Peter Bogdanovich, threshing machine

choose your own orson

My favorite story featuring these two guys is still this one: Orson Welles

Hour-plus interview this week with Bret Easton Ellis:
http://podcastone.com/pg/jsp/program/episode.jsp?programID=592&pid=1668379

the undercurrent of many interviews is the common ground between interviewer and interviewee

really not sure I want to listen to that, given the possible commonalities

it's a bright, guilty last picture show

anyone see Nickelodeon *in black and white*?? the 125 minute director's cut no less? it's on the DVD supposedly.

http://www.childstarlets.com/captures/videocaps/toneal/nickelodeon/tonickel04.jpg

I watched the first half-hour of They All Laughed the other night, and I didn't.

― Literal Facepalms (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, March 6, 2012 11:40 AM (six years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I rented this movie tonight and I was telling my friends that I remembered reading somewhere, could've been apocryphal, that this was an actual review of They All Laughed from 1981. but it was morbius 7 years ago lmao

Loved every minute of it.

yah i found that one quite affecting. some of the plots work better than others but the gazzara/hepburn material is just beautifully bittersweet. john ritter is also a treasure. saw it with bogdanovich q&a a few months ago which was very rough since he started out in tears (not only for stratten but for the other now-deceased cast members) and then was asked, by some ill-socialized person, "do you have any good stories about working with dorothy stratten??" yikes.

reviving cause i just saw WHAT'S UP, DOC? for the first time in a packed theater and was just absolutely tickled pink, even by the parts that go on just a bit too long. and i normally loathe this sort of setup! see Defend the Indefensible: films in which gorgeous, independent, "edgy" women have nothing better to do than break uptight whiny squares out of their bubbles but streisand sells it by giving the impression she'd be doing at least 3/4 of this stuff even if o'neal weren't there. supporting cast also kills it obv.

Very well. It's on my Netflix queue.

apparently my dear Dr C hasn't seen Bringing Up Baby yet

(y'know, the original)

There was a phone call to Bogdo on the set where he admitted to Hawks, "Howard, I know they're not Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant." HH: "You're damn right they're not!"

And then he sent Hawks some rehearsal footage, and Hawks advised him to tell Streisand and O'Neal to relax and not push for the laughs.

I'll check out What's Up Doc next weekend, Dr C.

Colleen Camp is the best. Hepburn & Gazzara are wonderful but I love Camp & Ritter together - her persistence and his precise, almost balletic clumsiness.

watched What's Up Doc for the first time (on a TV) a few weeks ago and found O'Neal stultifyingly blank, not even reaching uptight, and Streisand utterly insufferable as the MPDG desperately conscious of her camera angles... until they leave the hotel. That chase really plays, and would have been great in a full theatre.

yeah the film is better in the back half. p enjoyable imo.

Dr C, did you get the "love is never having to say you're sorry" joke at the end?

not at the time, sadly - i had remembered it as being from some 40s-era thing. at some point i knew it was delivered to o'neal in LOVE STORY (which i haven't seen) but that fact was not available to my brain as it would have been to, i imagine, nearly everyone who saw this at the time. a cute gag.

yes, in '72 it brought the house down

Love Laszlo Kovacs cinematography

Never in the history of art

haha i was just watching the weird-ass trailer for this today

apparently the first script had the guy being the weirdo? that makes no sense given the screwball precedents.

oh yeah, it actually started as... an Elliott Gould film.

Barbra's involvement with Doc happened because of her ex-husband, Elliott Gould. Bogdanovich recalled,“Elliott Gould was shooting a picture called A Glimpse of Tiger at Warners. He was having some problems, they had problems with Warner — they fired him and shut down the picture and decided to change the leading character from a man to a woman and cast Barbra in the part, his ex-wife, which is pretty weird." Bogdanovich and Streisand wanted to work together but could not decide on whether to make a drama or a comedy. Bogdanovich wanted to do a comedy and told a Warner Brothers executive he wanted the film to be "sort of like Bringing Up Baby, where the square professor, she's a crazy girl, maybe she could be a girl who knows a lot, been kicked out of a lot of colleges, so she knows a lot. You could steal that from Glimpse of Tiger. But other than that, there's nothing usable — I don't want to make that kind of movie. I want to do a flat-out screwball comedy like Bringing Up Baby."

