August 2004: Peter Bogdanovich

by John Gallagher

In 1997, director-historian-actor Peter Bogdanovich richly deserved the National Board of Review's first William K. Everson Award for History of Film for his book of his classic filmmaker interviews Who the Devil Made It (1997, Alfred A. Knopf). The late Professor Everson, a long-time NBR member and contributor to Films in Review , was one of our leading film historians, educators and authors.

JOHN GALLAGHER: Bill Everson was a very generous guy. He loaned me a print once of William K. Howard's White Gold (1927) and I'm on the subway thinking I'm holding what is very possibly the only existing copy of this film.

PETER BOGDANOVICH: I remember going up to his apartment on West End Avenue. I never saw so much film. Everywhere you looked, cans of film, in the corners, on the shelves, in the bathtub.

JG: He told me the management of his building had to reinforce the floors in his apartment.

PB: The floor would buckle. Film is heavy, heavier than books.

JG: You must have read Films in Review when you were a kid.

PB: Oh sure.

JG: It was one of the only film history magazines around.

PB: I used to collect the career indexes, the issues that had a career article with a list of the person's films. I had a whole bunch of them. I got rid of all my film books a few years ago, sold some, gave some away. I've gone through like four libraries. Every so often I want to periodically eliminate and start over again. The only thing I miss having is Cahiers du Cinema ; I used to have a run of those that disappeared. Somebody stole them.

JG: I devoured Who the Devil Made It . You had such a rapport with these directors -- Hawks, Walsh, Cukor, Hitchcock. The Howard Hawks interview is spectacular; your sessions spanned ten years with him.

PB: Yes, from '62 to '72.

JG: He was one of the veteran directors you were closest to.

PB: Yeah, as close as you could get. He was very encouraging to me and very kind, and tough in his way. He liked me and I liked him a lot. I miss him a lot. Thing is, my father (the artist Borislav Bogdanovich) was an older man, he was 40 when I was born, so I grew up with an older father than most people. He died at a young age, at about 70, and I think I gravitated towards older people just generally. The consequence of that is all these directors that I interviewed didn't seem old to me, really. So many of them have died and I feel bereft of a lot of friends, because the age thing didn't mean much to me. I feel sometimes like a whole part of my life is gone.

JG: I was very moved by the poignant picture you painted of Allan Dwan -- "The Last Pioneer" as you call him -- living in this little house in the San Fernando Valley owned by ...

PB: His housekeeper. Well, Allan was one of the sweetest men you ever could ask to meet. He was so kind. I think he was the nicest to me overall of the directors in the book. He was very warm, extraordinarily encouraging, interested in everything I did. He was just really fun and buoyant all the time. He never felt sorry for himself. He seemed very jolly and wise.

JG: Is the interview in Who the Devil Made It the same as the book you did on Dwan, The Last Pioneer ?

PB: It's the same interview. It's just slightly shorter actually.

JG: The Last Pioneer is long out of print, so it's great to have it in the new book.

PB: Yeah, that's difficult to find.

JG: As is Fritz Lang in America .

PB: Fritz Lang in America is virtually all in the new book, a little bit cut but not much. It's in a different order because in Fritz Lang in America we didn't deal much with the German films, but it's basically the same interview. Very little was cut from that interview and very little from Dwan. The book was so fat so we took some stuff out.

JG: It's interesting in your prelude to the Fritz Lang interview to read about your relationship with him.

PB: It was rocky. But he was like that. I've hardly heard of anybody saying anything nice about him, except Kevin Thomas (of the Los Angeles Times ) who got along with him very well. Fritz was threatened by people and also competitive as hell. He reminded me a lot of the European intellectuals I grew up with. My father would have a dinner party and these kind of people would come over. I met a lot of people like Fritz when I was a kid growing up here in New York, so he was familiar to me as a type. He wasn't too nice after a while but I try to remember the good things because he was extraordinarily generous and warm in the beginning.

JG: What was Josef von Sternberg like?

PB: Very warm in a cold way. He was just very reserved and not very outgoing. He didn't speak too much but what he did say had a lot of weight. He was sad, he was a sad man. I didn't understand a lot of that stuff when I was that age. I didn't understand what had happened and how rough it must have been. You don't when you're younger til you go through some shit you don't really know what they're dealing with and it must have been extraordinarily difficult for Joe. Very tough. I think his wife Mary kept him going. She taught, she was an archaelogist. I guess he had some money from the Directors Guild but I don't know how ... had a nice house though, didn't seem to be broke but again I don't know how they kept going. He died four years after we met. I didn't know him that well but I saw quite a bit of him.

JG: I'm a huge Leo McCarey fan and of course I read your piece on him in Esquire so again it's wonderful to have the full interview finally available. It's such a gift to have this interview in print, the only extensive one we have with McCarey. It's like suddenly finding a career interview with Victor Fleming or Woody Van Dyke or Gregory LaCava.

PB: Yes it's too bad but that was really how it got done cause the doctors and the wife didn't want to have it done. They thought it would hurt his health. Jim Silke, who was at the AFI then, convinced Irene Dunne that it was a good idea, and Irene Dunne convinced the doctors and the wife so I was allowed to go. Leo enjoyed it. There's no question he enjoyed doing it. It tired him out. After the first session I didn't seem him for a while cause he had a kind of a relapse. It was very fortuitous that I was able to do it because he was very revealing and a delight, and very much like his pictures although he was pretty sick and was fading. He faded through the whole twelve sessions. I didn't get that much after the first two.

JG: It's interesting to learn that Cary Grant tried to get out of doing The Awful Truth (1937).

