Peter Bogdanovich never had a bigger fan than Peter Tonguette. While still in middle school, Tonguette began devouring Bogdanovich’s writings as well as his filmography. “When I read in his book of interviews This is Orson Welles that he was sixteen when he first saw Citizen Kane, I promised myself that I would see the film at the same age,” Tonguette writes—preferably in a run-down art house just like his idol. He had to settle for watching Citizen Kane on PBS, but oh well, he saw it by the time he blew out 16 candles.
So, imagine his trembling hands when, in 2003, he dialed Bogdanovich’s New York number and asked for an interview. Tonguette’s book opens with that long-distance exchange and—fortunately for both parties—Bogdanovich responded generously to the unknown caller. In Picturing Peter Bogdanovich: My Conversations with the New Hollywood Director, Tonguette recounts without entirely explaining his fandom and sketches out an overview of Bogdanovitch’s life (The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon are among his hits). Half of the book is a Q&A composed from interviews Tonguette conducted from 2003 through 2019, with pieces stitched together to form one flowing conversation.
What emerges is Bogdanovich’s unique role as a bridge between Hollywood’s 1930s-‘40s Golden Age and the “New Hollywood,” the groundbreaking American cinema that sprang up in the late ‘60s and petered out by the end of the ‘70s as studios turned to blockbusters, tent-pole pictures and franchises. Bogdanovich came to Hollywood not to make a revolution but in search of the old timers, directors like Howard Hawks and John Ford, and was determined not only to document them for posterity but to be their friend. His filmmaking career began under B-movie maestro Roger Corman, for whom he turned a five-day shoot with Boris Karloff into a critique of the no-holds barred direction of contemporary cinema—and contemporary society. “Puzzlement and dread,” according to Tonguette, summarize Bogdanovich’s perspective on the modern world.
The picture Tonguette draws of Bogdanovich is of a thoughtful artist and classy person whose sensibility formed early yet remained capable—indeed, willing—to evolve. Despite Tonguette’s enthusiasm for Bogdanovich’s lesser-known work, the director’s greatest accomplishment (commercially, artistically) remains The Last Picture Show (1971). Tonguette paraphrases Roger Ebert’s remark that it was a film that “did not just take place in the past but somehow was of the past.”
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