Picturing Peter Bogdanovich: My Conversations with the New Hollywood Director

by Peter Tonguette

In 1971, Newsweek heralded The Last Picture Show as "the most impressive work by a young American director since Citizen Kane ." Indeed, few filmmakers rivaled Peter Bogdanovich's popularity over the next decade. Riding the success of What's Up, Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973), Bogdanovich became a bona fide celebrity, making regular appearances in his own movie trailers, occasionally hosting late-night television shows, and publicly advocating for mentors John Ford and Howard Hawks. No director of his era surpassed his ability to capture an audience's imagination.

In Picturing Peter Bogdanovich : My Conversations with the New Hollywood Director, journalist and critic Peter Tonguette offers a film-by-film journey through the director's life and work. Beginning with a string of 1970s classics, Tonguette explores well-known films such as Saint Jack (1979), They All Laughed (1981), and Noises Off (1992), as well as the director's work on stage and television. Drawing on interviews conducted over sixteen years, Tonguette pairs his analysis with an extensive, previously unpublished series of Q&As with Bogdanovich. These exclusive interviews reveal behind-the-scenes details about the director's life, work, and future plans. Part memoir, part biography, this book offers a uniquely intimate portrait of one of Hollywood's most underappreciated directors.

246 pages, Hardcover

Published July 21, 2020

Reviews

[J.r. Molina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peter Bogdanovich is my favorite director and I loved this book because it gave me insights to his thought process and method, but I really can’t recommend it to people who aren’t fans. It’s so inside baseball about his life but that’s what i enjoyed about it

[Andy Rausch · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was lucky enough to be read this book as a professional evaluator prior to its release. I was quite excited about being asked by the University of Kentucky Press to do this because the author, Peter Tonguette, had a tremendous impact on my writing career with his book ORSON WELLES REMEMBERED. That was the first time I had ever seen anyone put together a collection of interviews about a single artist's work. That book has since inspired me to do similar volumes on Quentin Tarantino, Stephen King, and Elmore Leonard. And having read Tonguette's work and even having had some communications with him about a decade prior, I had a pretty good idea this was going to be a great book.

First off, let me make it clear that I did not give this book a five-star review because I feel I owe some sort of debt to Tonguette. I do, but if this book were a poor one I would have told that to the University Press of Kentucky and I would say it now. But no, this book is a fitting tribute to Bogdanovich in that it's similar in structure and intent to the book Bogdanovich himself did with Welles (THIS IS ORSON WELLES, 1992). It's also just as good and well-prepared as that. This is a marvelous book and it does a tremendous job of painting a very rich picture of Bogdanovich's career and capturing much of that in Bogdanovich's own words. Tonguette always knows just what to say or ask and he proves himself to be a trustworthy authority on the filmmaker's oeuvre.

This is a fantastic book and I would recommend it to anyone interested in knowing more about Bogdanovich, his films, the American "New Wave" of the 1970s, and filmmaking in general. Bravo, Mr. Tonguette, bravo!

[I.D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is here is excellent but it’s too brief! The writings on his movies are in some cases barely more than a paragraph to a page and the bulk of the book is a Q & A. Now it’s a fascinating one for sure but there needs to be more here to make this definitive. A great supplement but not a end all book. At times Tonguette can come across as sycophantic but he obviously loves his subject so his enthusiasm shiva through. I just wish he’d put more work into this and expanded it into something larger in scope.

[Charles Gee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Divided into two parts. A shortish biography on Peter Bogdanovich followed by a long Q&A with Bogdanovich.

The Q&A is well worth reading for anyone interested in film. The biography can and should be skipped.

There is a good biography on Peter Bogdanovich to be had but this is not it. Embarrassingly hagiographic and filled with the intrusive presence of the author’s own life and opinions on the era in which Peter worked, most of it overly critical, in a wrong-headed attempt to make Bogdanovich’s career shine all the more.

[David Brimer · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting mix of short biography and longer q&a on the life and career of Bogdanovich. Missing detail on some of the smaller films (“Nickelodeon” especially), one gets a respectable overview of the man’s oeuvre.