PB: Isn't that amazing? That was surprising. I never asked Cary about that but Cary was always a little uncomfortable about McCarey. I was very friendly with Cary Grant, he was very nice to me. The interview I did with McCarey went to the AFI as part of the Oral History Program, the full interview was there in their files. Somebody read it and did a piece about Cary Grant and I think in some book that was published it said that Leo McCarey didn't like Cary Grant, based on my interview. I remember saying to Cary, "I'm sorry about that thing with McCarey but that's what he said.” He said "Oh that's alright, that's alright." It was Garson Kanin who told me how much of an influence McCarey had on Cary Grant. You can see it in pictures.

JG: You can see it comparing The Awful Truth with other movies Grant did before that, with the exception of Sylvia Scarlett .

PB: Sylvia Scarlett was a kind of Cockney characterization and he was very good in that but it isn't like The Awful Truth at all.

JG: The Cary Grant persona really came out of The Awful Truth .

PB: It happened in that picture. It came together for him in that picture. Having met McCarey, albeit when he was not himself really, I could see where that came from because he had a very sophisticated dry wit, kind of mischievous, with all those little kinds of noises that Cary makes in the movie, that's very McCarey. I can see Leo McCarey giving him that stuff. You can see it in other McCarey pictures without Cary Grant where people react that way. In Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), Roland Young has that very dry quality. Well, the Laurel and Hardys have that kind of reserved humor, slightly laid back.

           I think what is the key to the big movie stars -- and I'm writing a book about that for Knopf tentatively called Who the Hell's In It , all the actor pieces that I've done, all being rewritten and I'm writing new stuff -- and one of the main points I'm going to make in there is that the really big movie stars were all personalities of a certain kind and they were seen differently by major directors and those directors had an impact on those actors which they carried with them. Cary Grant is a perfect example. One of the things I left out of the book really by accident, it'll be in the next one, was that I asked Cary about Von Sternberg ...

JG: They did Blonde Venus (1932) together.

PB : Blonde Venus . I said to Cary, "Do you direct much?" He said, (Peter does a flawless Cary Grant ) "Not really. But the first day he saw me he looked at me and he said 'Your hair's parted on the wrong side.'" I said, "What'd you do?" He said, "I parted it on the other side and I kept it that way the rest of my career." There's a perfect example. If Joe hadn't said that maybe it would have been different. But that was a little thing but big deal, parting your hair on the other side! And then, wow. Then you can see in Sylvia Scarlett that Grant, as George Cukor said, found himself in a certain way as an actor, he allowed himself to be free, cause he's kind of reticent in all the other pictures, kind of laid back. He had been a straight leading man up to that point but not very interesting. In Sylvia Scarlett suddenly he explodes into a characterization. It was Cockney that he had grown up with, though he was from Bristol, he knew people like that. Then with McCarey on The Awful Truth suddenly he took the sophistication and the slapstick -- and Cary of course had been a circus performer, an acrobat -- so McCarey used that and you can see how the character and persona changed from Von Sternberg to Cukor to McCarey and then to Hawks who used him for the comedy stuff in Bringing Up Baby (1938) and added elements and then had him play a dramatic part for the first time in Only Angels Have Wings (1939). So really in the few years between 1936 and 1939, Sternberg was earlier, but in those three years he worked with Cukor, McCarey and Hawks and then Hitchcock in '40 which gave him another thing. With all those things going through, he had a career. He knew what to do for the rest of his career. He knew how to play each aspect of himself. So his personality in those roles, with that fine tuning the directors gave him, made him a movie star.

JG: Jimmy Stewart is another great example, from Capra to Cukor to Hitchcock to Mann to Ford.

PB: Yeah, Jimmy is a little less obvious than Cary Grant because he always had a certain persona. He had the Westerner and the Easterner that he played. It's odd that he played both those things so effectively, and you see them both in 1939 with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Destry Rides Again . That was the rest of his career right there in those two pictures. The only thing that was different was that after the war he added a certain element of harshness and cynicism which was exploited not just by Anthony Mann but by Hitchcock and Preminger, kind of an awareness about himself. He told me about that, he said (perfect Jimmy Stewart imitation) "I thought I better toughen it up." Somebody was putting him down after the war and he drew on the more neurotic aspects of his personality.

JG: I'm amazed by Jean Harlow -- dreadful in Hell's Angels (1930) and The Public Enemy (1931), then she becomes a different performer in Red Dust (1932), Red Headed Woman (1932) and Bombshell (1933).

PB: I think the first time you see that change is in Dinner at Eight (1933).

JG: Red Dust and Red Headed Woman pre-date that.

PB: They do? That's right, they do. Red Dust is Fleming, who directed Red Headed Woman ?

JG: Jack Conway.

PB: Well, a lot of it depends on who the co-star is and who the director is, no question about it, because the actor has to feel a certain way in front of the camera. I've seen actors dreadful in a take and then you tell them something and suddenly it changes everything.

JG: You have to make a creative environment for them.

PB: It's an atmosphere in which you feel that you can't really do anything wrong. The actor should feel that he can't do anything wrong. You may not like it and say let's try it that way or this way but it won't be wrong . Orson Welles was extraordinary with that, at creating that kind of atmosphere, cause I acted for him, where you felt that maybe he wouldn't like it or he'd ask you to do it again but you didn't feel like, "Oh Christ I better not do that," and you could just do anything. You felt it would be alright, Orson would forgive you if it wasn't good. If he didn't like something he'd laugh hysterically and say "That was pretty bad, we'll try that again!" It was always kind of fun and I think to varying degrees certain directors were like that. Certainly Hawks was very laid back and very encouraging.

JG: It shows, doesn't it, in the naturalistic dialogue patterns in movies like Only Angels Have Wings (1939). I love that picture.

