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Peter Bogdanovich (born July 30, 1939) is an American film director, writer and actor born in Kingston, New York. more...

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He was part of the wave of "New Hollywood" directors (which included William Friedkin, Brian DePalma, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Michael Cimino and Francis Ford Coppola, among others), and was particularly relevant during the 1970's with his film The Last Picture Show.

Early life

The son of immigrants fleeing the Nazis, his father is a Serbian painter and pianist and his mother descended from a rich Austrian Jewish family, Bogdanovich was conceived in Europe but born in America. He was originally an actor in the 1950s, studying his craft with acting teacher Stella Adler (he was only 16 but had to lie about his age and say he was 18 to qualify), and appearing on television and in summer stock. In the early 1960s, Bogdanovich achieved notoriety programming movies at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. An obsessive cinema-goer, sometimes seeing up to 400 movies a year in his youth, Bogdanovich prominently showcased the work of American directors such as John Ford, whom he subsequently wrote a book about based on the notes he had produced for the MoMA retrospective of the director, and the then-underappreciated Howard Hawks. Bogdanovich also brought attention to such forgotten pioneers of American cinema as Allan Dwan.

Bogdanovich was influenced by the French critics of the 1950s who wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma, especially critic-turned-director François Truffaut. Before becoming a director himself, he built his reputation as a film writer with articles in Esquire. In 1968, following the example of Cahiers du Cinéma critics Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Éric Rohmer who had created the Nouvelle Vague ("New Wave") by making their own films, Bogdanovich decided to become a director. With his wife Polly Platt in tow, they packed their bags, took a grocery carriage full of books and loaded them into their car and headed for Los Angeles, skipping out on their rent in the process. Intent on getting into the industry, Bogdanovich's persistence paid off when he would bug publicists for movie premiere and industry party invites. At one screening, Bogdanovich was viewing a film with film director Roger Corman sitting behind him. The two struck up a conversation when Corman mentioned he liked a cinema piece Bogdanovich wrote for Esquire. It was in this conversation that Corman offered him a directing job which Bogdanovich didn't even blink before accepting. He went on to work with Corman on Targets and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. Bogdanovich later said of the Corman school of filmmaking, "I went from getting the laundry to directing the picture in three weeks. Altogether, I worked 22 weeks – preproduction, shooting, second unit, cutting, dubbing – I haven't learned as much since."

Read more at Wikipedia.org