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    Clu Gulager, Rugged Character Actor of Film and TV, Dies at 93

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    On TV, he played Billy the Kid on the “The Tall Man” and was seen on the long-running “The Virginian.” His movies ranged from “The Killers” to “The Last Picture Show.” Clu Gulager, a rugged character actor who appeared in critically acclaimed films like “The Last Picture Show” as well as low-budget horror movies, and who memorably portrayed gunslingers on two television westerns, died on Friday at his son John’s home in Los Angeles. He was 93.John Gulager confirmed the death. He said his father’s health had been in decline since he suffered a back injury several years ago.Mr. Gulager’s rough-hewed good looks and Southwestern upbringing made him a natural for the westerns that proliferated on television in the 1950s and ’60s. He was seen regularly on “Wagon Train,” “Bonanza,” “Have Gun — Will Travel” and other shows.An appearance as the hit man Mad Dog Coll on “The Untouchables” in 1959 persuaded the writer and producer Sam Peeples to cast Mr. Gulager as the legendary outlaw Billy the Kid on “The Tall Man,” a television series he was planning about Billy’s friendship with Sheriff Pat Garrett. (By most accounts the title was a reference to Garrett’s honesty and rectitude, and to the show’s opening credits, in which Garrett’s long shadow stretches in front of him.)“He’s exactly what we were looking for, an actor with a flair for the unusual,” Mr. Peeples said in a TV Guide profile of Mr. Gulager shortly after the show first aired in 1960. “He lends a certain psychological depth to Billy.”The friendship between the lawman (played by Barry Sullivan) and the gun-toting rustler was fictionalized and greatly exaggerated over the show’s 75 episodes; many historians believe that Sheriff Garrett actually shot and killed Billy in 1881. Their fatal encounter never happened on the show, which ended abruptly in 1962.Mr. Gulager played a more lawful character on “The Virginian,” the first of three 1960s western series that ran for 90 minutes, which starred James Drury and Doug McClure. Mr. Gulager’s character on the show, Emmett Ryker, was introduced in the show’s third season when a rich man tried to hire him to murder a rancher. Although he refused to be a hired killer, he was framed for killing the man. After clearing his name, Ryker channeled his penchant for violence into the service of the law.On the series “The Virginian,” Mr. Gulager played a character who channeled his penchant for violence into the service of the law.NBC,via PhotofestIn Mr. Gulager’s first scene, Ryker was typically unflappable. He walked into a saloon and within moments angered a man playing cards. Ryker drew his gun on the card player before he could stand up, ending the conflict.Moments later a deputy sheriff asked Ryker where he learned to draw like that.“In the cradle,” he replied.Mr. Gulager’s acting career, which lasted well into the 21st century, was not relegated to the frontier. He appeared on non-western television shows including “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Knight Rider” and “Murder, She Wrote,” and in several notable movies.Mr. Gulager, right, with Lee Marvin in “The Killers” (1964).The Criterion CollectionHe and Lee Marvin played hit men in “The Killers,” a 1964 film noir directed by Don Siegel and based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway that also starred Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes and, in what turned out to be his last movie, Ronald Reagan.In 1969 he played a mechanic in “Winning,” a film about auto racing with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. He played an older man who has a fling with his lover’s beautiful daughter in “The Last Picture Show,” Peter Bogdanovich’s celebrated 1971 study of a fading Texas town.He was also in more lowbrow fare, like the Keenen Ivory Wayans blaxploitation parody “I’m Gonna Git You, Sucka” (1988) and the horror films “The Return of the Living Dead” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street 2” (both 1985).His movie work continued well into his later years, including roles in the independent productions “Tangerine” (2015) and “Blue Jay” (2016). His final screen appearance was as a bookstore clerk in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” (2019).Mr. Gulager left the cast of “The Virginian” in 1968 to focus on directing and teaching. (The show remained on the air until 1971, becoming the third-longest-running western in television history, after “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza.”) His directing career foundered after the short film “A Day With the Boys” in 1969, but he became a popular teacher, running a workshop that focused on horror film acting and directing.