'Noooooo' I heard Q exclaim from the other room. Idly intrigued, I wandered in about ten minutes later (not really) to find out what was up. 'Peter Bogdanovich is dead'. It was quite a shock. We had spoken to him about a year ago, and he seemed absolutely fine. He was only 82.
He had had quite an incredible career, though now you say to people The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon they look blankly at you - not Alec Baldwin, though, who yesterday said Paper Moon was one of his favourite comedies. By his own admission Peter made some questionable choices along the way, but we consider him one of the Greats, and They All Laughed his masterpiece, a film which - as I've said in this blog before - should be taught at film school. His books also should be obligatory academic texts (and they're really funny - the way he writes Cary Grant's pronunciation, for example, is hilarious).
He was a great director firstly because he could act - he studied as a teenager with the legendary Stella Adler - then because he had studied and interviewed so many great directors, he really knew the medium well, and when you see a film like They All Laughed or The Last Picture Show, you can feel John Ford or Howard Hawks behind the camera with him. And his later pictures which no one ever remembers, like The Cat's Meow, To Sir With Love II and The Mystery of Natalie Wood were nothing if not interesting, and highly underrated.
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