An Interview with Sidney Lumet by Peter Bogdanovich, Film Quarterly, VOL. XIV, NO. 2—WINTER 1960. A gem of an interview!

What have you found to be your main obstacle in film work?
For myself the main obstacle is the set—up, the film in America. The financial set—up, the method of making motion pictures, and the method of distribution is one that conspires to defeat freedom and good work. And I suppose it’s the age—old complaint, there’s no solution that I know of. I know every once in a while somebody just takes a camera and goes off into the street, but what if you had a piece that doesn’t belong in the street? What if your piece needs a sumptuousness and a sensuousness as part of its dramatic meaning? And, you know, documentaries and semi-documentaries are not the only method of work in film. And as soon as you get past that level, financially you’re caught in a miserable situation. Twelve Angry Men cost $343,000, which is ridiculously cheap, but that’s a rarity; it had one set, twelve actors, and a very tight shooting schedule of twenty days.

Many fine directors—Huston, Wilder, Bergman, Welles, Kubrick—either write their own screenplays or collaborate extensively with others on scripts. To date you haven’t done either; do you think you’d find it more satisfying to work on scripts rather than just do the best you can with material you are given?
It’s not “either/or.” I can’t write. And I have such respect for writers—I don’t understand how two writers collaborate, for instance—so that the method for myself is one simply of letting them do their work, then going back into work in terms of whatever specifics are needed, whether it’s structural or dialogue. On Fugitive Kind, for instance, there was a good deal of re—writing between the original draft and what wound up on the screen.
Did you have a say in that?
Oh, yeah. And the working procedure was that Tennessee and Meade [Roberts] brought in the first draft, then all of us together talk, talk, talk, talk, talk-back, another draft, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk-back, another draft—I think it was the fourth draft we used. —Sidney Lumet by Peter Bogdanovich, Film Quarterly, VOL. XIV, NO. 2-WINTER 1960.

John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich and Oja Kodar in Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind
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John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich and Oja Kodar in Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind

Source: chainedandperfumed.com

Interview with Peter Bogdanovich, 18th May 1979. With thanks to NellyM Previously on Cinephilia and Beyond: The Last Picture Show (1971) director Peter Bogdanovich’s commentary track The Last Picture Show, 1970 Revised Final Draft by Larry McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich [pdf]. (NOTE: For educational purposes only) More: Peter Bogdanovich
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Interview with Peter Bogdanovich, 18th May 1979.

With thanks to NellyM

Previously on Cinephilia and Beyond:

  • The Last Picture Show (1971) director Peter Bogdanovich’s commentary track
  • The Last Picture Show, 1970 Revised Final Draft by Larry McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich [pdf]. (NOTE: For educational purposes only)

More: Peter Bogdanovich

Director Roger Corman works out a scene of The Wild Angels with Peter Fonda, observed by assistant Peter Bogdanovich. My heart broke when I saw this in the documentary. He’s talking about director Roger Corman, who - fortunately - is still alive. Corman was one of the first people to trust Nicholson’s talent for acting, welcomed him in his ‘factory’ and offered him his first role as a protagonist in The Cry Baby Killer. Nicholson made his film debut in a low-budget teen drama The Cry Baby Killer, in 1958, playing the title role. For the following decade, Nicholson was a frequent collaborator with the film’s producer, Roger Corman. Corman directed Nicholson on several occasions, most notably in The Little Shop of Horrors, as masochistic dental patient Wilbur Force, and also in The Raven, The Terror, and The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
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Director Roger Corman works out a scene of The Wild Angels with Peter Fonda, observed by assistant Peter Bogdanovich.

My heart broke when I saw this in the documentary. He’s talking about director Roger Corman, who - fortunately - is still alive. Corman was one of the first people to trust Nicholson’s talent for acting, welcomed him in his ‘factory’ and offered him his first role as a protagonist in The Cry Baby Killer.

