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And suddenly, Peter Bogdanovich is everywhere.
A retrospective of Bogdanovichs films, including many of his directors cuts, starts at that same theater today.
(A Keaton retrospective will follow a week later.)
Both titles are screening at the New York Film Festival this weekend, ahead of their November Netflix releases.
So, it seemed like a good time to talk to Bogdanovich.
Your Buster Keaton documentary has a somewhat unorthodox structure.
I didnt want to end with the diminishing returns of Busters later decades.
I had that idea fairly early on, before I started making the movie.
So he took me to see silent pictures at MoMA when I was 5 or 6 years old.
But one of my everlasting regrets is that I didnt meet Buster.
I could have, but I waited too long.
We lived very close to each other, I found out when he died.
I was just about to start tracking him down.
But I have made a few comedies.
Ive done it on the stage, too.
One of my biggest successes on Summer Stage was a comedy calledOnce in a Lifetimeby Kaufman and Hart.
Is there a secret to constructing a great comedic set piece?Comedy has to be built carefully.
The topper is the guy runs out and the whole van falls over.
The chase was inspired by Buster Keaton at the time.
He didnt actually do a lot of chases, but his dynamic inspired me.
Another example in my pictures is [in]Paper Moon.
We were finishing the picture and we didnt have an ending.
The one in the script I didnt like, and I didnt like the end of the book either.
Then I remembered what Id been told by McCarey and others about paying things off.
We had started with that at the beginning of the picture.
Thats where I got the idea that she runs off after him.
I also realized that we hadnt paid off the photograph of her with the cardboard moon.
And we hadnt paid off the brakes on the truck being defective.
So put all that together andthat was my ending.
That sounds not unlike Buster Keatons method of shooting his films without a finished script.
Do you like that approach?They never had a script on some films.
They had a good beginning, good ending, and they said the middle would take care of itself.
I liked doing it.
It was a little dangerous, but luckily, I had producers that didnt bother me.
Because theres 25 minutes missing [from the release version].
I wanted to reissueThe Last Picture Showin theaters before we released the new film.
While we were shooting, Frank Price replaced him.
He didnt want to reissueThe Last Picture Show.
He referred to that as cheating.
I thought that was the stupidest thing Id ever heard.
And the movie wasnt available at the time.
What happened onMask?Maskwasnt the version that I wanted when it was originally released.
It made money, but it would have made a lot more money.
My version was a lot less depressing tragic, but a lot less depressing.
I had to wait 20 years to get that right.
So, the version that came out on DVD was the one I wanted.
Its not just artistic differences.
Usually, its ego, and power struggles and all that testosterone-fueled bullshit.
[The Frank Price regime at MCA/Universal] was a terrible regime.
There were political reasons why he didnt want my cut.
They hadnt set the movie up.
The picture they were pushing wasOut of Africa, which was relentlessly boring, I thought.
Lets talk aboutThe Other Side of the Wind, which you helped complete.
The script was pretty clear, but he rewrote it constantly.
I was on the film for part of it.
And we had a very good editor, Bob Murawski.
Orson had asked me suddenly one afternoon if I would finish the film if anything happened to him.
I said, Orson, nothings gonna happen to you!
He said, I know, I know, but if it does, promise me.
So, when he died, I felt I had to keep my promise.
We tried for years to get somebody to back us.
In fact, Showtime agreed to do it three different times, but we couldnt get the rights cleared.
People who owned various rights were being very difficult.
and then Netflix stepped up [to] the plate and really finished it.
We even went over budget and they didnt complain.
They were very supportive.
It was pretty strange for me.
I hadnt seen any of the dailies, and there I am in my 30s.
Im now in my 70s.
It was weird seeing that for the first time.
I thought, What ever happened to that actor?
Im very pleased we finished it, and I think Orson would be pleased, too.
The only thing we had to add was the opening monologue setting up the picture.
He wrote it, but he never recorded it.
Frank Marshall said to me, Why dont you do it?
We spoke about two or three weeks before he died, and everything was fine between us.
We loved each other, but things got in the way.
That drove us apart.
Did you ever make up with Burt Reynolds?We never had a falling out, really.
I didnt see Burt at all after we finished shooting.
He was a little nasty about me in his autobiography.
I liked Burt, but he was a bit of a shit.
He blew with the wind.
He very much followed the box office.
He was very affected by how people were talking about his films.
They were two of his best performances, but they werent successful, so he turned against them.
I said, You stretched well.
I remember one moment inNickelodeon, where he did something with a rifle.
And I said, That was a bit Burt Reynolds, wasnt it?
He looked like he was going to hit me.
But he did it differently in the end.
There was more of it in the 60s.
Younger directors seem to care a lot less about older pictures.
You talk to younger kids about silent movies and tfhey look at you like youre talking about Sanskrit.
Same with black and white they hate it.
The first 30 years of talking pictures were dominated by directors who had grown up making silent pictures.
Hitchcock, McCarey, Hawks, [John] Ford they all started in silents.
They knew that telling the stories visually was the art.