PB: It's very much like being with Howard, that movie. If you knew him you kind of felt, well, that was Howard. You could see him writing that stuff, having the actors do it. Yeah, it's very Hawks. I like it too. It's fun.

JG: Speaking of Orson Welles, what's the status of The Other Side of the Wind ? Do you know where the footage is?

PB: Oh yeah. The negative is sitting in a vault in Paris. There's a stalemate, a Mexican standoff -- is that politically incorrect? -- well anyway, between Orson's heirs, which basically is Oja Kodar in this case, and the Iranian investor who put up money, and Orson put up some money and the French court decided that neither owned it, that both owned it and they'd have to agree before anything could happen. They've been not agreeing for years and it just sits there.

JG: What a shame.

PB: Yeah. And Orson asked me to finish it should anything happen to him. He said that to me in '73 or '74 one afternoon. He said, "You must promise me that if anything happens to me you'll finish it." I'd say, "Orson, for God's sake, nothing's going to happen to you." He says, "I know but you must promise." And I did and I feel the burden of it. All it takes is money, that's it. It just takes some money to pay everybody off and put it together. It's shot. There's very little to shoot, there's some trick stuff, there's no acting stuff, there's a few trick shots and some things, but very little.

JG: You'd think that Miramax and Fine Line would be falling over themselves to do that.

PB: You would think so but maybe they don't know about it. I haven't really pursued it lately, I've been having my own problems. Frank Marshall was involved in trying to help us get it together. Y'know, there are so many things going on in life in one's own career, it becomes a problem but believe me it's on my mind and we're trying again now to see if we can make something happen.

JG: The Cukor interview in your book was originally for a TV special.

PB: I don't know what it was for, I can't remember but it never got used. It was for something . It was for a documentary or something. I don't know. It never got used, that's all I know.

JG: The Ulmer interview was originally published in Film Culture and then pieces in Kings of the B's .

PB: Todd (McCarthy) used most of it, I don't remember. What's there in the Knopf book is mostly there. It's not all there. His daughter is preparing a documentary about Edgar and she found they're restoring a lot of his films, I just spoke to her before. I'm meeting with her back in L.A. next week. The BBC is interested in doing a documentary on him and they found Natalka Poltavka (1937), they found a number of his old pictures.

JG: There are some wonderful stories in your interview about the making of Ulmer's Yiddish films, the nudist camp in New Jersey ...

PB: Yeah some amazing stuff. I think you get a real sense of what he was like.

JG: In retrospect, '70s mainstream Hollywood was a golden age compared to today - The Last Picture Show (Bogdanovich), Taxi Driver (Scorsese), The Conversation (Coppola), Five Easy Pieces (Rafelson), so many great pictures. What happened?

PB: Well what happened was that we all fucked up, really. What happened was the director became the superstar. People like John Cassavetes and some of my stuff, we all kind of geared it toward the director and that's pretty much what happened at the end of the '60s and early '70s. And then we had freedom to make what we wanted and most of us all made big bombs in various ways whether it was Coppola who went off the deep end or (Michael) Cimino, I made a musical that didn't work ( At Long Last Love ), Marty Scorsese made a musical that didn't work ( New York, New York ).

JG: In Everyone Says I Love You (1996) Woody Allen does the same thing you did in At Long Last Love (1975).

PB: Woody says he went to see my picture at the (Radio City) Music Hall five times and he loved it, but I didn't know that until recently! (laughter ).   But that picture was rushed into release. That was a disaster and unfortunately people say to me now "Gee, I really like that picture, why was it so attacked?" But the people who are reacting to that now have only seen the recut version which was the one I recut after it opened, you see. It was an original musical comedy and we only had two previews. Two. The first one was a total disaster in San Jose and the second one in Denver was OK. It played. But then I made some more changes to it because of pressure from the studio and didn't preview that version. So that version which had never previewed opened and it was the worst version there was. It was fucked. Then I saw that playing and I realized what I needed to do but by then it was too late. It was overconfidence on the part of the studio, because the studio really liked the movie, that was the funny thing. They liked it, they thought it was terrific but in a musical, well in anything, it all has to do with construction. And in a musical particularly, the balance between the musical numbers and the dialogue has to be delicate and I just was still too inexperienced to realize how critical that was and so after the picture had opened it was declared a bomb. The only place it made money was at the Music Hall. Then I realized how I should have cut it after that and I immediately did cut it, they let me recut and I think I paid for that, and that version was then shown on television and that's the version that all release prints have been ever since. That was quite different from the opening version. Very different, but unfortunately it was too late.

JG: I always felt the critics at the time were incredibly harsh to you.

PB: Yeah well they were. Judy Crist, the critic, was friend of mine and when we were preparing to come into New York with At Long Last Love -- which I always refer to as At Long Last Turkey -- I spoke to Judy and she said, "How's the picture?" and I said, "It's OK I guess." She said, "It better be good." I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "They're layin' for you here," and they were. It was just too much. I'd had three hits in a row and even though people think of Daisy Miller as having gotten bad reviews it was a critical hit and got quite good reviews.

JG: It's the best Henry James adaptation.

PB: Well thank you, that's what Gore Vidal said.

JG: I didn't know if you've seen Portrait of a Lady (1996). It's a snore.