“I tell the young students in my class that what we do is as important as the work of a man who grows the wheat, the doctor who saves lives, the architect who builds homes,” he said in an ABC news release before he starred in the TV movie “Stickin’ Together” in 1978. “What we do, in our best moments, is provide humanity with food for the spirit.”William Martin Gulager was born in Holdenville, Okla., on Nov. 16, 1928. He often said that he was part Cherokee; the name Clu came from “clu-clu,” a Cherokee word for the birds, known in English as martins, that were nesting at the Gulager home.His father, John Delancy Gulager, was an actor and vaudevillian who became a county judge in Muskogee, Okla., and who taught him acting from a young age, well before he graduated from Muskogee Central High School. His mother, Hazel Opal (Griffin) Gulager, worked at the local V.A. Hospital for 35 years.Mr. Gulager served stateside in the Marines from 1946 to 1948 before studying drama at Northeastern State College in Oklahoma and Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He continued his education in Paris, where he studied with the actor Jean-Louis Barrault and the mime Etienne Decroux.He married Miriam Byrd-Nethery, and they acted in summer stock and university theater. In 1955 both were in a production of the play “A Different Drummer” on the television series “Omnibus.” He continued acting in New York until 1958, when the Gulagers and their infant son, John, moved to Hollywood.Mr. Gulager’s wife died in 2003. Besides his son John, survivors include another son, Tom, and a grandson.John Gulager is a director of horror movies, notably the gory “Feast” (2005), which starred Henry Rollins and Balthazar Getty. That film and its two tongue-in-cheek sequels also featured the older Mr. Gulager as a shotgun-toting bartender battling fanged monsters in a Midwestern tavern. The second “Feast” movie was even more of a family affair.“You know, there are three generations of Gulagers in this movie,” John Gulager told the blog horror-movies.ca in an interview. One of them, named after Clu the elder, was Clu Gulager’s infant grandson.“He was 11 months old when we filmed it,” John Gulager added. “My dad said, ‘We have to get Baby Clu’s career started now.’ ”Christine Chung contributed reporting. More

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      Clu Gulager, ‘The Tall Man’ and ‘The Virginian’ Actor, Dies at 93

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      On TV, he played Billy the Kid on the “The Tall Man” and was seen on the long-running “The Virginian.” His movies ranged from “The Killers” to “The Last Picture Show.” Clu Gulager, a rugged character actor who appeared in critically acclaimed films like “The Last Picture Show” as well as low-budget horror movies, and who memorably portrayed gunslingers on two television westerns, died on Friday at his son John’s home in Los Angeles. He was 93.John Gulager confirmed the death. He said his father’s health had been in decline since he suffered a back injury several years ago.Mr. Gulager’s rough-hewed good looks and Southwestern upbringing made him a natural for the westerns that proliferated on television in the 1950s and ’60s. He was seen regularly on “Wagon Train,” “Bonanza,” “Have Gun — Will Travel” and other shows.An appearance as the hit man Mad Dog Coll on “The Untouchables” in 1959 persuaded the writer and producer Sam Peeples to cast Mr. Gulager as the legendary outlaw Billy the Kid on “The Tall Man,” a television series he was planning about Billy’s friendship with Sheriff Pat Garrett. (By most accounts the title was a reference to Garrett’s honesty and rectitude, and to the show’s opening credits, in which Garrett’s long shadow stretches in front of him.)“He’s exactly what we were looking for, an actor with a flair for the unusual,” Mr. Peeples said in a TV Guide profile of Mr. Gulager shortly after the show first aired in 1960. “He lends a certain psychological depth to Billy.”The friendship between the lawman (played by Barry Sullivan) and the gun-toting rustler was fictionalized and greatly exaggerated over the show’s 75 episodes; many historians believe that Sheriff Garrett actually shot and killed Billy in 1881. Their fatal encounter never happened on the show, which ended abruptly in 1962.Mr. Gulager played a more lawful character on “The Virginian,” the first of three 1960s western series that ran for 90 minutes, which starred James Drury and Doug McClure. Mr. Gulager’s character on the show, Emmett Ryker, was introduced in the show’s third season when a rich man tried to hire him to murder a rancher. Although he refused to be a hired killer, he was framed for killing the man. After clearing his name, Ryker channeled his penchant for violence into the service of the law.On the series “The Virginian,” Mr. Gulager played a character who channeled his penchant for violence into the service of the law.NBC, via PhotofestIn Mr. Gulager’s first scene, Ryker was typically unflappable. He walked into a saloon and within moments angered a man playing cards. Ryker drew his gun on the card player before he could stand up, ending the conflict.Moments later a deputy sheriff asked Ryker where he learned to draw like that.“In the cradle,” he replied.Mr. Gulager’s acting career, which lasted well into the 21st century, was not relegated to the frontier. He appeared on non-western television shows including “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Knight Rider” and “Murder, She Wrote,” and in several notable movies.Mr. Gulager, right, with Lee Marvin in “The Killers” (1964).The Criterion CollectionHe and Lee Marvin played hit men in “The Killers,” a 1964 film noir directed by Don Siegel and based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway that also starred Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes and, in what turned out to be his last movie, Ronald Reagan.In 1969 he played a mechanic in “Winning,” a film about auto racing with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. He played an older man who has a fling with his lover’s beautiful daughter in “The Last Picture Show,” Peter Bogdanovich’s celebrated 1971 study of a fading Texas town.He was also in more lowbrow fare, like the Keenen Ivory Wayans blaxploitation parody “I’m Gonna Git You, Sucka” (1988) and the horror films “The Return of the Living Dead” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street 2” (both 1985).His movie work continued well into his later years, including roles in the independent productions “Tangerine” (2015) and “Blue Jay” (2016). His final screen appearance was as a bookstore clerk in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” (2019).Mr. Gulager left the cast of “The Virginian” in 1968 to focus on directing and teaching. (The show remained on the air until 1971, becoming the third-longest-running western in television history, after “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza.”) His directing career foundered after the short film “A Day With the Boys” in 1969, but he became a popular teacher, running a workshop that focused on horror film acting and directing.