Peter Bogdanovich, threshing machine

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.

xp yeah maybe a decade before Atlantic City

ABC's doing a two-hour true crime doc on Stratten tonight. Always blows my mind that she was only 20 when she was killed.

Special kind of weirdo this guy was/is. Imagine most of his contemporaries had their eyes rolling out of their skulls around him.

Did you ever hear what Billy Wilder said about him?

Wow, I didn't know he was a semi-regular guest host for Carson !

Wilder:

''It isn't true that Hollywood is a bitter place, divided by hatred, greed and jealousy. All it takes to bring the community together is a flop by Peter Bogdanovich.''

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/07/movies/film-older-sadder-maybe-wiser.html

That's not even the full quote.

Longer version here: Billy Wilder, the genre-jumper who would be 100 years old on June 22

Wilder had more to say later:

I’d assumed you’d been showered with flowers.

Didn’t want to touch it. Murder. After she was killed, I didn’t go out much. Then one day, about six months after it happened, I went to a dentist appointment. As I’m leaving the dentist, who’s coming up the street but Billy Wilder. I said, “Hi, Billy.” He says, “Hi.” Without even a blink, he says, “You know that whole story about the girl that got murdered? The plot is not right. It should be how … ” and he starts telling me how to fix the plot of the story of Dorothy’s murder.

That might be the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever heard.

Yeah, I know. This is beyond German bad taste. It’s just unbelievable bad taste. I just nodded.

Apparently, after the premiere of At Long Last Love, which went very badly, Wilder said you could hear the Champagne corks popping all over town.On March 7, 1975, Vincent Canby reviewed At Long Last Love for the New York Times: “casting Cybil [sic] Shepherd in a musical comedy is like entering a horse in a cat show. She’s beautiful and lithe and has great lines, but she’s the wrong species … The bluntness and naiveté that made her so appealing and so right in Daisy Miller are simply abrasive here.” What was his deal?

He was jealous. I was young and successful. He was old and hadn’t made a picture and I hadn’t written about him or done any pieces praising him. He managed to fuck up two pictures I was going to do. One was Private Lives. The executives asked him what he thought of the idea. He said, “Bad idea.” That was the end of that. You know what he did when Tony Curtis’s son died of an overdose? He sent him a telegram saying, “Like father, like son.”

Do you like burying assholes? When you see your enemies’ obituaries, what do you think?

Well, I wasn’t unhappy when Billy died.

From the Vulture interview posted upthread.

Billy...

Don’t know if I mentioned it upthread but one time I saw him give a bookstore talk and for the first half hour or so he kept referring to “Mr. Welles” but towards the end it was just “Orson.”

Bogdo's cameo in IT:Chapter Two was one of the highlights of 2019 cinema. He may actually have been playing himself.

watched BR of What's Up Doc tonight...

"He tried to molest me."
"That's... unbelievable."

🤣🤣🤣

the last picture show tonight. it helped