PB: Daisy Miller was a good picture but I probably shouldn't have made it at that particular moment. I remember when we screened it at Paramount, Frank Yablans, the new head of the studio came over to me and I said "What do you think?" He said, "It's alright." I said "Is that all you have to say?" "Well what do you want me to say?" I said, "It's just alright?" He said, "It's fine, it's good but you are Babe Ruth and you just bunted." From a commercial point of view he was right. It was not a picture that was ever going to be a big hit unless you released it today. It got very good notices. People remember it as having gotten bad notices but the truth is that Paper Moon got fairly mixed notices. The New York Times didn't like it, Time didn't like it. On the other hand The New York Times raved about Daisy Miller , but it was just not a commercial picture in its day plus at that point Paramount changed hands, Barry Diller came in, Frank was out, it fell between the cracks, and nobody really pushed it. I like the picture. I think it was pretty daring.

JG: Weren't you supposed to star in Daisy Miller at one point?

PB: I asked Orson if he would direct Cybill and me in it. He said, “No, you direct it. Cybill's born to play it.” He encouraged me to do it which maybe was a double-edged sword but anyway Barry Brown was so right for the part that it was scary. But it was also a problem because he just wasn't very personable and the part needed somebody with a little more personality, but y'know, he was the part, he sure was Winterbourne. Poor Barry. He killed himself really, with booze.

JG: He projected intelligence in the part.

PB: He had a kind of intelligence and he was a very bright kid but he was so self-destructive. But he was very much like Winterbourne, he was definitely "winter born."

JG: Let's talk about Raoul Walsh.

PB: Yeah.

JG: Were you going to do a Walsh interview book in the '70s?

PB: We were gonna do a big interview and then after that first interview he decided he was going to write his own book. He said, "Pedro, I'm going to do my own book, so we'll talk." I think he talked to Schickel after his book came out. He didn't do any more interviews until after his book came out. I think it made him decide, what the hell, I may as well write my own book.

JG: It's a fun interview talking about his pre-moviemaking days.

PB: You get a sense of what he was like, don't you.

JG: Absolutely. And you got him to talk about some of his lost films like Lost and Found on a Desert Island (1922) and The Spaniard (1925).

PB: We got all the way up to What Price Glory ? (1926). After that most of his films got to be pretty known. I regretted that I couldn't get more but I was very happy with what I had. I didn't know what I'd ever do with it, I never used any of it except in that piece I did in Esquire .

JG: "Paul Revere on the Trolley Tracks."

PB: Which was really an attempt to plug his book. It was published around the time his book came out.

JG: Did you stay in touch with him?

PB: Oh yes, we talked on the phone all the time. I didn't go out to see him much, he was way out in the Simi Valley but we talked on the phone a lot.

JG: Did you ever interview King Vidor?

PB: I knew him and I met with him a few times, and he was a lovely man, but Nancy Dowd did a great interview, very long, hard to get.

JG: Yeah, it's in the DGA Oral History Series.

PB: It's very complete. Coppola, Friedkin and I had a company at Paramount ...

JG: The Directors Company.

PB: It was a great fuckin' deal. Billy, Francis and I could make anything we wanted under three million dolars and not even show an outline to the studio. That's how Daisy Miller got made. Nobody read it, nobody saw it, we made it for 2.2 (million), substantially under three, and that was it. My partners weren't happy with it, they thought it was a kind of a vanity production to show Cybill off. If I'd wanted to do that I would have done something else. That was a pretty difficult role, and I thought she was awfully good in it. What some people didn't realize is that that was the way a girl like that would have been in 1875. She was from New York, she was a provincial girl. If you read the story that's what she is. If you read the original novel we hardly added anything. The movie is exactly the book. I added one sequence that I wrote that Freddy Raphael had nothing to do with. In fact Freddy Raphael had nothing to do with that script, it was so funny. There's two things he wrote. One idea was the little miniature painter and the other thing was having that scene play in the baths.

JG: With Mildred Natwick.

PB: Yeah, that was his idea. Everything else was the book and I couldn't use his script cause it was really way over the top. Anyway, that's another story. We went to arbitration in England cause Freddy's English and so they were a little partial to him. They said I could have billing but it would have to say "Additional Dialogue by", and I said I'm not going to give myself that.

           So anyway the deal at the Directors Company was anything we wanted to make under three million was fine. And if we wanted to produce a picture for another director it could be anything up to a million and a half. So King Vidor came to me and asked if we would help him produce a picture that he wanted to do very badly about what happened to the guy that played the lead in The Crowd (1928).

JG: Murray.

PB: James Murray. And King had a whole script prepared to do a movie about what happened to James Murray. I wanted to do it, I was trying to get it together but then Billy pulled out of the company and Francis kind of reluctantly pulled out of the company and there was no company. It was over.

JG: The Conversation was The Directors Company, wasn't it?

PB: Yeah. There were only three pictures made for The Directors Company. Billy never made one. I did Paper Moon and Daisy Miller and Francis did The Conversation. I had a deal on Paper Moon before the Directors Company came into being and I decided to throw it into the company as a way of kicking off the company, cause it was made for under three (million) too, it was 2.8.

JG: Did you ever hear about a company called Renowned Artists that John Ford, Tay Garnett and Ronald Colman tried to start back in '37?

PB: No! I've heard about Renown, Harry Joe Brown and Randolph Scott's company.

JG: Renowned Artists had a deal in '37 with UA. Ford was going to do The Quiet Man and Garnett was going to do Trade Winds , but the company never got off the ground.

PB: I would think that the idea of independence during the studio system would have been very very difficult because it was so much easier to do it with the studios. It would have been hard to break off. (William) Wyler, (George) Stevens and (Frank) Capra did it after the war (with Liberty Productions) and McCarey was supposed to be part of that and he decided to go on his own (Rainbow Productions), but they were still pretty much attached to studios. Although I think It's a Wonderful Life (1946) probably suffered because it was a Liberty Production. I think the studio (RKO) kind of fucked them a little on that one. That's why it wasn't successful. I doubt that picture, if it had been properly distributed, wouldn't have been successful. It probably was done for political reasons to screw him. They didn't like them being independent. I'm sure of that. They do that. They can screw you up. They can distribute it badly, and you have no control and you can't really prove it.