“I tell the young students in my class that what we do is as important as the work of a man who grows the wheat, the doctor who saves lives, the architect who builds homes,” he said in an ABC news release before he starred in the TV movie “Stickin’ Together” in 1978. “What we do, in our best moments, is provide humanity with food for the spirit.”William Martin Gulager was born in Holdenville, Okla., on Nov. 16, 1928. He often said that he was part Cherokee; the name Clu came from “clu-clu,” a Cherokee word for the birds, known in English as martins, that were nesting at the Gulager home.His father, John Delancy Gulager, was an actor and vaudevillian who became a county judge in Muskogee, Okla., and who taught him acting from a young age, well before he graduated from Muskogee Central High School. His mother, Hazel Opal (Griffin) Gulager, worked at the local V.A. Hospital for 35 years.Mr. Gulager served stateside in the Marines from 1946 to 1948 before studying drama at Northeastern State College in Oklahoma and Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He continued his education in Paris, where he studied with the actor Jean-Louis Barrault and the mime Etienne Decroux.He married Miriam Byrd-Nethery, and they acted in summer stock and university theater. In 1955 both were in a production of the play “A Different Drummer” on the television series “Omnibus.” He continued acting in New York until 1958, when the Gulagers and their infant son, John, moved to Hollywood.Mr. Gulager’s wife died in 2003. Besides his son John, survivors include another son, Tom, and a grandson.John Gulager is a director of horror movies, notably the gory “Feast” (2005), which starred Henry Rollins and Balthazar Getty. That film and its two tongue-in-cheek sequels also featured the older Mr. Gulager as a shotgun-toting bartender battling fanged monsters in a Midwestern tavern. The second “Feast” movie was even more of a family affair.“You know, there are three generations of Gulagers in this movie,” John Gulager told the blog horror-movies.ca in an interview. One of them, named after Clu the elder, was Clu Gulager’s infant grandson.“He was 11 months old when we filmed it,” John Gulager added. “My dad said, ‘We have to get Baby Clu’s career started now.’ ”Christine Chung contributed reporting. More

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      Peter Bogdanovich, 82, Director Whose Career Was a Hollywood Drama, Dies

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      Within one decade, the ’70s, he was transformed from one of the most celebrated of filmmakers, notably for “The Last Picture Show,” into one of the most ostracized.Peter Bogdanovich, who parlayed his ardor for Golden Age cinema into the direction of acclaimed films like “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon,” only to have his professional reputation tarnished in one of Hollywood’s most conspicuous falls from grace, died early Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 82.His daughter Antonia Bogdanovich confirmed the death but did not specify a cause. Originally trained as a stage actor (he was also a producer, a screenwriter, a film historian, a programmer and a critic, as well as a theater and television director), Mr. Bogdanovich was long recognizable by his soulful basset-hound face, outsize horn-rimmed glasses and trademark neckerchief.As a filmmaker, he was hailed for his ability to coax nuanced performances from actors, and for the bittersweet luminosity of movies that conjured a bygone past — bygone in American cinema, bygone in America itself.Reviewing “The Last Picture Show” — only Mr. Bogdanovich’s second film and widely considered his foremost — on its release in 1971, Newsweek’s critic called it “a masterpiece,” adding, “It is the most impressive work by a young American director since ‘Citizen Kane.’”Before the end of the ’70s, however, Mr. Bogdanovich had been transformed from one of the most celebrated directors in Hollywood into one of the most ostracized. His career would be marred for years to come by critical and box-office failures, personal bankruptcies, the raking of his romantic life through the press and, as it all unspooled, an orgy of film-industry schadenfreude.Mr. Bogdanovich with Cybill Shepherd on the set of “The Last Picture Show” (1971). Only Mr. Bogdanovich’s second film, it is widely considered his best.Columbia Pictures“It isn’t true that Hollywood is a bitter place, divided by hatred, greed and jealousy,” the director Billy Wilder once observed. “All it takes to bring the community together is a flop by Peter Bogdanovich.”What was more, Mr. Bogdanovich’s life and work would be affected by violent, almost unimaginable personal loss.Yet in a business that rarely grants second acts, he enjoyed a professional renaissance, both behind the camera and in front of it, in the 21st century. To television viewers of the period, he was probably best known for his recurring role on the HBO drama “The Sopranos.” He portrayed Dr. Elliot Kupferberg, the psychiatrist who