The director on his films, marriage and infidelity, and the deaths he didnt mourn.
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
This interview originally ran in 2019.
We are republishing it followingthe death of Peter Bogdanovichon January 6, 2022.
I dont judge myself on the basis of my contemporaries, he told the New YorkTimesin 1971.
I certainly dont think Im anywhere near as good as they are, but I think Im pretty good.
Hide that book, will you?
That is Dorothys mother.
Thank you, darling, he answers every time.
You grew up in New York.
Your father was a painter.
I understand there was something peculiar about his hair.It grew upwards for some reason.
He didnt trust shampoo, so he used Listerine to clean his hair.
It looked all right.
Its an antiseptic, you know?
I read something about your mother and I didnt know whether it could possibly be true.
Did you have a brother die before you were born?Yeah.
I didnt even know about any of it until I was about 7.
I was in the room of the apartment where my father painted.
I saw a sketchy painting of a young boy with blond hair, and I said, Whos that?
And he said, Thats your brother.
I said, My brother?
Yes, he died.
And he didnt say much else.
My mother never spoke of him.
She told me about it, but it was very difficult for her to talk about even then.
She got choked up and she couldnt go on.
I was born into that tragedy, actually.
Was it an accident?It was a kitchen accident.
I dont know how they survived that moment.
It happened I think in 1938.
The kid was a year and a half old.
I cannot even imagine.Terrible.
Neither of them ever quite got over it.
I think she was a good mother.
She was warm, but she was not cuddly.
She was a bit distant that way.
Was it the same apartment where you grew up?No, it was in the former Yugoslavia.
It happened in the old country, and then she got pregnant with me right after that.
She was pregnant on the ship when they came over to America.
He was a really great painter and very highly praised in the former Yugoslavia.
But he gave all that up to save my mother and her family because they were Jewish.
He wasnt, but they were.
That was the ostensible reason, yeah.
But my father felt the war was coming.
Ellen Burstyn, Eileen Brennan, and Cloris Leachman are all so amazing.
You just dont see many films that have so many great female parts.Well, thats true.
Do you think youre a good director of women?Well, I like women.
I dont know if Im particularly good at women.
I never thought of it that way.
She kept saying, I want to rehearse that last scene with you.
I said, No, I dont want to see it.
I wanted it to be fresh to me.
She could rehearse it a hundred times, but I didnt want to see it until the end.
We did the scene, and what you see is that first take.
At that point, you had directed onlyTargets,a low-budget film nobody had seen.
Like Ben Johnson, Cloris had been around for years.
Everybody in town knew them and liked them, but they never had a great part.
So I just thought that they might win an Oscar,and they did.
He said, Reading your reviews is like opening presents at Christmas.
He just wanted to make another picture; he didnt want to think about the past.
We talked about this recently, Cybill and I. I was very attracted to her.
Were you trying to elicit a performance or were you wooing her?That was definitely a pass.
She had been dating Jeff Bridges.Yeah.
Subsequent to that [scene], Jeff went and had a week of military training.
You would take a week or two weeks in training in lieu of being drafted.
So after he left, I said to Cybill, Youre going to be alone for a while.
She said, Im always alone.
I thought,Thats definitely a hint.
So Jeff comes back and basically one of the movies plotlines is playing out on set.Yeah.
I think she told him that she was seeing me.
I remember having a conversation with Jeff near the bus, for some reason.
I remember Cybill sticking her head out the window of it to hear what we were saying.
Jeff was saying, Be careful.
Polly figured it out and moved out of our suite.
I didnt know how to deal with it.
Cybill and I kept saying this was just during the picture.
We were not going to be going out after the movies over.
But we fell in love.
But when we got back to our lives, we just couldnt stop seeing each other.
We met at the Holiday Inn in Hollywood.
She got me stoned for the first time.
Whatd you think?It was one of the great experiences of my life.
You were a little square, werent you?Yeah.
They offered it to me, and Id say, No, no, I dont do that.
They talked about not doing [The Last Picture Show] with me because Im square.
Then I not only got stoned but I had an affair and left my wife.
So I wasnt square after all.
You know the story about when Cybill came to audition for me?
Why would she want to take credit?
It totally destabilized her life.She took credit for things she had nothing to do with.
