Peter Bogdanovich RIP

No one in the history of Hollywood had a more Hollywood-like life and career than Peter Bogdanovich.

He has died at age 82. 

A child of immigrants, a bookish kid who loved movies that he started writing about them before making them, Peter was one of the brightest lights in the New Hollywood. He started in the late 1960s with a Roger Corman movie called Targets before hitting it big -- really big -- in the early 1970s with The Last Picture Show, What's Up, Doc? and Paper Moon. His directing career was up and down -- mostly down -- after that initial flush of success but he made some interesting movies in the years and decades afterwards including Mask. His last movie was in 2014, a small comedy called She's Funny That Way (one of the few he made in NYC).

Peter also acted occasionally, including as Dr. Melfi's shrink on The Sopranos. He also made a big documentary about the late Tom Petty and oversaw the restoration in 2015 of never-before-seen Orson Welles movie The Other Side of the Wind. 

Infamously, he turned down the chance to direct Chinatown, something he said was the biggest mistake of his career. 

Peter's love life was crazy -- he got married young, dumped his first wife for a very hot Cybill Shephard, dated lots of other gorgeous ladies, then infamously dated a Playboy Playmate named Dorothy Stratton who was then murdered horribly by her ex-husband (it became the story for the controversial Bob Fosse movie Star 80). Peter then married Dorothy's sister. To paraphrase something Howard Stern once said to Warren Beatty, "We could talk about the movies, but the broads get in the way." In later life, Peter resumed his extensive writing about movies and also became something of a protector of Orson Welles' legacy, his Boswell.

Peter was a man of many talents and travails. 

Most of all, Peter was a New York City kid who grew up on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. The boy from NYC struck out West to fulfill his manifest destiny. Many of his movies are set in the West (most notably The Last Picture Show), a Jewish-immigrant NYC kid's refracted vision of Americana. No wonder he was considered a genius.

RIP Peter. Say "Hi" to Orson for us.