By Larry Jaffee
This January 6th marks the third anniversary of the passing at 82 of Peter Bogdanovich, who 25 years ago keynoted a DVD conference in Hollywood that I chaired. During our pre-event interview to promote his participation, Peter offered prescient observations about how filmmaking evolved in just the past decade. For example, the ubiquity of digital tools in post-production allows filmmakers to create more quickly, easily and most importantly, inexpensively. In June 2000, he offered a hypothetical scenario in which he was given $1 million “to make a picture.” Still fond of using the vernacular of his heroes Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, to whom he served as a confidant towards the end of their lives, Bogdanovich instead would make “ten pictures” at $100,000 each.
At the time of our talk, technological advancement also took the form of distribution through DVD, which was quickly replacing VHS as a promising ancillary revenue stream. Home video saved studios’ balance sheets on scores of box-office failures or in the case of smaller and indie films – lack of a distribution deal as the result of one bad review or no review following a festival screening.
Earlier that year, Bogdanovich started writing a column for The New York Observer. “DVD is the format that cineastes have been waiting for” opened one piece.
I knew who I wanted to be my keynoter for the B2B conference, for which I had just been given responsibility, dedicated to the format that still was in its relative infancy. The event the previous year attracted about 100 executives, paltry considering that home video had been saving Hollywood’s ass for two decades, and DVD was poised to be a cash cow.
But I first had to sell the concept to the president of our trade association partner on why we needed to spend $19,000 ($15,000 for the director’s speaking fee and $4,000 for first-class airplane travel from New York two Los Angeles and accommodation). The problem was the trade association guy never heard of Bogdanovich, or his Oscar-nominated The Last Picture Show.
“We’re in Hollywood; let’s start taking advantage of that,” I remember telling him, noting the conference was being held at the Universal City Hilton, in that studio’s literal backyard. After talking his ear off for about 30 minutes, he finally agreed to give me the money. I then realized how persuasive I sometimes can be.
Bogdanovich did not disappoint as the keynoter and previewed his inspiring speech, in the following exclusive interview, which previously was published 25 years ago in Medialine, the trade publication I then edited. Peppering his talk with anecdotes of his numerous encounters with Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Howard Hawks, Bogdanovich stressed how DVD allowed filmmakers to reflect their visions in a small-screen environment.
“Hitchcock liked to talk about how he did things and how he achieved effects. All of the capabilities on a DVD would be interesting to him,” Bogdanovich said, citing the then Universal Studios recently released disc of Hitchcock’s The Birds, which featured the film’s storyboards, production notes and Tippi Hedren’s screen test as a stellar example of what can be done on one side.
“There’s a tremendous educational value to DVD. You can show all of the different anecdotes of how the film was made and how things were done. It can be enlightening.”
At the time of the interview, Columbia TriStar had given the deluxe treatment to the 1971 feature The Last Picture Show, still regarded as his masterpiece. Besides Bogdanovich, the documentary on The Last Picture Show DVD also contains interviews with the film’s actors. including Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Cloris Leachman and Eileen Brennan. Also among The Last Picture Show DVD’s extras is a featurette that Bogdanovich made when the movie was rereleased theatrically in 1974.
“I was asked to participate in a making-of documentary specially made for the DVD, and also asked if I had any particular desires about the look of [the package]. I asked for them to go back to the original artwork and they did to a point. I got approval on a lot of stuff,” said Bogdanovich, whose films also include What’s Up Doc?, starring Barbra Streisand, Paper Moon, starring Ryan O’Neal, and Mask, starring Cher.
Of the 18 films Bogdanovich directed until our interview, his next title slated for DVD treatment at the time was Saint Jack (1979), which was being released by Roger Corman, the famed low-budget movie producer who helped to launch Bogdanovich’s Hollywood career. I endeared myself to Bogdanovich when I told him that it was my favorite film of his, with They All Laughed not far behind.
