A way with women
“You can call this piece ‘Peter Bogdanovich Has a Cold,’ says the director-writer-actor, noisily blowing his nose at the Ten-20 restaurant in the Sunset Strip’s Wyndham Bel Age hotel and referring to Gay Talese’s famous profile of Frank Sinatra. Bogdanovich is charming, funny and, often, directing.
His next destination is CAA, and on the ride over he’s free with directions and suggestions. When the car gets inconveniently stopped by a red light, he utters an audible -- albeit sweetly humorous -- “Damn.”
Bogdanovich has been in the business for more than 30 years that have taken him from the heights -- in 1971, his “The Last Picture Show” was hailed as the most important work by a young director since “Citizen Kane” -- to tragic lows -- the 1980 murder of then-love Dorothy Stratten. Today he is known as a preserver of Hollywood history as well as a contributor to it. Though subsequent films like “Daisy Miller” and “At Long Last Love” never caught box office fire, he has made critically acclaimed movies throughout his career, including the 1985 hit “Mask” and 2001’s “The Cat’s Meow” (not to mention the Streisand smash “What’s Up, Doc?”). He is undoubtedly an artist of his time influenced by artists of other times. Which brings us in a roundabout way to his latest project, “The Mystery of Natalie Wood.”
A three-hour biopic airing Monday night on ABC, the film paints Wood as very much of her own time and milieu -- Marilyn Monroe and James Dean as well as Warren Beatty make appearances -- but also as a woman who might be of our time.
A scene in Wood’s kitchen when a young Beatty tries to sell her on costarring in “Bonnie and Clyde” because it’s going to strike box office gold goes thus: “It’s funny about success. I mean, I’ve had quite a bit of it,” the thrice-Oscar-nominated actress -- as portrayed in a full-fledged performance by Justine Waddell -- tells him. “I’m 27. I don’t have a husband or a baby. I’m not in love with anybody, nobody’s in love with me. Big success, huh?” In that moment, she could be any woman of today.
The film, which is based on the books “Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood,” by Suzanne Finstad, and “Natalie and R.J.,” by Warren G. Harris, also traces Wood’s particular psychological idiosyncrasies. Starting with Wood as the young daughter of a controlling stage mother, it looks at her childhood in particular detail. (Of actress Grace Fulton’s startling performance as a traumatized and very young Natasha -- she plays her from 4 to 6 -- Bogdanovich says, “She’s a real natural.”)
The film incorporates documentary-style interviews with Wood’s real-life friends and family as well as bits of footage of the actress -- something Bogdanovich says he was only able to do because Waddell, who portrays the actress from 16 to 42, so closely resembles Wood.
Waddell also commits to -- and resembles -- Wood emotionally; Bogdanovich has said he didn’t even know she was an English actress until filming wrapped, as she spoke in her American accent both on and off the set. Among those who play off Wood’s character are Michael Weatherly as Robert Wagner, Matthew Settle as Beatty, and Alice Krige as Maria Gurdin, Wood’s mother.
Female intuition
Bogdanovich also brings a long-standing interest in women’s stories to the project. From Tatum O’Neal’s Oscar-winning portrayal of a savvy little girl in 1973’s “Paper Moon” to Kirsten Dunst’s on-point performance as Marion Davies in “The Cat’s Meow” -- and even in an episode of next season’s “Sopranos,” which he directed, that has “a lot of Edie [Falco] in it” -- he’s portrayed females with a particularly intuitive ear and eye.
What interests him about women? “I think the inequality in the world between men and women is probably the primary cause of our unrest,” he says and notes that, in Hollywood at least, inequality hasn’t always been the name of the game.
Biograph’s Florence Lawrence was “the first movie star,” he says, explaining that in 1910 she was the first to break the custom of actors working anonymously because fans demanded to know her name. He even believes that Hollywood helped women get the vote. Why? “Because
It’s a typically brazen statement -- “The golden age of Hollywood conclusively ended in 1962,” he says at another point, drawing the line at the moment Warner Bros. disbanded its cartoon division because “Bugs Bunny was dead” -- but one that also typically holds water.
Again, this may have to do with his being a student of such things from an early age. A friend of Orson Welles for decades (the elder director suggested he shoot “Picture Show” in black and white) and other legends, he recently perused some old diaries. “I kept them between 1965 and ’71 ... and every page was people I was calling and talking to, and they were all older. It was Fritz Lang or George Cukor or Howard Hawks.”