JG: Are you interested in doing independent pictures?

PB: Sure. I have a number of pictures that I want to make and I'll make them however I can.

JG: You were involved with Sam Fuller's The Big Red One (1980) originally.

PB: Yeah, it's a sad story. I should never have left the damn thing. I was going to do Saint Jack . That was a mess. What happened was, Yablans was the head or Paramount and I got Fran to make a deal for Sammy to write a script, and I think they paid him and he wrote a draft and then Yablans was out of there, I don't know what happened, but the next thing that happened was I got Lorimar to step up to it and I was going to be the producer. Sammy wanted me to play the Bob Carradine part. I didn't see myself as a soldier but I regret that I didn't do that and I regret that I didn't stay involved as a producer but for various reasons it didn't work out. I brought Gene Corman in (to produce). Gene took over and Gene wasn't as strong with Lorimar as he might have been, so unfortunately they kind of took the picture away from Sam. He was stuck with having to complete it their way. It was unfortunate. I didn't see the completed version til it opened in New York in 1980. Sam invited me, I remember Dorothy Stratten and I went to see it and that's when he met her. It was right toward the end of shooting here in New York (on They All Laughed ). I just thought it didn't feel anything like what the original script was, what it could have been. That footage still exists. There's been an attempt to put it back the way it was and I've spoken to Joel Silver and a couple of people to see if they could get the money to let Sammy do it correctly. That's another problem, getting that money together.

JG: Is there more footage that exists for The Last Picture Show ?

PB: Yeah. The original cut was about two hours and twenty-five minutes, but it wasn't the right cut, it was too long. When we were preparing Texasville , Peter Guber agreed to let me recut Picture Show by adding certain footage to it. The picture had not yet appeared on video so the idea was to add some footage and make a new version of it and put it out in theatres prior to the opening of Texasville . That started to happen. I started working on it, I reveiwed all the material and decided there were about seven minutes I wanted to put back in. Some stuff had disappeared, but very little. The sound had disappeared but the footage was there. The dailies were there so we had the dailies of the sound. I put back about seven minutes and then Frank Price took over at Columbia and Frank didn't like me because of the situation that happened at Universal on Mask, so Frank pretty much sabotaged that plan, which was to bring Picture Show out and then Texasville , so that was sabotaged and didn't happen. What did happen was that Texasville had to be totally recut because I had to lose certain stuff that wouldn't make any sense if you hadn't seen Picture Show . It wasn't available anywhere. So that was unfortunately very sad. Texasville came out and was perceived incorrectly because it wasn't what we made. It was perceived as too much of a comedy when in fact the original Texasville was more evenly balanced between comedy and drama. Subsequent to that the long version of Last Picture Show was finished on 35mm and on laserdisc and is available on Criterion Laserdisc, seven minutes longer. There's a very good laserdisc that's been available a few years. Pioneer did a director's cut of Texasville so that also exists on laserdisc in a version that's twenty-five minutes longer. But the only way to see those two pictures the way we would have liked them to be show one after the other is on laserdisc.

JG: You mention the balance of comedy and drama. People like Leo McCarey did that so beautifully.

PB: It's my favorite thing. Doing a comedy that becomes sad or the intermixing of comedy and drama which when I was growing up had a name -- it was called a comedy-drama. Now they don't do that anymore. It's either a comedy or a drama. It's very unusual now to have the two mixed. The ability to do that is the best.

JG: Paper Moon is a great example of that.

PB: That has it. Most people thought of it as a comedy but I made it as a drama. I thought it was fairly mordant humor.

JG: How did John Ford react to The Last Picture Show ?

PB: I don't know if he ever saw it. He never said anything to me about it. He never said anything about any of the pictures. I don't know if he saw them. He came on the set of What's Up Doc? and visited but I never heard him say anything.

JG: How about Hawks?

PB: Hawks did. I ran Targets for Hawks and I describe that in the book ( Who the Devil Made It ). He said "The action's good and that stuff's hard to do." He was critical of it otherwise but complimentary. Dwan saw the pictures and he was very encouraging. Jean Renoir was the most encouraging. He asked me to run my pictures at my house once I got a projection room. Hawks was very proud of What's Up Doc? though I don't remember him ever saying much about it. He went down to South America one time for some kind of retrospective and came back with some snapshots he'd taken of the marquee when What's Up Doc? played in Rio. He was kind of proud of that.

JG: He had to be proud to see Targets where you use a clip from The Criminal Code (1931) and have dialogue about it with Karloff.

PB: Yeah, I say "Howard Hawks directed that." Yeah he liked that but Howard never said much about those kind of things.

JG: What was it like working with Boris Karloff?

PB: He was so sweet, a wonderful man. He was a joy to work with, very encouraging. Loved the picture, loved the script. I first met him a few days before we started shooting. He'd flown over from London to do the picture, came out to my house in the Valley at the time to have dinner. He said to me, "As I was landing in Los Angeles I was reminded of one of the lines you wrote in the script, and I think it's the truest line I've ever read in a screenplay." I said, "My God, what is it?"

           "It's that line -- 'What an ugly town this has become.'"

JG: It's interesting reading your interview with Edgar Ulmer in Who the Devil Made It about him working with Karloff on The Black Cat (1934).

PB: Yes and how funny he was and how charming. Boris was like that. I don't know anyone who's ever said anything against Boris. I think Hawks talks about him briefly in the interview too.