So at the checkout, there was a copy ofGlamour,a magazine I had never heard of.
But I thought to myself the look on her face belies the sentiment.
She doesnt look like she really loves me in the picture.
She was Cybill Shepherd.
She gave it to me typed out, and I thought Cybill spelled C-Y-B-I-L-L is a bit much.
Sal gave the book to me after three people gave me the same fucking book.
I said to Polly, Why dont you read this and tell me what its sort of saying.
The script was based on the book.
How could I write the script with Larry [McMurtry] unless I read the book?
She died in 2011, so we cant hear her version of it.
But youve obviously heard this before.Yeah, she lied.
She did earn a lot of credit, but she didnt direct anything.
She was very fun to bounce things off of andhad good ideas.
Is it true you were offered bothThe GodfatherandThe Exorcist?AndThe Way We Were.AndChinatown.And just about everything.
Do you regret turning them down?No, I didnt feel I made a mistake.
I said, Im not interested in the Mafia.
William Friedkin once said that casting Shepherd in the movies afterThe Last Picture Showwas a huge mistake.
That she didnt have the acting ability and that you had somehow lost your mind.
He called you pussy-struck.Pussy-whipped?
No, he said pussy-struck.Thats a crude way of putting it.
Shes very good in the pictures we did together.
And we were rich and we were famous and we did movies together.
Sometime in the mid-70s, when we were getting terrible press, Cary Grant called me.
He says, Peter, will you for Christs sake stop telling people youre happy.
And stop telling them youre in love.
I said, Why, Cary?
Because theyre not happy and theyre not in love.
Why?He thought it was dangerous.
Because people hated me for it.
Welles was living in your house in Bel-Air around then.
You had 7,000 square feet, so obviously you had room for him.He had his own wing.
Do you know the story about when Cybill smelled smoke?
She was walking past Orsons wing, and she said, Orson, I smell something burning.
Are you all right?
He said, Privacy, like!
So later on, the housekeeper said, Mr. B?
Mr. Welles had an accident.
She holds up this white terrycloth robe with a big burn hole.
He said he would fix it and he never did, but it doesnt matter.
Orson was a lot of fun to be around a lot of the time.
He was particularly heavy then.
Was he a stress eater?I dont know.
I do, he says.
I went to the other room and said, Somebody ate all the ice cream.
And he says [makes guilty look], I didnt.
He was very nice.
He invited me over and I said okay.
I was having some problems.
I didnt have a house or something.
Did you watch a lot of movies with him?
His taste is a bit out there.Yes, he was a little odd.
He wanted to look at a lot of movies, so I sat with him.
He fell in love with a director named William Witney who made some Lone Ranger movies or something.
Not my cup of tea, but I liked being with Quentin.
LovesThey All Laughed.I sat next to him when he screened it in his projection room for a whole audience.
He was quoting the lines before they would happen.
Finally, I said, Quentin, would you cut it out?
He knew every line in the picture.
Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach love it too.
They call me Pop, and I allow it.
You and Ben Gazzara, who played Jack, saw a lot of prostitutes there.
How did that work?Wed invite them over.
Benny would call them out there: Mama, send over two girls.
We did that a lot.
The book was all about a pimp and trying to start a whorehouse.
And the trouble was, there were no women characters in the book [by Paul Theroux].
So we had to put in some female characters.
So we started seeing hookers to talk to them about it.
And sleep with them?Yeah.
Was Ben married?Yeah, he was married.
But I think Ben was always fucking around.
I dont think he needed a picture to do it.
Did you pay them?Yeah.
I got off the plane and said to the cabdriver, Where can I get some girls?
And he said, Ill take you.
This girl was very sweet and she told me her story, which was sad.
They all had sad stories.
I felt bad for her and I gave her $5,000 to go home, and she did.
That was where she was going.
And I used that line in the picture.
Saint Jackis a very good movie.
But its not one you could make today.Probably not.
I didnt want to get into the grim part about hookers, because it wasnt grim with him.
That was why they call him Saint Jack.
So I found somebody to be with if Cybill couldnt be there.
She got very upset and left.
I remember throwing a glass ashtray down on the ground that shattered.
She went home and had an affair with this guy in Memphis and got pregnant.
I was very upset about it.
In the movie, Pootss character seems to truly enjoy the sex.
