Peter Bogdanovich, threshing machine

who is PG?

Pelham Grenville?

Sorry, meant P Bog

"wait! i'll tell you what he talked about: he talked about bogdanovich!"

Yes! Also,

You know when vaudeville died, and all the great vaudeville performers - the comics, the singers - were thrown out of work. They couldn't make the move to radio or film. They used to huddle around these barrels in Times Square, where they made fires, and ate roasted potatoes off sticks. Then television arrived, and the TV producers came looking for these guys to use them in their variety shows. One of them was the biggest star of vaudeville. While he was on top, he treated everybody like shit. So when the bad times came, they wouldn't share their fires with him, or their food. But gradually they started to feel sorry for him. Years passed. They all forgave him. Now, the Ed Sullivan Show is going to do the best of vaudeville, at the Palace Theater. This guy gets a plum part. He tells all his friends, who didn't get chosen, "Guys, I just got lucky. I'll never forget you. You can't imagine what you mean to me; you've saved my life; here are some tickets, front row; come backstage afterwards; we'll go out for drinks, celebrate. I've learned my lesson." The show goes on, this guy is sensational, he's going to be a big TV star now. All his friends come backstage, knock on the door. He comes out in a velvet robe, says, "Fellas, I've got that old shitty feeling coming over me again." And he slams the door in their faces. That's Peter."

Just been reading My Lunches With Orson - surprised at how mean and nasty OW is abt PG

― Foster Twelvetrees (Ward Fowler), Sunday, August 14, 2016 8:49 PM (Yesterday)

yeah i read it a few months ago and that struck me as well -- welles generally seems ill-tempered and spiteful in these interviews in a way he doesn't in "this is orson welles." some of that may be the influence of henry jaglom who often seems to be egging him on. i did find myself wondering if welles really was aware he was being recorded.

welles also vetted the PB book -- must've quoted this twice before on ilx now cuz hilar but cf the part where bogdanovich asks him to name some directors he doesn't like and the response is redacted at the request of a letter PB received from welles after reading the proofs that ends "always remember your heart is god's little garden, yours truly, louisa may alcott"

(plus the PB book is all about doggedly scraping for technical details about like the camera angles in the trial while welles tries to change the subject; HJ wants gossip.)

none of this is changing my illl-researched intuition that PB was always something of a fool and that OW went from being amused and flattered at early contact to irritably bored and a bit dismayed that this was the actual true lasting shape of his fandom

(also i continue to heart raising kane, which is i think really p good on the collective nature of film-making: one day someone shd make a case for PB's failure as a director being fully down to the fact that he actually entirely believed in an undiluted version of the solo genius form of the auteur theory lol) (welles came up in theatre and very obviously knew different: hence brining the mercury troupe with him…)

In the Lunches book, Welles grouches about Raising Kane - specifically that it was used as a foreword to a print edition of the screenplay - but admits that Kael is one of the few film critics (that he's read) who pays any attention to acting and performance. He also swats away Graham Greene's film crit pretty convincingly.

Def feels like Welles is partly trolling Jaglom - or the absent P Bog - when he slags off The Searchers, Hawks, Powell/Pressburger, Bogart and other sacred cows.

and he hates Rear Window!

All I can pejoratively about Raising Kane is that Kael is a shitty reporter and the narrative is rather misshapen. Her critique of the movie's strengths and weaknesses is spot on.

xxp Most definitely, I don't think I'd take any of Welles's supposed criticisms in that book to heart. If anything, it's an exercise in how well he could dish out gossip and practice his shade-throwing for someone who's enamored with it.

It's part of why I don't buy the argument that Welles didn't know Jaglom was recording. He either knew, or he was getting older and felt that his performances over the dinner table were good fun.

I know of Bogdanovich's personality mostly through his Orson Welles obsession but I'd imagine conversing with him at length would be excruciating

I love how Welles was as bemused/frightened by Reagan as everyone else.

Welles seems like he was very relatable, if difficult

one day someone shd make a case for PB's failure as a director being fully down to the fact that he actually entirely believed in an undiluted version of the solo genius form of the auteur theory lol

Getting to the end of the book, there's another conversation about P Bog where Jaglom says to Welles:

"You're being too hard on him. I think it's part and parcel of the Kane thing, the great man thing, which has been fed to him by you. It's all your fault."

OW: "A little bit, yeah."

boom

x-post

that "if difficult" has to be the most understated caveat ever

i think my favorite welles story of all is from the bogdanovich book, where PB relates seeing OW slagging him off on television, writing him a hurt note, and getting an envelope with two letters in it: one a heartfelt apology, the other one rudely saying "oh, get over it!" with a little note from OW attached saying that he felt that both of these reactions were equally valid.

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