treats Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist, played by Lorraine Bracco.Mr. Bogdanovich’s film career had seemed almost foreordained, for he was nothing short of a cinematic prodigy. “I was born,” he liked to say. “And then I liked movies.”As a writer and critic, a calling he pursued in the 1960s, he was the author of influential monographs on Hollywood directors before he was out of his 20s.As a director, he blazed to fame in the early ’70s as the auteur of three critically acclaimed films: “The Last Picture Show,” based on Larry McMurtry’s novel of small-town Texas life; “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972), a contemporary twist on 1930s screwball comedies, starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal; and “Paper Moon” (1973), starring Mr. O’Neal and his daughter, Tatum, about a Depression-era confidence man.Mr. Bogdanovich’s life, it turned out, was bracketed by loss. For as he would discover, he had been born to a family defined by absence.Ryan O’Neal as a con man in 1930s Kansas and Tatum O’Neal as the girl who may or may not be his daughter in Mr. Bogdanovich’s “Paper Moon” (1973). Ms. O’Neal won an Academy Award for her performance.Paramount Pictures, via PhotofestA Son of ImmigrantsThe son of Borislav and Herma Robinson Bogdanovich, Peter Bogdanovich was born on July 30, 1939, in upstate Kingston, N.Y., and reared on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His parents were recent immigrants to the United States — his father a Serbian painter, his mother a member of a well-to-do Austrian Jewish family.The Bogdanovich home, Mr. Bogdanovich recalled long afterward, was pervaded by melancholy. His father was silent and withdrawn. Throughout Peter’s boyhood, their rare moments of camaraderie came when the elder Mr. Bogdanovich took his son to silent films at the Museum of Modern Art.When Peter was about 8, he learned the source of the family sorrow: He had had an older brother, who died as a baby after a pot of boiling soup was accidentally spilled on him.Remembering Peter BogdanovichThe filmmaker, who became one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors in the ‘70s before a public fall from grace, died Jan. 6, 2022.Obituary: Mr. Bogdanovich was hailed for his ability to coax nuanced performances from actors, and for the bittersweet luminosity of movies that conjured a bygone past.Streaming Guide: The director loved the world of classic Hollywood so much that it’s as if he never left it. Here are nine of his film highlights.From the Archives: Read our original reviews of Mr. Bogdanovich’s most acclaimed films: “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon.”By this time Peter was irretrievably in love with motion pictures — sound and silent alike. From the age of 12 to about 30 he kept a file of index cards, one per picture, evaluating every movie he saw. In the end, he had amassed some five thousand cards.Pictures from the heyday of Hollywood’s studio system — by directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, George Cukor and Alfred Hitchcock, starring actors like John Wayne, Cary Grant and James Stewart — beckoned to him above all.“I just wanted to be like those people on the screen,” Mr. Bogdanovich told The Los Angeles Times in 1972. “I wanted to look like Bill Holden, because I wanted to be a real American boy and do all those wonderful things. And with a name like Bogdanovich there wasn’t much of a chance.”As a teenager, Peter studied with the famed acting teacher Stella Adler. Leaving the Collegiate School, a Manhattan prep school, “a failed algebra examination shy of a high school diploma,” as The New York Times wrote in 1971, he played small roles in summer stock, Off Broadway and on television.At 20, he directed an Off Broadway revival of Clifford Odets’s drama “The Big Knife.” (The cast included a young Carroll O’Connor.) Around this time, he began writing on film for publications like Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post and the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. He helped program Golden Age pictures for the New Yorker Theater, a Manhattan revival house, and for MoMA.Mr. Bogdanovich with Alfred Hitchcock, one of several noted directors about whom he wrote a series of monographs for the Museum of Modern Art.Universal, via Kobal/ShutterstockFor MoMA, Mr. Bogdanovich wrote his series of monographs on great directors, including Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock and Orson Welles. It was a mission undertaken, he cheerfully confessed, so that he could meet and interview his idols.Those sessions, he said, were his de facto film-school education. (Mr. Bogdanovich would spend the rest of his career, interviewers often carped, dropping his teachers’ names. “Jack” flicked out conversationally denoted Mr. Ford. “Hitch” and “Orson” were self-explanatory.)He would become most closely involved with Welles, recording scores of hours of oral history before Welles’s death in 1985. The seminal book that resulted, “This Is Orson Welles” (1992), edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum and with Mr. Bogdanovich and Welles as co-authors, is “the closest we’ll ever come to a Welles autobiography,” The Orlando Sentinel said in 2002.Though Mr. Bogdanovich repeatedly disavowed the connection, critics liked to point out affinities between Welles’s career and his own: Both men began as directorial wunderkinds. (“Citizen Kane,” released in 1941, was Welles’s first full-length feature.) Both were later expelled from the Eden of A-list directors. (In the 1970s, a down-and-out Welles lived for a time in Mr. Bogdanovich’s mansion in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles.)Hollywood-BoundMr. Bogdanovich