Do you think prostitutes ever enjoy the sex?If its good.
Oh, come on.
You dont think its just an acting role for them?Maybe.
But I dont think so.
A few days later, I got a letter from him, which had two letters in an envelope.
One was a long apology, that it was a betrayal, and he was very sorry.
The other was a short note that said, You deserved it, basically.
He said take your pick.
I can understand the apology.
But why would you have deserved it?He was jealous, I guess.
I had never done anything against him.
I assumed you loved him.I loved Orson.
And I think he loved me too, actually.
I liked Burt, too, but he was his own worst enemy in a way.
Youre going to accept it, then shut up.
He wrote that he was loaded through the whole picture.Not true.
He said he was drinking vodkaandorange juice.Maybe, but it didnt show.
He was all right when we were shooting.
But I do remember one moment on [1976 comedy]Nickelodeonwhen I knew he wanted to hit me.
He looked at me like he wanted to punch me out.
[Barbra] Streisand, Id give Streisand 99 out of 100.
She did everything I asked her to do.
And she was fun to work with.
Burt was a bit of a prick.
So who was the most difficult actor youve ever worked with?Cher.
Tell me about your experience with her onMask.Well, she didnt trust anybody, particularly men.
She doesnt like men.
Thats why shes named Cher: She dropped her fathers name.
Sarkisian, it is.
She won Best Actress at Cannes because I shot her very well.And she cant sustain a scene.
So I shot a lot of close-ups of her because shes very good in close-ups.
Her eyes have the sadness of the world.
I did a number of times.
What did Cher think of you?Cher doesnt like me.
Why?Well, because I didnt like her.
She was always looking like someone was cheating her.
But finally, after about seven weeks of this, we started getting to like each other.
She said, you know, we dont watch out, we might end up liking each other.
I said that would be amazing.
It was fucking dynamite.
Bruce was the hottest thing going.
At that point,Born in the USAwas the most successful album in the history of albums.
Didnt she get an Oscar for it?She gets Oscars for everything.
It was a boring picture.
So Frank Price wanted to see to it thatOut of Africagot a lot of attention andMaskas little as possible.
So he insisted on taking that music out.
I shouldnt have done that, but I did because I was so pissed off.
What did you sue for?For fucking up my picture.
Is that the legal term?Yeah, fucking up my picture.
Taking out the music and taking out the sequences.
What became of the suit?It was dropped.
The casting ofThey All Laughedblows my mind.
Its called getting to know your actors.
Colleen was somewhere after Polly and Cybill.
When Cybill and I broke up, we had a brief thing.
We were very attracted to each other.
It was just so complicated during that time period.
Did you like the idea of casting all these women youd been involved with?
Theres kind of a screwball aspect to it.There is a screwball aspect.
Also we wrote the parts for them because I knew them.
I thought it would work, and it did.
And Colleen and Dorothy became very close on the picture.
Patti was jealous of Dorothy.
But Dorothy and John Ritter got along wonderfully.
John was one of my dearest friends.
It was so sad when he died.So sad.
I was with him the day before.
He had asked me to act a part in his new series that he was doing,8 Simple Rules.
He loaned me a lot of money when I needed it afterTheyAll Laughed: $350,000.
He didnt ask if I needed the money.
You based that on your own situation, right?Yeah, yeah.
Based on the outlines of her situation.
I didnt know the real story about it, though.
I never met him, I never even saw him.
Never in the same room with him, even.
And I didnt know what he was like.
That wasnt the problem.
That wasnt what caused the murder.
And she went to see him about a week before that and had a nice time with him.
And then Hefner barred him from the Mansion.
You dont think getting barred from the Mansion might just have been the straw that broke the camels back?
He must have been enraged to learn about the affair.He knew about that affair for a long time.
He never did anything about it.
The Mansion was his bread and butter.
The murder was caused because Hefner banned him from the Mansion.
She told me that.
She didnt want to, but she was put in a position where she had to.
It was just, she had no other choice, I guess.
Because of what you wrote about theculture ofPlayboy,you were described as a feminist.Well, I was.
I hadnt been before.
Hefner was apparently very much affected by this book.
I destroyed the wholePlayboymyth which, by the way, was a myth.
It was just another way of getting laid faster.