JG: Did you know Tay Garnett?

PB: I met him once, just shook hands with him at a museum screening or somewhere. He wrote his own book ( Light Your Torches and Pull Up Your Tights ).

JG: I remember seeing your documentary Directed by John Ford when it first aired. Where can one see that now?

PB: The AFI has it. They've done nothing with it. They never did clear the rights to the clips so you couldn't show it anywhere except for free. I've been trying over the years to get somebody to finance an updated version of it but haven't managed to pull it off.

JG: That film has classic interview clips with Ford giving you answers like "Uh huh" or "If you say so."

PB: Well that was just what we got. That was Ford (laughter) so we put it in.

JG: Did you work with his daughter Barbara Ford, the editor?

PB: She worked on Mask . She died right after. I knew Barbara for years. She worked with me as an assistant at the house, she was kind of the secretary at the house for a few years. She was really a sweet woman. She died of cancer shortly after Mask .

JG: She was very close to her father.

PB: She was very close with Jack. Yeah he thanked me for helping her.

JG: In Targets , you also show a clip from Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder and you mention Ben Gazzara and of course you went on to work with Ben.

PB: He wasn't a friend then. I didn't know him. I met Ben through Cassavetes when they were working Opening Night , that was the first time I met him. I went over to do that extra thing and we all went to have lunch and that's where I got the idea to use Ben in Saint Jack because he was very much like the character that I envisioned of Jack Flowers. At one point I thought of Cassavetes playing him, but I thought Ben was more outgoing, more the kind of character this guy was, plus he was Italian. The ironic thing about it all is the first review of anything I ever wrote was for my high school newspaper and it was about the off-Broadway production of End as a Man , which was the first time Benny had been seen in New York. It was weird kind of coincidence that was the first thing I ever wrote about.

JG: That was filmed as The Strange One (1957).

PB: It was, but I saw it off-Broadway. It was such a hit it moved to Broadway. It was brilliantly done. Ben was extraordinary. I saw everything Ben did in New York in those years before I moved out to Los Angeles. I saw Hatful of Rain on stage with Gazzara, he was brilliant and I saw him do Cat on a Hot Tin Roof which was magnificent.

JG: He's great, wonderful guy.

PB: Oh you know him.

JG: Yeah, his daughter Liz worked on the editing of my film The Deli ( author's note : I subsequently directed Ben Gazzara in the feature Blue Moon [2000]).

PB: Liz worked with us on Saint Jack.

JG: How did you handle directing yourself in Saint Jack ?

PB: I'd walk through it myself and stage it which I do often even when I'm not acting. I'll step into it just to figure out how to do it. I began as an actor and I will very often have to step into the role to see how I'm going to stage it. People I work with let me step into it and figure out how to do it. On Saint Jack it was no different except in this case I was going to play it. So I'd stage it and walk through it with Benny and then I'd have another actor step in and I'd watch it and then I'd shoot it.

JG: Did you do that on Targets as well?

PB: No I didn't have the luxury to have somebody else on that one, which is tougher.

JG: Would you mind talking about your experience with Sergio Leone?

PB: No, I don't mind. It was doomed. Sergio had liked Targets and he decided he wanted to have an American director direct the picture ( Duck, You Sucker! a.k.a. A Fistful of Dynamite ). He pretty much thought he was going to be able to push the buttons and tell me how to shoot it. I worked on the script for about three months with Luciano Vincenzoni who was a terrific guy and a terrific writer, and had written Sergio's best films, the two after Fistful of Dollars -- For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. For me, those are Sergio's best pictures. I went over there (to Italy), I didn't know anything, I was arrogant and I didn't get along with Sergio because he wanted to direct through me. I didn't want to particularly do that. It just didn't work out and I quit or was fired after I came back for Christmas, and I never went back. Before I even left we had been told by BBS that we would make The Last Picture Show. It was just a question of clearing the rights and eventually they were cleared. We got the rights and I went right into preparing that when I got back. So it was just as well. The Sergio Leone picture came out and it was called Duck, You Sucker! The title we were going to call it was Johnny and Johnny , because one of the characters was called Sean and the other was Juan. They both mean John so they were going to call each other Johnny.

JG: Was it cast at the point you were working on the script.

PB: I think it was going to be Rod (Steiger) as Juan. Who ended up playing Sean?

JG: James Coburn.

PB: Yeah, I think they were both cast. After I left, Sergio tried to bring another director in but the two actors wouldn't go for it and it ended up that Sergio had to direct it. I don't think he wanted to particularly but he did though. He did it alright.

JG: Didn't you also try to set up a picture with Howard Hawks?

PB: Hawks had a Louis L'Amour Western that he wanted to put together and it just didn't work out. He wanted to produce it and I was going to direct it. I should have probably done it. I don't know that I said I would but I think he just couldn't get it put together. I got busy with Picture Show and one thing led to another. I wish I'd done it now. At the time ...

JG: Do you think there was more respect then for the veteran Hollywood directors than today? I've had meetings with producers and executives who have literally never heard of John Ford.

PB: Oh yeah, I'm not surprised. Then it was closer to the beginning, it was twenty-five years ago, all those guys were alive, it was closer to when they made pictures. The people who are running the movies today don't know pictures. They just don't know them. They have no film culture at all. So many of the young people making pictures don't watch the old pictures. It shows in the work. A lot of the American independent films and even the Hollywood films made today show an amazing lack of film culture. It's almost as if everyone's trying to invent the wheel all over again. The technique of pictures seems to me very old fashioned, old-fashioned in the sense that it's primitive. Today it's cut-cut-cut-cut-cut, that's all it is.