struck out for Hollywood in 1964, accompanied by his wife, Polly Platt, a production designer he had married two years before. He was hired as a second-unit director and rewriter by the producer Roger Corman, whose movies — among them “Attack of the Crab Monsters” (1957) and “Teenage Cave Man” (1958) — strove for maximal shock value at minimal expense.For Mr. Corman, Mr. Bogdanovich directed his first feature, “Targets,” released in 1968. Inspired by the Charles Whitman Texas tower shootings of 1966, it was nominally a thriller about a troubled young man who embarks on a killing spree.But it was really a paean to, and an elegy for, the Hollywood films that Mr. Bogdanovich cherished. An aging, elegant Boris Karloff plays an aging, elegant version of himself. Scenes of Tim O’Kelly, who played the young man, scaling heights from which to shoot random strangers — a gas storage tank, a drive-in theater screen — are vivid homages to James Cagney’s last stand, high up in a gas plant, in “White Heat,” Raoul Walsh’s celebrated 1949 film.For its stylish direction and brisk screenplay, by Mr. Bogdanovich and Ms. Platt, “Targets” drew wide critical praise. His triumph led him to be hired to direct “The Last Picture Show” for Columbia Pictures.Cloris Leachman and Timothy Bottoms in “The Last Picture Show.” The film was nominated for eight Oscars and won two, including one for Ms. Leachman.Columbia PicturesThat film, with screenplay by Mr. Bogdanovich and Mr. McMurtry, centers on life and love in a down-at-the-heels town in the early 1950s. Shot in stark black and white in Mr. McMurtry’s hometown, Archer City, Texas, the movie, designed by Ms. Platt, portrays a world of boarded-up storefronts and blowing dust.The cast featured relative unknowns, among them Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms and Cybill Shepherd, a 19-year-old model whom Mr. Bogdanovich had discovered staring seductively at him from the cover of Glamour magazine while he waited in a supermarket checkout line.It also included veterans like Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson, who at midcentury had been a member of Ford’s stock company.“The Last Picture Show,” too, is a valentine to old Hollywood. At the town’s fading movie house, Vincente Minnelli’s 1950 comedy, “Father of the Bride,” is playing. When the theater is forced to close, the last picture shown there is Hawks’s “Red River” (1948), starring the indomitable John Wayne.Nominated for eight Oscars, including best picture, “The Last Picture Show” won two, for the performances of Ms. Leachman and Mr. Johnson.The film catapulted Mr. Bogdanovich to the first rank of Hollywood directors. It also upended his personal life. He left Ms. Platt and their two young children for Ms. Shepherd, embarking on an eight-year relationship that furnished ceaseless grist for Hollywood gossip columns.Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal in Mr. Bogdanovich’s “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972).Warner Bros.His professional success continued with “What’s Up, Doc?,” a reworking of Hawks’s 1938 comedy, “Bringing Up Baby,” and again with “Paper Moon.”Set in dust-blown 1930s Kansas, “Paper Moon” brought an Oscar to 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal for her performance as a scrappy girl who may or may not be the con man’s daughter. (Despite her divorce from Mr. Bogdanovich, Ms. Platt designed this film and “What’s Up, Doc?”)After the Hits, DudsBut after the wild success of the early 1970s came a string of creative debacles. Two vehicles Mr. Bogdanovich conceived to star Ms. Shepherd incurred critical vitriol: “Daisy Miller,” his 1974 adaptation of Henry James’s 1870s novella, and the musical “At Long Last Love” (1975), also starring Burt Reynolds.“Produced for $15 million, this ‘musical’ was Cole Porter sung by the tone deaf, danced by the afflicted,” The Chicago Tribune wrote in 1990. “Critics compared leading man Burt Reynolds to a wounded buffalo and Shepherd to an orphan trying to play Noël Coward. The picture, which lost $6 million, was Bogdanovich’s ‘Heaven’s Gate.’”His next film, “Nickelodeon” (1976), an overt homage to early cinema starring Mr. O’Neal and Mr. Reynolds, was also critically derided. But there was far worse to come.In the late 1970s, after his romance with Ms. Shepherd had ended, Mr. Bogdanovich met the Playboy model Dorothy Stratten at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. They fell in love, and Ms. Stratten, who was married, left her husband to move in with him.Mr. Bogdanovich gave her a small role in his caper “They All Laughed,” starring Audrey Hepburn and Ben Gazzara. But in August 1980, before it was released, her estranged husband, Paul Snider, shot her to death before taking his own life. (The murder of Ms. Stratten, 20 at her death, would be the subject of a 1983 feature film, “Star 80,” directed by Bob Fosse and starring Mariel Hemingway.)Mr. Bogdanovich with Dorothy Stratten, who was also his partner, on the set of his “They All Laughed” (1980). Before the film was released, Ms. Stratten’s estranged husband shot her to death and then took his own life.DMI/The LIFE Picture Collection, via ShutterstockAfterward, Mr. Bogdanovich was reported to have watched “They All Laughed” — which preserves Ms. Stratten’s last film performance — over and over, as if communing with a ghost.Released in 1981, the film was a critical and box-office failure. Dissatisfied with its promotion, Mr. Bogdanovich bought the rights and tried to distribute it himself. It proved a disastrous decision, costing him some $5 million.In 1985, with “$21.37 in the bank and $25.79 in his pocket,” according to court papers, he declared bankruptcy, a move that further marginalized him in Hollywood. In the years that followed, he became, by his own account, addicted to prescription drugs.