http://barbra-archives.com/films/whats_up_doc_streisand.html

I have no idea what to to make of They All Laughed. For about forty minutes Ritter, Gazzara, Hepburn are chasing each other or being chased on the excellently photographed Manhattan streets, there's some kids, country music, Hepburn and Gazzara in a bookstore, John Ritter doing Peter Bogdanovich doing Ryan O'Neal doing Cary Grant, Dorothy Stratten awkwardly smiling in scenes. Some of Bogdanovich's dialogue is so far from glittering that I'm sad he thinks his script is Samuel Raphaelson material. It defines a mess, and I can understand why someone would hug it close based on what I've written.

so shapeless and unmoored

wiki entry for this is bizarre. I've never seen it, not sure I want to.

Stratten aside, the cast is game: Gazzara, Hepburn, especially John Ritter.

The identity of Hepburn's son was killing me until I looked it up and realized it was Glenn Scarpelli of One Day at a Time, one of the more obnoxious child actors of my childhood.

do you mean to say you never got a love on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuGBff9HJ1U

that's why everyone thought he was straight

jesus Glenn Scarpelli

TAL is a glorious & melancholy stoner movie. It’s on the same frequency as 70s Altman. I was really moved by it.

I read that as 70s Allmans

http://www.artnet.com/WebServices/images/ll1297142llgJJjR3CfDrCWBHBAD/julian-wasser-linda-and-paul-mccartney,-sara-and-bob-dylan,-cher-and-gregg-allman.jpg

They All Laughed, 1974

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GY0E9zvHw0

https://www.vulture.com/2019/03/peter-bogdanovich-in-conversation.html

You ended up living with Quentin Tarantino in the 2000s.
I was living in his guesthouse for about a year, maybe more. He was very nice. Very sweet. He invited me over and I said okay. I was having some problems. I didn’t have a house or something.

Did you watch a lot of movies with him? His taste is a bit out there.
Yes, he was a little odd. He wanted to look at a lot of movies, so I sat with him. He fell in love with a director named William Witney who made some Lone Ranger movies or something. Not my cup of tea, but I liked being with Quentin. He was fun. Loves They All Laughed. I sat next to him when he screened it in his projection room for a whole audience. He was quoting the lines before they would happen. Finally, I said, “Quentin, would you cut it out?” He knew every line in the picture. Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach love it too. They call me “Pop,” and I allow it.

https://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/vulture/2019/03/01/magazine/01-bogdanovich-4.w700.h467.2x.jpg

SO NOT GONNA HAPPEN

So who was the most difficult actor you’ve ever worked with?
Cher.

Tell me about your experience with her on Mask.
Well, she didn’t trust anybody, particularly men. She doesn’t like men. That’s why she’s named Cher: She dropped her father’s name. Sarkisian, it is. She can’t act. She won Best Actress at Cannes because I shot her very well.

And she can’t sustain a scene. She couldn’t do what Tatum [O’Neal] did in Paper Moon. She’d start off in the right direction, but she’d go off wrong somehow, very quickly. So I shot a lot of close-ups of her because she’s very good in close-ups. Her eyes have the sadness of the world. You get to know her, you find out it’s self-pity, but still, it translates well in movies. I shot more close-ups of her than I think in any picture I ever made.

She won Best Actress at Cannes because I shot her very well.

bogdanovich is so good that cher won best actress at the oscars because he shot her very well on an entirely different movie

I was having some problems. I didn’t have a house or something.

relatable

Well, she didn’t trust anybody, particularly men. She doesn’t like men. That’s why she’s named Cher

He may not do drugs, but Bogdo talks like he has a hole in his cerebellum.

I can't stop thinking about "He wanted to look at a lot of movies, so I sat with him." Such an odd way to describe watching movies with your friend.

or yr landlord

Bogdo talks like he has a hole in his cerebellum.

Too-tight ascot, methinks.

was it on this thread or elsewhere that someone amusingly speculated that bogdanovich consistently wears ascots because he lost a bet long ago?

https://imagesvc.meredithcorp.io/v3/mm/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpeopledotcom.files.wordpress.com%2F2016%2F09%2F1_23_89_750x1000.jpg&w=400&c=sc&poi=face&q=85

That PB Photo...

almost looks like Burt Lancaster

posthumously?

The strange world of a real Rain Man.