JG: That's the whole MTV influence.

PB: It's just cut-cut-cut. That's pretty easy to make pictures that way.

JG: Have you seen Sling Blade ?

PB: That was different. That was good. I thought Billy Bob Thornton was amazing. I told (John) Ritter to tell Billy Bob I thought he had gigantic balls to just put the camera down and watch some of that stuff. He didn't feel he had to cut it up into a thousand pieces.

JG: It was almost shot like a Biograph film.

PB: It's very good, very effective. Very well done. Woody Allen shoots a lot of stuff in one master shot. I saw him the other night and I said “Do you like to do them in masters?” He said “Yeah, I do everything in masters. I hate all that coverage." He doesn't even bother to shoot it. That takes a lot of confidence and knowledge. I feel like in most American pictures today nobody's home. Nobody made this picture, which is why I used Hawks' quote for the title of the book. I asked Hawks who he liked and he said he liked almost anybody that made you know who the devil was making the picture. The director's a storyteller and he ought to have his own way of telling it. That just about sums it up.

JG: Would you tell the story about John Ford asking Ben Johnson to do The Last Picture Show?

JG: I had asked Ben to do it and he turned it down. He said "There's too many words. Too many words, Pete." So I called Ford and I said, “I've got this really good part for Ben Johnson, he says, he won't do it, he says there's too many words."

Jack said, "Aw Jesus! I mean, Ben always said that. When we were doing (She Wore A) Yellow Ribbon , I mean he'd come on the set and he'd say to the script girl 'Do I got any words today?' If she said yes he'd go out and sulk. If all he had to do was ride the horse he'd be happy. I mean, Jesus, where is old Ben?"

"I think he's in Arizona."

"Aw, give me his number, I'll call him."

I said “It's really a good part.”

"Well I"ll call him."

About fifteen minutes later he calls me back and he says, "He'll do it."

I said “Did you talk to--?”

“He'll do it. I said to him what's the matter with you Ben, I mean, Jesus, Pete has got a good part for you, what do you want to do, play Duke's sidekick your whole life?"

           So then about ten minutes after that Ben Johnson calls me and he says, (Ben Johnson drawl) "You put the Old Man on me."

"I really want you to this."

"Oh, God, Pete, I don't know ... I'll be back in a couple of days, I'll come see ya.”

           So he came over to the office and he still didn't want to do it. I kept bugging him and bugging him. He'd been there about about an hour and I said “Ben, if you do this, you're going to win the Oscar for it.” He got angry with me, he said, "Why do you say that! Why the hell do you say that!” (laughter).

           I said “I don't know if anybody else will get the Oscar but you in this role I think will win the Oscar. You'll certainly get a nomination.” Then we talked another forty minutes. He had the script in front of him and he slammed the script shut and said, "Oh alright I'll do the goddam thing!" That's how he agreed to do it. And he did win the Oscar.

JG: You do a great Ben Johnson, by the way.

PB: Old Ben. I can't believe he's gone. That's weird.

JG: You also worked with Harry Carey, Jr., on Mask.

PB: And in Nickelodeon . He was very good in that and very good in Mask. Wonderful actor. I had him in another picture, that awful one I made for DeLaurentiis, I don't even like to mention it, Illegally Yours .

JG: You took a lot of shit for Nickelodeon.

PB: Well again Nickelodeon was not released the way I wanted it. I had two pictures in a row that were favorite projects of mine, the musical (At Long Last Love) and Nickelodeon. Both of them were very dear to my heart

JG: Nickelodeon was originally called Starlight Parade.

PB: That's how it started, and that was a mistake, I should have never gotten involved, I should have done it myself. I'd been planning to do a big picture about the silent era, largely based on the interviews with Dwan, Walsh and McCarey. I was preparing it and I got a call from my agent and she said they're preparing a movie called Starlight Parade , there's another director involved but they want you. I said, “Well, I don't really want to do their script, I'll have to rewrite it completely.

“They'll let you rewrite it, whatever you want.”

Basically I rewrote the whole damn thing and never used any of Starlight Parade . The trouble was, again, the picture had a balance between comedy and drama and it was a comedy-drama, no question about it, and I had wanted to do it in black and white. It was very important to do it in black and white and Columbia, the studio, wouldn't let me. I had a big fight about that and they cancelled the picture. Then Barry Spikings at British-Lion came in and funded some of the picture, threw in a few million dollars. It ended up being a Columbia-British Lion picture and but when it was all done it was a difficult picture. The previews were edgy and the studio wanted me to take most of the drama out, play it more comedy and turn it more into a What's Up Doc?, which it really wasn't. So that threw it off and it got fucked up. Again, the picture came out not at all the way I wanted. I tried to recut that one and I couldn't get back to it.

I still would like to put some of that stuff back. There's about five minutes I'd like to put back that really makes a difference, some heavy stuff where you find out that Ryan O'Neal has an affair with Stella Stevens, it becomes very clear, and you see that John Ritter knows it. All that stuff. It was just much heavier and darker. So the picture got screwed up and that's why I took three years off and went away. I said I don't want to do this. Finally I did Saint Jack for that reason with Corman -- I didn't want to compromise what I believed in anymore. We didn't get much money to make it, but Saint Jack was made exactly how I wanted to. People thought I had to go to Corman. I didn't have to. I just didn't want to deal with the studios. They said they'd make Saint Jack but not with Ben Gazzara and I wanted to do it with Ben. That's why I went off and did that.

JG: There's something you said about Raoul Walsh's directorial style in High Sierra influencing Targets.

PB: Well, the chase.

JG: What was it about Walsh's pictures that influenced you before you were a filmmaker?