“I made an enormous number of mistakes,” Mr. Bogdanovich said in a 2004 interview. “You don’t do rational things when somebody blows up an atom bomb at your feet.”One thing he did that he said he came to regret was to write a biography of Ms. Stratten, “The Killing of the Unicorn,” which was equal parts adoration and accusation. Published in 1984, it contended that Mr. Hefner, in commodifying her, had been partly responsible for her death.Mr. Hefner retaliated with a bombshell of his own: He publicly accused Mr. Bogdanovich of having seduced Ms. Stratten’s younger half sister, Louise, shortly after the murder, when Louise was 13, below the age of consent.Mr. Bogdanovich denied the accusation. But it was a matter of record that he paid for Louise’s education; arranged for her to have corrective surgery on her jaw — an act, his detractors said, that was intended to make her look more like her dead sister — and, in 1988, when Louise was 20, married her, causing a frenzy of tabloid opprobrium.Louise Stratten, billed as L.B. Stratten, appeared in several films and TV movies directed by Mr. Bogdanovich. They divorced in 2001.“She was like a contact with Dorothy, as far as I was concerned,” Mr. Bogdanovich, speaking of the marriage, told The New York Times the next year. “There was garbage talk that I made Louise have facial surgery — to look like Dorothy. ‘Vertigo’ stuff.”‘I’m Not Bitter’Mr. Bogdanovich seemed to return to directorial form in 1985 with “Mask,” a well-received picture starring Cher as the mother of a boy with a facial deformity.But he alienated the Hollywood establishment once more by filing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the studio, Universal Pictures, and the producer, Martin Starger, for cutting two scenes and substituting music by Bob Seger for the Bruce Springsteen soundtrack that Mr. Bogdanovich favored. (The suit was later withdrawn.)Several critical failures followed, including “Illegally Yours” (1988), a romantic comedy starring Rob Lowe; “Texasville” (1990), a sequel to “The Last Picture Show”; and “The Thing Called Love” (1993), a comedy-drama about country music.In the late 1990s, after declaring bankruptcy again, the down-and-out Mr. Bogdanovich lived for a time in the guesthouse of the young director Quentin Tarantino.From the mid-’90s through the first years of the 21st century, Mr. Bogdanovich resorted to directing for television. His credits include the TV movies “Prowler” (1995) and “Naked City: A Killer Christmas” (1998) and an episode of “The Wonderful World of Disney.”But the medium, he said, taught him economy and speed. He returned to the big screen in 2001 with “The Cat’s Meow,” his first feature in nearly a decade. Made for just $6 million, it was shot in only 24 days.Mr. Bogdanovich and Kirsten Dunst on the set of “The Cat’s Meow” (2001), his first feature in nearly a decade.Richard Foreman/Lions Gate FilmsThat film, too, is a paean to old Hollywood. It tells the story — based on a long-suppressed incident that for years ran through the industry in whispers — of a fatal shooting in 1924 aboard the yacht of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.“The Cat’s Meow” — starring Edward Herrmann as Hearst; Kirsten Dunst as his mistress, the silent-film star Marion Davies; and Eddie Izzard as her lover Charlie Chaplin — earned mostly favorable notices.Mr. Bogdanovich’s luster was also restored with his publication of two acclaimed books: “Who the Devil Made It” (1997), a collection of his interviews with eminent directors, and “Who the Hell’s in It” (2004), about great actors and actresses.Later features he directed include “She’s Funny That Way” (2014) and “The Great Buster,” a documentary about Buster Keaton, in 2018.Mr. Bogdanovich in 2005. “Success is very hard,” he said late in his career. “Nobody prepares you for it.”Damian Dovarganes/Associated PressIn addition to his daughter Antonia, he is survived by another daughter, Alexandra (both from his marriage to Ms. Platt); a sister, Anna Bogdanovich; and three grandchildren.Among Mr. Bogdanovich’s other films as a director are “Saint Jack” (1979), starring Mr. Gazzara as an American who aims to open a bordello in Singapore; “Noises Off …” (1992), an adaptation of a play by Michael Frayn; and the documentary “Directed by John Ford” (1971).In a 2002 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Bogdanovich offered a cleareyed appraisal of his career.“I’m not bitter,” he said. “I asked for it. Success is very hard. Nobody prepares you for it. You think you’re infallible. You pretend you know more than you do. Pride goeth before the fall.”But when it came to one of his detractors, at least, Mr. Bogdanovich appeared to have the last laugh. His later-life acting roles included two appearances, in 2005 and 2007, on the NBC series “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”In both episodes, Mr. Bogdanovich, always a wicked mimic, played to the hilt a sybaritic, smoking-jacket-clad, thinly veiled incarnation of Hugh Hefner.Maia Coleman contributed reporting. More

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      Stream These Peter Bogdanovich Movies

