Hollywood tributes are pouring in for acclaimed director Peter Bogdanovich who is being remembered as a “champion of cinema” and a “marvelous film critic and author.”
“Peter Bogdanovich passed away. He was a dear friend and a champion of Cinema. He birthed masterpieces as a director and was a most genial human. He single-handedly interviewed and enshrined the lives and work of more classic filmmakers than almost anyone else in his generation,” tweeted Guillermo del Toro.
“Peter Bogdanovich has passed away at the age of 82. He was a brilliant director (SAINT JACK is the masterwork you may not know) and also a marvelous film critic and author,” tweeted director Rod Lurie.
“Peter was my heaven & earth. A father figure. A friend. From “Paper Moon” to “Nickelodeon” he always made me feel safe. I love you, Peter,” wrote Oscar winning actress Tatum O’Neil on Instagram.
“In the 60s, at a crucial moment in the history of the movie business and the art of cinema, Peter Bogdanovich was right there at the crossroads of the Old Hollywood and the New,” Martin Scorsese said in a statement to The Wrap. “Curator, critic, historian, actor, director, popular entertainer…Peter did it all. As a programmer here in New York, he put together essential retrospectives of then still overlooked masters from the glory days of the studio system; as a journalist he got to know almost everybody, from John Ford and Howard Hawks to Marlene Dietrich and Cary Grant. Like many of us, he made his way into directing pictures by way of Roger Corman, and he and Francis Coppola broke into the system early on: Peter’s debut, Targets, is still one of his very best films. With The Last Picture Show, he made a movie that seemed to look backward and forward at the same time as well as a phenomenal success, followed quickly by What’s Up Doc and Paper Moon. In the years that followed, Peter had setbacks and tragedies, and he just kept going on, constantly reinventing himself. The last time I saw Peter was in 2018 at The New York Film Festival, where we appeared together on a panel discussion of his old friend Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind (in which Peter gives a great performance, and to which he dedicated a lot of time and energy throughout many years). Right up to the end, he was fighting for the art of cinema and the people who created it.”
Bogdanovich died Thursday morning, his manager told TheWrap. He was 82.
Bogdanovich is a two-time Oscar nominee and has an equally storied legacy working as a film critic, historian and speaker, and he had a close relationship with legendary actor and director Orson Welles. Frequently bespectacled and wearing an ascot, Bogdanovich was a well-known and respected figure in Hollywood, and his work on the screen has inspired numerous filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola and many more.
His breakout film “The Last Picture Show” from 1971 was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture, and won two for supporting actors Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman. The film, an intimate character study shot in black and white and set in 1951 about a small, North Texas town, also provided breakout roles for Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd and Ellen Burstyn. The film’s black and white aesthetic was unusual for the ’70s and especially for someone in the New Hollywood age of directors. But Bogdanovich frequently mentioned that he was urged by Orson Welles to shoot the film in black and white, with the “Citizen Kane” filmmaker proclaiming that the best screen performances in film were always shot in black and white, never color.
Here are some more tributes.