Day of the Locust, The Last Tycoon, and Dino De Laurentiis's million dollar inducement to direct Hurricane. Even Warren Beatty picked his brains about Heaven Can Wait, then decided to take the reins himself. "I had to make a choice in my life," Bogdanovich said, "whether I was to continue with the large budget Hollywood movie or go back to recapture an integrity which I felt was in danger of being lost." Integrity, as it turned out, meant Saint Jack, a (1979) movie version of Paul Theroux's novel about an expatriate pimp in Singapore, made on $1.5 million for Roger Corman. Bogdanovich edited the left-field, morally ambiguous movie at home. Critics liked it better than audiences did, perhaps because, as one writer put it, Bogdanovich is better at describing emotions than feeling them.

For the first time since Daisy Miller, Bogdanovich entertained the idea of starring in one of his own movies, They All Laughed. Among the female cast were not only Colleen Camp and Patti Hansen, former Bogdanovich conquests, but also Dorothy Stratten, a Playboy "Playmate of the Year" and budding actress whom he had met at Hugh Hefner's home. "I could hardly believe that she really existed," Bogdanovich said of the luminously beautiful Stratten, who at 20 was a badly-married ex-welfare kid and escapee from an unhappy home. Bogdanovich again refrained from stepping in front of his own camera (he cast John Ritter as his alter ego), but long before the filming finished, he was in deep with Stratten.

What happened on this film made Daisy Miller look successful. First, the film's financiers bailed out; then, in a tragedy that has become the basis for several books and films, Stratten was raped and shot point-blank by her jealous husband, who then committed suicide. The two experiences shattered Bogdanovich, who went bankrupt to reclaim the $8.6 million picture (he once called it his "salvation," his "record of Dorothy"), recutting it three times at his own expense and distributing it himself, unsuccessfully. He announced that he would move to Texas to begin again, a move he evidently reconsidered.

Suddenly, instead of producers hiring Bogdanovich to direct pictures, they were hiring actors to piny him. In 1981, Bogdanovich's character (veiled, but unmistakable) figured in a TV movie, "Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story," in which Jamie Lee Curtis played Dorothy Stratten. Three years later, Mariel Hemingway and Roger Rees played Stratten and a character based on Bogdanovich in Bob Fosse's Star 80. Perhaps as much out of self-defense as grief, the director published The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten 1960-1980, in 1984. But the contents of that book were more personally damning than the movies that had preceded it. "I'm a widower," he told a People reporter (who described his grief as "bordering on melodrama"). "I don't know if I can ever love as totally and completely as I loved Dorothy."

The mining of the Bogdanovich legend continued. 1984 brought Irreconcilable Differences, in which Ryan O'Neal and Shelley Long starred as the nice young married moviemakers who turn into Hollywood shitheels, with Sharon Stone as the director's utterly inept girlfriend-leading lady. Strangers Kiss (1984), co-written, produced, and starring Blaine Novak, Bogdanovich's production associate and an actor in They All Laughed, detailed the complications of a doomed, on-the-set love affair.

Mask (1985), starring Cher as a biker mom and Eric Stoltz as her congenitally disfigured son, at first appeared to be the stuff of a career rally. Then in-fighting broke out. The director launched an $11 million suit charging Universal and producer Martin Starger with cutting eight minutes from the movie and substituting "inappropriate" Bob Seger songs in place of a Bruce Springsteen soundtrack. Aside from financial damages, he also wanted the credit "Peter Bogdanovich's Mask" removed from the film and its advertising. Trade papers printed a letter in support of Bogdanovich from such heavy-hitters as Woody Allen, John Huston, Billy Wilder, and Fred Zinnemann. But the industry's Professional Standards Committee advised him to drop it, and when the movie opened to hearty reviews and business, he wound up looking more bratty than principled.

Whatever cachet Mask might have lent him was undercut by reports in The Los Angeles Times that his salary from Mask had gone directly to the bank, to which he then owed $2.5 million and which held a lien on the rights to They All Laughed and his Stratten book. The same story reported that he owed an additional $12,000 to American Express and to more than one hundred creditors. Later, Cher, whose performance in Mask won her 1985's best actress award at the Cannes film festival (she tied with Norma Aleandro for The Official Story), vowed never to work with Bogdanovich again: "It is no secret that we didn't get on. When he had his ideas and I had mine, I just went my own way."