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      The director loved the world of classic Hollywood so much that it’s as if he never left it. Here are nine of his film highlights.Peter Bogdanovich, who died Jan. 6 at 82, loved the world of classic Hollywood so much that it’s as if he never left it. He directed movies as if trying to bottle an ineffable essence or panache from the heydays of Orson Welles, John Ford and Howard Hawks, whose legacy he helped preserve in his first calling as a film historian.But Bogdanovich’s knowledge (and name-dropping) didn’t produce movies for a select few cinephiles. Even Francis Ford Coppola, a New Hollywood contemporary who would release “The Godfather” the next year, marveled at the rapt, packed audiences for Bogdanovich’s 1971 masterpiece “The Last Picture Show.” Writing and filming with flair, elegance, and the heart of an old romantic, Bogdanovich reimagined the storied past and played with genre, dialing up or down the noise of the plot. Having studied as an actor, he also brought a palpable affection for his stars that persisted even as his own star as a filmmaker faded after the 1970s. The joy of moviemaking, however, never left him.Here are nine highlights of Bogdanovich’s work, all available to stream.‘The Last Picture Show’ (1971)Stream it on Showtime. Rent it on Apple.After years of interviewing the masters, Bogdanovich directed his own canonical classic, adapting Larry McMurtry’s personal novel about a small Texas town in the 1950s. Bittersweet and funny, it’s a warm portrait of folks dealing with loneliness, tedium and, frankly, horniness in a tight-knit place where there’s little to do but see a picture show. Cybill Shepherd makes her screen debut as a high schooler tiring of her roughneck boyfriend (Jeff Bridges); her disillusioned mother (a wonderfully sly Ellen Burstyn) knows a dead end when she sees one. The heart of the movie might lie with Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), a well-meaning teenager with all the direction of a tumbleweed. Well-deserved Oscars went to two more standouts, Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson. Shot in a lovely, dusty black-and-white, the movie sighs with the lived experience of a hundred memoirs.‘What’s Up, Doc?’ (1972)Rent or buy it on Amazon or YouTube.Ryan O’Neal and Barbra Streisand face off in probably the truest screwball comedy since the days of “His Girl Friday.” A nerdy musicologist (O’Neal) bumps into a gleeful troublemaker (Streisand, pure magic) while looking for aspirin in a store. Feature-length lunacy follows. Not a line or shot is wasted as the stars expertly carry out the clockwork chaos orchestrated by Bogdanovich in a San Francisco hotel through syncopated dialogue, comic bits of business and, of course, chases. Four identical suitcases fuel the madness, creating a sensation of absolute giddiness.‘Targets’ (1968)Stream it on Fubo; rent or buy it on Apple.Born out of an assignment from the B-movie maestro Roger Corman, Bogdanovich’s ingenious and unusual directing debut taps into a late-1960s mood of upheaval and disorientation. Boris Karloff plays a retiring horror star who decides that no movie could match the fearsome violence of the real world. At the same time, a sniper is on the loose — a conceit inspired by the University of Texas tower shootings by Charles Whitman. The story lines converge at a drive-in to produce a genuine sense of shock, previewing the talents of the young director, who has a part as a filmmaker looking to cast Karloff.Remembering Peter BogdanovichThe filmmaker, who became one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors in the ‘70s before a public fall from grace, died Jan. 6, 2022.Obituary: Mr. Bogdanovich was hailed for his ability to coax nuanced performances from actors, and for the bittersweet luminosity of movies that conjured a bygone past.Streaming Guide: The director loved the world of classic Hollywood so much that it’s as if he never left it. Here are nine of his film highlights.From the Archives: Read our original reviews of Mr. Bogdanovich’s most acclaimed films: “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon.”‘Paper Moon’ (1973)Stream it on Amazon; rent or buy it on YouTube.Ryan O’Neal plays a con man who makes quick bucks by selling Bibles to widows, and his real-life daughter, Tatum O’Neal (an Oscar winner at age 10), is the orphan who falls under his care and keeps outwitting him. A number of directors in the 1970s looked back to the Depression era, but Bogdanovich’s comedy has a mischievous verve. Shooting again in black and white, he clearly delights in Tatum’s defiant streak, and gives Madeline Kahn an immortal monologue as Trixie Delight, a dancer seeking to ensnare the con man.‘Saint Jack’ (1979)Stream it on Tubi; rent or buy it on Amazon.Ben Gazzara brings his effortless charm, amused grin and gravelly baritone to this story of an expat pimp in Singapore running into trouble. You can almost feel the film’s rhythms being given over entirely to Gazzara, as he glides through rooms and streets, saying his hellos. It’s a site-specific view on the shifting sands of expatriate existence, with cinematography by Robby Müller. It also brings to a close the freewheeling, high-flying ’70s chapter of the director’s filmmaking career, as his fortunes shifted.‘The Thing Called Love’ (1993)Stream it on Hoopla; rent or buy it on Apple.A fondness for country music crops up throughout Bogdanovich’s work, and it blooms here in this overlooked, warmhearted story of an aspiring singer-songwriter in Nashville. While trying to land gigs, Miranda (Samantha Mathis) finds herself living a series of country songs: pining for one singer (River Phoenix), mooned over by another (Dermot Mulroney), wondering whether to pack up and go back home. Sandra Bullock co-stars, pre-“Speed,” as Miranda’s aimless roommate. The film’s gentle story provided Phoenix with his final role before his tragic death. Bogdanovich’s other musical interests later culminated in a four-hour-plus 2007 documentary about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.