Bogdanovich was born to a painter father and gold frame-maker mother and grew up on New York’s Upper West Side. Part of his interest in women’s stories, he’s recently realized in therapy, may also date back to those times. “I identified with my father and empathized with my mother,” he says. (Yes, the shrink for the shrink in “The Sopranos” sees a shrink.) Like Wood, Bogdanovich was a child actor: At 15, he began the first of four years studying acting with Stella Adler.
Though Wood is portrayed as having a push-pull when it came to her career -- due in large part to her gender -- Bogdanovich blossomed into his, making the leap from actor to director spontaneously one day during Adler’s class.
At 32, Bogdanovich garnered his first Oscar nominations for best director and screenwriter (with Larry McMurtry) of “The Last Picture Show,” and two years later his second best director nomination arrived for “Paper Moon,” the film for which O’Neal became the youngest person ever to win an Academy Award. (Bogdanovich still recalls that one of his favorite reviews came for that film: “In the year’s wrap-up, [Ms. magazine] said something to the effect that in the whole of 1973, there was only one truly rounded female role and it was 9-year-old Tatum O’Neal.”)
Not long after came a period that was more fallow, if not creatively then commercially. Says his longtime friend Jeff Bridges, “Hollywood kind of knocked him off his throne, knocked his crown off his head.... He knows how to make a great movie for very little money, and he can also make a big-budget movie.” Included in the work of those years was the film that is his personal favorite, 1981’s “They All Laughed,” starring Audrey Hepburn, Ben Gazzara, John Ritter and Stratten.
A very public personal life
Bogdanovich has also, of course, been on the cultural radar screen because of his personal life. His affair with Cybill Shepherd, which began during the filming of “Picture Show” and led to his divorce from designer Polly Platt, captured the imagination of the public, and his relationship with Stratten followed.
The latter had a particularly profound effect on him, and he says it may have contributed to his interest in the Wood project. Though Wagner and the couple’s children decided not to take part in the film, he says, “I could understand where Wagner was coming from because I felt the same way about movies that were about Dorothy.... But I thought maybe I should do it because I was someone who could bring a more personal touch.”
Shepherd, who made her debut in “Picture Show” and lived with Bogdanovich in the ‘70s, says the difficult Hollywood years and Stratten’s death affected the director deeply. “Like in ‘The Magnificent Ambersons,’ well, Peter had an arrogant way and then he went through incredible suffering,” she says. Of Stratten’s murder, Shepherd adds, “to go through the loss of that and the insanity of that -- he came out the other side a much gentler and kinder and generous person.”
Bogdanovich has also continued a parallel career as an actor, appearing as Dr. Elliot Kupferberg on “The Sopranos” as Dr. Melfi’s psychiatrist, and in films like 1997’s “Mr. Jealousy” and last year’s Showtime miniseries “Out of Order.” Often cast as a therapist or movie director, he says he draws on his behind-the-camera experience to play both roles. “Being a therapist is not that different than being a director,” he explains. “You listen. And when you’re directing, you have to listen a lot.”
As for other projects, his book “Who the Hell’s in It? Portraits and Conversations” is coming out from Knopf in September, and it is made up of personal recollections of and interviews with 26 stars, from Cary Grant to Jerry Lewis to Lauren Bacall, and opens and closes with Gish and Monroe, respectively. He’s also working to secure rights to complete editing on Orson Welles’ “The Other Side of the Wind,” which stars John Huston as a film director. Bogdanovich would oversee the team of editors and says, “We’re closer than we’ve ever been to being able to do it.”
Though the auteur makes his home in New York these days -- he was in L.A. recently to shoot a spot on the ABC sitcom “8 Simple Rules
As for future Bogdanovich projects, Bridges says, “We’re hoping at some point to do the third installment of “The Last Picture Show.” It’s called ‘Duane’s Depressed’ ” (and would be based on another McMurtry novel). Bogdanovich also has several other projects he’d like to make, among them a film about ghosts. “It’s a picture I’ve been working on for about 20 years. It’s a comedy-drama, the kind of movie that nobody makes anymore. The ghosts are not scary; they’re all very friendly. I don’t think ghosts are scary,” he says from the passenger seat and smiles.
With that, we’re nearly done -- we’ve finished lunch and he’s even kindly held the tape recorder for a few more questions on that ride to CAA. He’s still battling that cold -- we can’t tell if he’s caught it or not -- but is off and running into the L.A. day.