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. 

NYC Kids

Wherever you grow up, wherever you spend your formative years from birth to adulthood, it stamps you forever -- no matter how far you may run away from it. 

Think of Gatsby. The Long Island millionaire bootlegger is revealed to be, at the end of The Great Gatsby, what he always really was -- a poor boy from North Dakota trying to make good. Think of Ronald Reagan -- yes, he was a Hollywood movie star and US President but he never really stopped being the poor boy from small town Illinois whose dad was a drunk. It haunted him and his years in power, informing his dark view of the world. 

You might not be able to "go home again" but your childhood home never leaves you -- no matter how old you get, no matter where you move to.

Being a kid in New York City is something special -- this city is so unique, so weird, so crazy, that growing up here defines you forever. You may move far away, you may grow old -- but NYC kids are always NYC kids no matter where they live or whatever age they are.

Here are two amazing examples of kids from NYC who grew up to define the culture: the movie director and author Peter Bogdanovich and the writer Diane di Prima. 

Bogdanovich grew up on Riverside Drive (like me), fell in love with the movies as a kid and spent his childhood and young adulthood in the NYC art house movie scene. Eventually he moved to Hollywood and became a successful (and then not so successful) director of movies like The Last Picture Show and Mask. He had a wild life, dating Cybill Shepherd and Playboy playmates, being best buddies with Orson Welles, acting on The Sopranos -- just an amazing ride. He's an old man now but, as this big interview shows, despite all his successes and failures, despite all his adventures, he's still just the kid from NYC who wanted to be in the movies. And he did it.

I had never heard of Diane di Prima until now but I wish I had: she was the leading female member of the Beat generation. A child of Greenwich Village, she wrote books and poems, taught school and college, and was an innovator in what today we'd call "confessional memoir." She's over 80 now and has had a crazy life but, you get the sense from this article, that Diane is still a young girl from the Village who just wanted to write.

And here's something that all kids in NYC and their parents have to struggle with: at what age can they be allowed to ride the subway alone? Believe it or not, this is a matter of great debate. Honestly, I don't recall how old I was when I started riding the subway by myself (I was 10 when  I started riding the bus by myself) but it's one of the "only in NYC" things that defines being a kid in NYC.

Up from the Ashes

Reincarnation may not exist but sometimes, as the saying goes, "what's old is new again"; people or things from the past are either resurrected, rediscovered, or reimagined for new generations.

Think of every reboot of every old show currently on television.

Well, this blog post is not about TV reboots but about two very seperate, very old, and very NYC things that have, in very different ways, gone from old to new again.

The first, most notably and most infamously, is the World Trade Center. For almost 30 years the Twin Towers glowered over NYC until September 11, 2001. The next several years a battle over rebuilding what was known, for a long time, as Ground Zero until, more than a decade later, One World Trade Center emerged as its replacement. The new tower was obviously a reminder and a replacement of the old World Trade Centers, the past coming back to life in a new way, up from the ashes, into the future. 

The man at the center of rebuilding the World Trade Centers, of turning Ground Zero into a gleaming, shining structure, was Larry Silverstein. He has a new memoir about his long career as an NYC builder and what it took to rebuild in Lower Manhattan -- although, as this article points out, while a gorgeous new building was constructed, the thing was a big missed opportunity. Instead of reimagining the area as a mixed-use, residential/commercial, affordable neighborhood, they just built another big office buidling that, nearly a quarter of a century from 9/11, remains largely empty.

But another, more enjoyable rediscovery, is the 1981 movie They All Laughed. Made by NYC director Peter Bogdanovich, it was a mad caper about private detectives hired to follow unfaithful wives -- until the detectives get double-crossed by their prey and hilarity ensues. At the time of its release, it was a critical and commercial flop, and it marked the end of Bogdanovich's time as an A-List director. For decades it wasn't watchable anywhere but now it was reemerged, to great acclaim, on TCM and currently steaming on Max. 

It's great to see older, excellent, and underappreciated work rediscovered. Also, directors Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson have said that this film specifically was an influence on them. From the ashes of critical and commercial ignomy to the heights of canon and influence, that is something great to see. 

Remembering Ben Gazzara

Almost all of my blog posts this week have been about actors so I think I'll end the week by writing about one more -- the late, great Ben Gazzara.

The quintessential character actor, Gazzara had a long and impressive career. A native of NYC, a child of Italian immigrants growing up in Kips Bay, Gazzara got his start in local theater and the Actors Studio before his big break, starring in the original production of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955, directed by Elia Kazan.

Numerous plays, films and TV appearances followed through the 1950s, '60s, and 70s, including A Hatful of Rain and movies with the John Cassavettes including the classic Husbands in 1970 and Opening Night in 1977. 

Gazzara's brief flirtation with movie stardom happened in the 1970s when he starred as Al Capone in Capone (1975) and the Peter Bogdanovich classic Saint Jack in 1979, playing an American running a prostitution ring in Singapore -- a thriller about the depths of human greed and depravity. 

Gazzara continued to work into the 1980s and 1990s, and I became aware of him when he had another golden era in the late 1990s with such classics as David Mamet's brilliant thriller The Spanish Prisoner, the super dark comedy Happiness by Todd Solandz, and as the sleazy Jackie Treehorn in the The Big Lebowski.

Then in 2002 he won an Emmy for his role in the HBO movie Hysterical Blindness.

A few years later I saw him on the Broadway stage in a revival of the Clifford Odets play Awake and Sing! He was an adorable, charming presence in that first-class revival. 

Gazzara died in 2012, leaving behind an amazing body of work. A great NYC, the last of a great acting breed.