Nicholson made his film debut in a low-budget teen drama The Cry Baby Killer, in 1958, playing the title role. For the following decade, Nicholson was a frequent collaborator with the film’s producer, Roger Corman. Corman directed Nicholson on several occasions, most notably in The Little Shop of Horrors, as masochistic dental patient Wilbur Force, and also in The Raven, The Terror, and The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

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  • The Last Picture Show (1971) LaserDisc commentary with director Peter Bogdanovich
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The Last Picture Show, 1970 Revised Final Draft by Larry McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich [pdf]. (NOTE: For educational purposes only)

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Peter Bogdanovich: How about Rogopag?

Orson Welles: Can’t believe that. I was never in a picture with a name like that.

Bogdanovich: In one episode directed by Pasolini. You played a movie director.

Welles: Oh, yes… Censored, in Italy at least, after one single screening in Venice.

Bogdanovich: I didn’t think it was very good.

Welles: No? Why?

Bogdanovich: It was sort of obscure and arty—

Welles [laughs]: “Obscure and arty.” Simply because it didn’t happen on the banks of the Mississippi, it’s obscure and arty… You mustn’t be asked about anything that isn’t, you know, Judge Shit on the Range or something—

Bogdanovich [laughing]: Well, among other things wrong with it, they dubbed you into Italian.

Welles: I played it in Italian! The exhibitors must have thought the Italian public couldn’t stand my accent. They have a terrible snobbism about accents in Italy. So much so that lots of their leading actors—the girls especially—have never been heard in Italy speaking their own language in their own voices; they’re dubbed by radio actors.

Bogdanovich: I didn’t know that.

Welles: Yes. If your accent is vaguely of the north, let’s say, then everybody in the south hoots with laughter. So of course my own little touch of Kenosha would have been fatal. I read a poem in that one, and Pasolini told everyone that he’d never heard an Italian actor read Italian poetry with such simplicity and directness. He tried to get me to play a pig a couple of years ago when I was in Vienna.

Bogdanovich [laughing]: Really a pig?

Welles: A German pig. Something really obscene.

Bogdanovich: You like Pasolini?

Welles: Terribly bright and gifted. Crazy mixed-up kid, maybe—but on a very superior level. I mean Pasolini the poet, spoiled Christian, and Marxist ideologue. There’s nothing mixed up about him on a movie set. Real authority and a wonderfully free way with the machinery.

[This is Orson Welles]

Interviews with Orson Welles (1969)

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strangewood:

“One time everybody went to lunch except Orson and me. He had said he wasn’t hungry, so I’d said the same to keep him company. Ten minutes after we were alone, he said, “Are you hungry? I’m absolutely starving!” I admitted I was too, so we went into the kitchen and from the top of the refrigerator he pulled the largest bag of Fritos I had ever seen, ripped off a two-inch strip across the top of the bag, splashed out a large portion onto the kitchen table, sat, took a huge handful, and shoved it into his mouth. I did exactly the same and we sat there chewing seriously for several minutes before Orson could finally manage to say, confidentially, still chewing, and with a gleefully manic look: “You know… you don’t gain weight… if nobody sees you eating!”

— Peter Bogdanovich, This is Orson Welles [x]

Interviews with Orson Welles (1969)

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A Decade Under the Influence (2003)

A DECADE UNDER THE INFLUENCE from Kinam YUN on Vimeo.

Decade Under the Influence,” a feature-length version of a three-part series to be shown on the Independent Film Channel in August, is a breezy, uncritical, frankly nostalgic documentary about Hollywood in the late 1960’s and early 70’s. It was a time when the studios, reeling from their failure to attract the new generation of filmgoers, briefly threw their gates open to outsiders — mainly young directors formed by film schools and highly conscious of the European art film tradition.

Directed by the screenwriter Richard LaGravenese (“The Fisher King”) and the director Ted Demme (“Blow”), who died last year, the film is a standard-issue parade of talking heads interspersed with clips. It does little but reinforce the romantic notions about 70’s filmmaking that seem to have taken root among the current generation of Hollywood’s young Turks.

Here, indeed, are the usual suspects: Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich, Dennis Hopper and Paul Schrader, each trying to account in his own way for the fleeting moment of artistic freedom with which all their careers began.

