Peter Bogdanovich Was the Bridge Between Old and New Hollywood
Peter Bogdanovich, who died today at 82, once boasted that he’d “seen every American film worth seeing.” That’s an extremely arrogant thing to say — and Bogdanovich was an extremely arrogant man — but given that he most likely said it in the late 60s or early 70s, he was probably correct. At that time in history, one could have seen every American film worth seeing because there weren’t as many of them as there are now. No director today could ever make such a claim and actually mean it. He could.
A precocious film lover who worked his way from actor to critic to director before he was 30, Peter Bogdanovich was the bridge between the Old and New Hollywood. He was the first director of his generation to have learned directly from watching the work of the Old Masters — John Ford, Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, etc. — as well as befriending and learning from them personally about their successes and failures. The three masterpieces he made in a row at the beginning of the 1970s, The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon, made him a force to be reckoned with to this day, and while he never achieved the same success after that, they are tremendous achievements that stand with the best of the films that inspired him.
What’s Up, Doc?, the first film of his that I saw, is the last great screwball…