Bogdanovich had recently recorded an audio track commentary for Corman about how he shot the film in Singapore. “The DVD is also going to have a trailer that I shot in Singapore for it that was never used. I didn’t know what happened to it. Quentin Tarantino found it. This is the kind of thing to have on a DVD.” Bogdanovich said he liked Laserdisc as a “good quality” format that has served as “a kind of a warmup for DVD,” but felt the disc size was “cumbersome, and you couldn’t get all the information on one side.”
When asked if he ever considered that more people ultimately would see his films on a small screen rather than in a theater and whether that affected his approach to filmmaking, Bogdanovich replied that “it occurred to him a long time ago-before video, when we were making movies in the 1970s – that they were going to be on or would end up on television and I didn’t want to deal with that. The widest I’d go was 1:8:5. I wasn’t that interested in the [Panavision] image. I didn’t like what happened to it on television.”
As a film scholar in demand (he had authored 11 books by the time of the interview), Bogdanovich was regularly called upon by the likes of the Criterion Collection and American Movie Classics to introduce films. He’s worked on two Criterion DVDs: Welles’s The Third Man and The Lady Eve. In addition, he also occasionally reviewed DVDs for the New York Observer. In the process, he’s acquired a bookshelf of discs, “mostly the classics.”
Bogdanovich more recently had been in the public view as an actor on HBO’s The Sopranos. In 1999, he appeared in five episodes of the second season, playing Dr. Elliot Kupferberg, the psychiatrist of Lorraine Branco’s character Dr. Jennifer Melfi, the therapist treating Tony Soprano. Elliot recurred through the series’ sixth and final season.
Bogdanovich started his career as an actor, studying with Stella Adler. While he did some acting in the theater when he was in his early 20s, he gravitated to film. In 1993, television producer David Chase was producing the popular series about a tiny quirky Alaskan town. One episode dealt with the town having a film festival dedicated to Orson Welles, and Bogdanovich was asked to play himself as a film historian.
“On the second day of shooting Chase called me to ask if I ever acted before. He said, ‘You have a lot of presence. You ought to do it more.’ Seven years later he called me about The Sopranos,” which Bogdanovich called “really brilliant, very well written and directed.”
Asked whether he ever ceased being a director when working as an actor, Bogdanovich said, “I never say anything when I’m acting. I made that mistake on Mr. Jealousy, when I was also playing a psychiatrist. I asked the cameraman what lens he had on, and he said it was a 35. I said, ‘I never like that lens.’ The atmosphere on the set changed. Everyone got so defensive. Even if I have a problem with a line, I figure out a way to make it work.”
If Bogdanovich had any laments regarding DVD, circa 2000, it was that not enough back catalog was out. “I think the studios got caught off-guard and surprised at how DVD has taken off with consumers.” Speaking like a true director, Bogdanovich summed up: “They should put them all out there.”
I am sure he felt the same way about how streaming developed in recent years. But knowing him the little bit I did, Peter must have lamented over the loss art of the extras found in DVDs, such as commentary tracks, mini docs, and EPKs, he loved so much a quarter century ago.
He remained active during the next two decades after we met, with IMDB seven directing credits, including a Sopranos episode, and a whopping 38 acting for film and TV.
But he’ll always go down in the annals of Hollywood history as being twice nominated for an Oscar for The Last Picture Show, which launched his career at 32 as a talent to be reckoned with.
Larry Jaffee (https://larryjaffee.com) is a New York-based journalist specializing in the entertainment business. Jaffee is the author of Record Store Day: The Most Improbable Comeback of the 21st Century (Rare Bird Books, 2022). Jaffee currently blogs about film on Medium. Here are two recent reviews: ‘A Complete Unknown’ and ‘Anora’. Jaffee currently teaches “Writing About Music” to undergraduates at St. John’s University in Queens, NY as adjunct assistant professor.
Photos: Wikicommons | MovieStills DB