After the murder of Stratten and the Mask flap, Bogdanovich confessed that he "didn't quite have the same feeling about [movies] anymore. When I work now, it's got to be something that I really care about." His next film, Illegally Yours, a Dino De Laurentiis production that went direct to video in 1988, was defensible only as an act of severe financial woe. It is unwatchable except for the perverse spectacle of Rob Lowe (in Bogdanovich-like glasses) imitating John Ritter imitating Ryan O'Neal imitating Cary Grant. The movie does have a place, though, in its director's personal story: it contains the debut of one "L.B. Stratten" (described as "very tall" by one reviewer) who was the latest leading lady to star on and offscreen with Bogdanovich--and was also the 20-year-old sister Louise of the late Dorothy Stratten.

Last year, the 49-year-old director married Stratten. "I feel he wants her because of a guilt trip," said Stratten's mother, Nelly, who, in 1985, launched a $5 million slander suit (later retracted) against Hugh Hefner for making allegations about Bogdanovich's "seduction" of Louise and "pathological replacement of Dorothy." Bogdanovich has reportedly lavished on Louise private tap-dancing lessons, private schools, corrective plastic surgery--including a new nose, that, according to a friend, looks "more like Dorothy's." Is Bogdanovich mixing his cinematic metaphors--a bit of James Mason's nymphet-obsessed character in Lolita here, a bit of James Stewart in Vertigo there? "I told Peter long ago, 'You should marry Louise,' "Polly Platt has said in the couple's defense. "Who can whisper when there's a ring on your finger?"

Bogdanovich appeared to come full circle when he debuted two years ago as resident film historian on "CBS This Morning," touting the vintage James Stewart, Cary Grant, and Marlene Dietrich flicks now available on video. (He exited the show last year.) Plus ca change. In a career remarkable for so little distinction between fact and fancy, it seems fitting that Bogdanovich did not return to Texas to begin again, but to film Texasville, the $ 18 million follow-up to The Last Picture Show due out this month. Based on Larry McMurtry's novel (which is dedicated to Cybill Shepherd), the project is surely more than a decade too late and as such, the least clamored-for sequel since The Two Jakes. Bogdanovich became involved in Texasville three years ago when Dino De Laurentiis bought the screen rights to the book for $750,000. When De Laurentiis went under, Columbia, which released the original film, was among the studios that passed on the project that Bogdanovich calls "an opportunity to go back in time and recapture something that's important in your career and in your life." Eventually Nelson Entertainment agreed to assume the financial risk, which is considerable, given that no star in the movie--Cybill Shepherd, Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms, Eileen Brennan, Cloris Leachman, Randy Quaid, all back from the original film--is a guaranteed box-office draw.

Texasville picks up 30-odd years after the conclusion of The Last Picture Show and finds our stolid Texans reeling from a busted oil economy, wrong-headed love affairs, and male pattern baldness. What drove Bogdanovich back to the well? "I just have to keep making pictures," says the director, who can relate to McMurtry's "comic look at going broke" more than most. But why did the actors--some of whom ended the earlier movie liking neither Bogdanovich nor each other--agree to go back with him? The producers paid Jeff Bridges, an Oscar nominee for the 1971 film and today one of the movies' most consistently watchable, not-quite-front-rank stars, $1.75 million. Timothy Bottoms, with whom Bogdanovich swore never to work again and who called making the original "Hollywood at its worst," perhaps found as much inducement in his acting fee as in Nelson Entertainment's funding of his behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of both films. Cybill Shepherd, still a close friend of Bogdanovich's and of writer McMurtry's, agreed to a salary cut to do the show: $1.5 million. Sources say that Bogdanovich played the despot on the set. But at least this time, the five principal actors who had to deal with him each owns a cut of the film.

Could anyone have actually been motivated by loyalty toward Bogdanovich? "At last, he has started to relate to something besides movies," offers Polly Platt, now an executive at James L. Brooks's Gracie Films. "People--real human beings versus those on celluloid--have an equal opportunity with him now." Some say that the private Peter Bogdanovich has put his house in order. He is often spotted in the company of his wife and daughters, who are contemporaries, as when he sat stoically through a recent Madonna concert. He is on good terms with many of the women from his past. But if Texasville is Bogdanovich's seventh flop, the man who once professed not to understand how anyone can do anything else but make movies may have to learn.

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Stephen Rebello is the author of Alfred Hitchcock and The Making of Psycho. He has written numerous cover stories for Movieline, including the June feature on Sean Young.

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