Peter Bogdanovich (1939–2022)

In the style of a Woody Allen film with quirky characters, and this movie doesn't work as entertainment. The characters are neurotic more than quirky. Overall are moments of an interview with one character, which does not seem to be a useful element in the story. It's full of cliché gags, and not done in an interesting way. For example, two scenes of extended jugging calls on two phones. The story has an interesting twist with Owen Wilson's character; the characters all have overlapping scenarios and cross paths—not interesting tension, just extended tension. Wonderful cast, so the acting is spot on. A good director, yet in my opinion, this movie is not worth watching.
— Rebecca… (plus d'informations)

The book is a collection of interviews of 16 movie directors that the author knew, and, as a bonus, he discusses the scandals and tribulations of his own life and career in the book’s introduction. The interviews were done at various times between the 1960s and the 1990s; many were previously published as magazines articles. Several of the directors did work in silent films. If you have an interest in movies, the book should be broadly entertaining. Some of the directors' life stories, their revelation of how certain famous scenes were shot, their complaints about their producers and heads of studios, and their stories about actors are often both interesting and amusing.

Did you know that Lana Turner was originally cast to play the lead in Anatomy of a Murder, but she refused to wear a pair of slacks that the director, Otto Preminger, had selected? Preminger told her agent that if she didn’t like it, she could turn the picture down. Preminger said that she probably thought he was bluffing, but the role went to Lee Remick.

Howard Hawks, while discussing Barbary Coast (1935), commented that it was the first time he had used Walter Brennan, and told the story that a man came up to him in tears after the movie’s preview and said that he didn’t know how to thank Hawks. Hawks didn’t know who he was until Brennan took out his teeth. He had never seen him except in makeup and Brennan was playing (and often played) characters who were older than he was.

The directors interviewed are Allan Dwan, Raoul Walsh, Fritz Lang, Josef von Sternberg, Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey, George Cukor, Alfred Hitchcock, Edgar G. Ulmer, Otto Preminger, Joseph H. Lewis, Chuck Jones, Don Siegel, Frank Tashlin, Robert Aldrich, and Sidney Lumet.… (plus d'informations)

This is the companion volume to Bogdanovich’s Who the Hell Made It in which the author has written entertaining summaries of the lives and work of 25 famous actors. The chapters are centered around the author’s interactions or relationships with the actors – if he had any. In some cases, e.g. Marilyn Monroe, his personal relationship may be just that he once sat behind them in an acting class. In several cases, the chapters are constructed from earlier journalistic pieces PB had researched and written.

There is a lot of interesting historical information here, as well as the author's personal insight into the psyches of the actors he knew or interviewed. Yet after a while, the chapters sometimes seemed like a farrago of nostalgia, overblown appreciation of the mediocre, narcissism, and gossip. I felt that his other volume about directors told me much that I didn’t know, but that I didn’t benefit nearly as much from being told how funny PB thought that Jerry Lewis was or what great actors Dean Martin and John Wayne were. After all, we are unlikely to know how Lubitsch made his movies (or how movies are made at all), but anybody can watch Rio Bravo or The Bellboy.… (plus d'informations)