PB: The energy is amazing, tremendous vitality and a very sure sense of action. He was a very good action director. White Heat is one of those very powerful action films. High Sierra's a picture I love. Raoul had a real sense of the kinetic, and a recklessness that was very effective. Those films he made at Warners like Gentleman Jim and High Sierra in the early '40s were very very effective. I love even Colorado Territory.

JG: Remake of High Sierra.

PB: A very effective remake, with Joel McCrea, who was a dear man. I never really talked to him as much as I'd have liked to. There's a biography of him coming out, by the way. His daughter I think interviewed him and Knopf is going to publish it.

JG: He was an underrated actor.

PB: Very underrated. He really did some good ones. A really nice guy too. But Raoul was a lot like his movies. There was a recklessness and a vitality in the man that was appealing. An edginess. He was edgy. I like what Allan Dwan said to Raoul Walsh -- "I always liked Raoul's on the edge kind of thing". There was that kind of on the edge thing with Walsh at his best.

JG: Did you know William Wellman?

PB: Never met him. I just never met him. I know he said a very nice thing about me on television one time, cause it was reported to me. He named me as one of the young guys that knew something. I was the only one he mentioned. He said he didn't like the new pictures but he thought this guy Bogdanovich knew something. Something like that. That was nice.

JG: What's your opinion of his work?

PB: He was a good director. Uneven. Louise Brooks was very fond of him, said wonderful things about Beggars of Life which is supposed to be his best picture. I've never seen it. Is it good?

JG: It has an opening where Wellman tells lots of story in a purely visual way, very quickly, very economically.

PB: He was a good storyteller. I liked some of his pictures. I never really got into his pictures the way I did with some of the others.

JG: How about Henry Hathaway?

PB: No, I never liked him. He didn't like me personally and I didn't much like him. I met him a couple times and I just didn't like him. I don't like his pictures.

JG: Gregory LaCava?

PB: My Man Godfrey is as good as it gets in that kind of comedy. That's the best one, he made a few others but that seemed to me to be the best of them. Private Worlds is his, that's a nice picture.

JG: The Half-Naked Truth.

PB: That's also quite good. I haven't seen all of his pictures. Of course he died long before I could have met him.

JG: Lumet.

PB: I think it closes the book nicely, brings it back to New York.

After all, Dwan was shooting in New York during the silents.

JG: And Walsh was from the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

PB: That's right. So that kind of brings it back to New York, which is where I'm coming back to. I'm moving back to New York. I grew up here. 15 West 67th Street for years, then my parents moved to 90th and Riverside Drive. I went to Collegiate.

JG: And the RKO-Colonial Theatre.

PB: And the Loew's Lincoln. Both of them are gone long ago. Loew's Lincoln preceded Lincoln Center.

JG: There's a wonderful story about your mother forcing you to go to a play. You just wanted to go to the movies.

PB: Yeah she did, she forced me to do that. We had a big huge argument about it. That was a major thing.

JG: You wrote about maintaining a big file on all the movies you saw. When I was a kid I used to tape record credits off of pictures playing on TV, make notes, put them on index cards.

PB: See, I didn't have television. My parents didn't get television until I had already moved out of the house.

JG: You were doing all that from seeing the movies in theatres?

PB: Either from the movies or down at the public library. I still have all those files.

JG: When I was in school in Philadelphia I took a lead from you and wrote program notes for the cinematheque in exchange for free admission.

PB: (laughter) So it worked. Yeah, I had done that at the New Yorker Theatre.

JG: Where was that?

PB: Between 88th and 89th on Broadway.

JG: That was a big influence on you.

PB: Huge. It was a 900-seat theatre. I saw Dan Talbot yesterday. He's still a friend.

JG: Andrew Sarris and Eugene Archer.

PB: We used to hang around at the New Yorker in this little office in which Jonas Mekas came in one day and wrote on the wall "All the good movies are made in Hollywood" Everybody thought I had written it. It was really Jonas.

JG: Really? Mr. Experimental Cinema?

PB: Yeah I guess he'd written it as a tongue-in-cheek thing. At that point we were showing a lot of good old Hollywood pictures. As I say in the book, I don't think one should call them old movies, I think that there's good movies and there's not good movies, and there's movies you've seen and there's movies you haven't seen. If it's a good movie and you haven't seen it, it's new.

JG: I taught American Film Comedy one semester at School of Visual Arts and the very first thing I put up was The Awful Truth . As soon as the Columbia logo came up in black-and-white, I got groans from the film students.

PB: I know.

JG: Until they saw the movie, of course. There's an attitude people have about vintage films. Knowledge of classic American cinema is dismissed as film trivia.

PB: I know. It just isn't taken seriously and that's an American tragedy. We don't take seriously the stuff that we're best at. Jazz is the same thing. It took the French to discover that too. To say it was good. The kids just don't know what they're missing. People who haven't seen these movies don't know what they're missing. It's like an extraordinary treasure that's right under their noses and they're just too ignorant to know it's there. And they better get wise to it because it's really a tragedy, lost to people. It's like having never read a novel.

JG: Which is another problem.

PB: That's another thing that seems to be happening. Nobody reads anymore.

JG: Do you have a personal favorite among your films?

PB: They All Laughed. That's probably for very personal reasons but it is a personal question so that's my personal answer! (laughter) That's the picture I like best. I think people who know me would say that picture is kind of the way I am. It's more like me than any other picture I've made. I don't really dislike any of them except the ones that aren't the way they're supposed to be.

(For Bogdanovich's remembrance of John Cassavetes, check out the June 2004 edition of “Between Action and Cut”).

  -- JOHN GALLAGHER

< Between Action and Cut