But you were a beneficiary, no?I guess I was to a degree, yeah.
And I said, We wouldve met sometime.
But she was right.
Were you depressed after this?Terribly fucked up.
More fucked up than Ive ever been in my life.
You know, when Dorothy was killed, nobody called me from Hollywood.
Nobody except the people working the picture who knew her or something like that.
Nobody called me except Cary Grant.
Cary was very sweet.
Id assumed youd been showered with flowers.Didnt want to touch it.
After she was killed, I didnt go out much.
Then one day, about six months after it happened, I went to a dentist appointment.
As Im leaving the dentist, whos coming up the street but Billy Wilder.
I said, Hi, Billy.
He says, Hi.
Without even a blink, he says, You know that whole story about the girl that got murdered?
The plot is not right.
That might be the most fucked-up thing Ive ever heard.Yeah, I know.
This is beyond German bad taste.
Its just unbelievable bad taste.
I was young and successful.
He managed to fuck up two pictures I was going to do.
One wasPrivate Lives.The executives asked him what he thought of the idea.
He said, Bad idea.
That was the end of that.
You know what he did when Tony Curtiss son died of an overdose?
He sent him a telegram saying, Like father, like son.
Do you like burying assholes?
What about when Hef died?Oh boy, I had a celebration then.
He was a piece of shit.
Because I was so depressed.
I just didnt give a shit.
I wanted to die in some way.
I wanted to forget it.
Just end it all.
Everyone said to me, Dont do this.
Dont buy the picture.
Theyll fuck you every time if they can.
I just said, Fuck you.
I mortgaged my house.
Blew $5 million.
It was all I had.
It must have been hard to leave that house in Bel-Air.Yeah.
Louise and I still talk about it.
It was a nice house.
She owned it for a while, and then she sold it.
I dont know who owns it now.
They All Laughedgot some good reviews.
In fact, I didnt think it would do well.
And when it [failed], I thought,Our child is dead too.
And he said, Yeah.
I said, Well, why are you doing that?
He said, Well, we think its a good story.
Well, its not about you; its about her.
I said, I dont care if its about me.
I dont give a shit about that.
Let me just put it this way, Bob.
If it had happened to you, I wouldnt do a movie about it.
The movie didnt do well, and it was the last picture he did.
He shouldnt have done it.
He died four years later in 1987.
His career died, and then he died.Pretty much, yeah.
I remember I had to go see it because Nelly was portrayed in the movie.
They didnt use my name, so I had nothing to say.
I went to see it for legal reasons and it was horrible.
I thought to myself,Okay, Bob, I get it.
Youre a fucking asshole too.Jealous, envious, fuck them all.
What did Orson say about Dorothy?Nothing.
I never spoke to Orson about it.
I wasnt talking to Orson much then.
I said, Jesus, Orson, I feel like I made so many mistakes.
That was the last time we spoke.
What do you think the mistakes were?A lot.
I shouldve known more about a lot of things, but I didnt know things.
I just, I dont know.
Its too sad to talk about.
Is the trauma of Dorothys death something you still live with?In a way, yeah.
You dont get over a thing like that, you know.
I got a bad case of PTSD.
So they said Id had an affair with her mother, which was ridiculous.
We call it our anniversary, when we met.
She was 11 and a half.
You and Louise married in 1988.
So when did you fall in love?Sometime in there.
Its like a shipwreck.
They liked her too.
You divorced in 2001.
Why did you break up?Well, you know, she was about 20 when we got married.
She needed to see the world out there.
Id tried to save her from the male shits in her world by marrying her.
And she came to understand that.
So she wanted to sow her oats?I think so.
It seems like its a running theme in your life, saving people.Saving people, yeah.
Hadnt thought of it that way.
I was staying at Brett Ratners guesthouse for about two years, and then I moved back in here.
Now Im looking for a house.
He said, Do you want to stay at my place?
So I left here and went there.
Now Im back here.
I was in an adjacent bungalow.
Hed come down and introduce people to me all the time, call me his roommate.
He was a very nice guy.
But I didnt really talk to him much about it.
Do you have any more love affairs in you?No.
Just happy to be with Louise.
I love her and her mother, I love them both, and we like being with each other.
Shes the only person I care about that way.
Its a great song.
We have separate bedrooms.
We dont fuck around.