Mr. Schrader presents the most cogent, and certainly funniest, explanation of the 70’s boom in personal filmmaking: the studios, stunned by big-budget bombs like “Hello Dolly” and “Star,” were willing to give money to anyone who could tell them he could provide what the new audience wanted. And since these young directors had no track record to speak of, there was nothing to prove they could not.

The picture, which opens today in New York, has the undiscriminating temperament of a fan, blithely placing Mr. Coppola’s magnificently made “Godfather” on the same plane as Mr. Hopper’s slapped-together, and today all but unwatchable, “Easy Rider.” As the clips mount up, the sense of smug, generational entitlement on which many of these films depended becomes depressingly clear: here, in clip after clip, are cocky young men (Jack Nicholson, Elliott Gould, Dustin Hoffman) venting their self-righteousness on cardboard establishment figures, a suspiciously large number of them played by women. (The excerpt from “M*A*S*H,” in which Mr. Gould and Donald Sutherland bully a couple of nurses, seems particularly egregious.)

The decade did, of course, produce two enduring feminist stars: Julie Christie, who speaks in the film with the radiant sincerity that has always been hers, and Jane Fonda, who does not appear but is ably represented by her best director, Sydney Pollack. Curious, then, that both are represented in “A Decade Under the Influence” by films in which they played prostitutes, “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” and “Klute.”

“A Decade Under the Influence” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or guardian) for its language and images of sexuality, violence and drug use.

Directed by Richard LaGravenese and Ted Demme

R, 108 minutes

Source: The New York Times

Everyone knows Peter Bogdanovich for his encyclopedic knowledge of the history of American film. The thousand stories man was friends with some of the most important filmmakers of the XXth century, Orson Welles, Howards Hawks, Raoul Walsh, etc., and interviewed hundreds of directors and actors. But the movie lover is also a director. Special mention: The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon. In this interview, he tells the story of his life as a director, reviews his films, their making, how studio choices and films were produced, and his approach as a craftsman, and also fun anecdotes about declining The Getaway, The Godfather or The Exorcist…

This long interview, 160 minutes, is a chance to listen to someone who spent so many hours listening to the others and to hear his take on the making of a film, the choice of a script, without compromise. He tells the happiest times of his life as well as the saddest after the murder of Dorothy Stratten, actress and playmate he hired in They All Laughed and with whom he fell madly in love. A video that everyone will appreciate and that should motivate all movie lovers to watching his films, his documentaries, especially the extraordinary This is Orson Wells, and to reading his books.

Source: en.acidtest.fr

The Last Picture Show, 1970 Revised Final Draft by Larry McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich

 

 

Source: ru-oldmovie.livejournal.com

Happy Birthday Mr. Peter Bogdanovich

Recordings of almost 4 hours of a series of interviews conducted by director/author Bogdanovich with Orson Welles between the years 1969 and 1972.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich had conducted extensive interviews with Welles, but a number of circumstances—including the director’s decision to compose an autobiography that he never got around to writing—kept the interviews out of the public eye. Finally edited and annotated by Jonathan Rosenbaum, these conversations give wonderful insights into Welles’s craft and personality. He discusses his forays into acting, producing, and writing as well as directing, his confidences and insecurities, and his plans for film projects that were either never made or only partially completed. He also offers insights into the triumph of Citizen Kane and later masterpieces like The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil, Othello, and Chimes at Midnight. His defense of his controversial adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial is so fascinating that listeners might want to rush out and rent the film.

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Interviews with Orson Welles (1969)

Recordings of almost 4 hours of a series of interviews conducted by director/author Bogdanovich with Welles between the years 1969 and 1972.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich had conducted extensive interviews with Welles, but a number of circumstances—including the director’s decision to compose an autobiography that he never got around to writing—kept the interviews out of the public eye. Finally edited and annotated by Jonathan Rosenbaum, these conversations give wonderful insights into Welles’s craft and personality. He discusses his forays into acting, producing, and writing as well as directing, his confidences and insecurities, and his plans for film projects that were either never made or only partially completed. He also offers insights into the triumph of Citizen Kane and later masterpieces like The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil, Othello, and Chimes at Midnight. His defense of his controversial adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial is so fascinating that listeners might want to rush out and rent the film.

Play / Download