‘The Cat’s Meow’ (2001)Stream it on Tubi; rent or buy it on YouTube.In 1924, the Hollywood producer Thomas H. Ince died under mysterious circumstances on William Randolph Hearst’s yacht, on a cruise to celebrate Ince’s birthday. The incident, which became the basis for a 1997 play by Steven Peros that he adapted for the screen, proves irresistible to Bogdanovich, who assembles a cast game for louche partying and meaningful glances. An effervescent Kirsten Dunst headlines as the actress and Hearst amour Marion Davies, with Eddie Izzard as Charlie Chaplin, Edward Herrmann as the ever-jealous Hearst, and Joanna Lumley and Jennifer Tilly to boot.‘The Great Buster: A Celebration’ (2018)Stream it on Kanopy; rent or buy it on Amazon.Some of Bogdanovich’s greatest work was done off screen as a film historian, interviewer (see, for example, “Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Filmmakers”) and curator, but his feature-length documentary on the great silent comedian gives a taste. Stirring clips of Buster Keaton’s work accompany admiration from fans ranging from Mel Brooks to Johnny Knoxville. In this vein it’s also worth tracking down Bogdanovich’s even better documentary “Directed by John Ford.”‘The Other Side of the Wind’ (2018)Stream it on Netflix.Bogdanovich stars in one of cinema’s great, lost works, begun in the early 1970s by Orson Welles and painstakingly reassembled in 2018. The main setting is the 70th birthday party of the raucous director Jake Hannaford (John Huston), with glimpses of a radical new film to come. Bogdanovich plays Hannaford’s young foil — fittingly, a hotshot director on the rise. The film’s cinematic phantasmagoria belongs to Welles’s legacy, but also captures Bogdanovich’s double life as filmmaker and film-chronicler. More

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      Stream These 10 Great Performances by Cloris Leachman

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyStream These 10 Great Performances by Cloris LeachmanThe Oscar- and Emmy-winning actress was still pushing comedic boundaries in her 90s. Here’s a guide to some of her most fearless and memorable performances.Cloris Leachman (right, with Mary Tyler Moore) was only just hitting her stride when she appeared in the groundbreaking “Mary Tyler Moore Show,” a role that earned her two Emmys.Credit…Bettmann, via Getty ImagesJan. 28, 2021, 11:55 a.m. ETOnstage, on television and, finally, at the movies, there was no missing the irrepressible Cloris Leachman, who died on Wednesday at 94. She was an all-purpose entertainer who became best known for her no-holds-barred comedy. But that same openness left room for moments of disarming sensitivity and heart.She was also the rare performer to reach the prime of her career at middle age, with her role as Phyllis Lindstrom in the groundbreaking “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and in her Oscar-winning turn in “The Last Picture Show.” Still decades later, she proved durable enough to cut a rug on “Dancing With the Stars” at age 82 and continued acting into her 90s.Although some of Leachman’s notable roles are currently not available to stream in the United States, like her striking appearance in the 1955 noir classic “Kiss Me Deadly,” most of her major work is easy to sample. While she is perhaps best remembered for her collaborations with James L. Brooks, Mel Brooks and Peter Bogdanovich, Leachman also thrived in voice work for animated films, including two for Studio Ghibli, and seemed willing to push herself to greater comic extremes as she got older. These seven films and three TV series showcase her versatility and moxie.‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ (1970-1975)In James L. Brooks and Allan Burns’s groundbreaking sitcom about Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore), a single, independent woman working behind-the-scenes at a Minneapolis TV news program, Leachman’s Phyllis is an agent of chaos, constantly swooping in and upending Mary’s day. Phyllis and her unseen dermatologist husband are landlords to Mary and her best friend, Rhoda (Valerie Harper), and she has a tendency to poke around in their business, upsetting Rhoda especially with her flighty arrogance. Leachman’s appearances are heavily weighted toward the show’s first two seasons, but her performance was enough to score her a couple of Emmys and the spinoff hit “Phyllis,” which ended the same week the flagship show did.Stream it on Hulu. Buy it on Amazon, Apple TV and Vudu.‘The Last Picture Show’ (1971)Leachman (pictured with Timothy Bottoms) won an Oscar for her role in the Peter Bogdanovich film “The Last Picture Show.” Credit…Columbia PicturesLeachman won an Oscar for best supporting actress for her shattering performance in “The Last Picture Show,” embodying the sadness and quiet desperation that pervades Peter Bogdanovich’s elegy for a dying North Texas town. As Ruth Popper, the bored wife of an oafish football coach, Leachman plays a Southern flower that’s dying on the vine until she takes up with Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), a high school senior of limited sexual experience. Ruth seems to know her role in Sonny’s coming-of-age story, but she is nonetheless unprepared for the inevitable conclusion, which Leachman registers as the latest in a lifelong series of disappointments.Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.‘Daisy Miller’ (1974)After following “The Last Picture Show” with “What’s Up, Doc?” and “Paper Moon,” Peter Bogdanovich’s hot streak ended with this troubled adaptation of the Henry James novella “Daisy Miller.” But the film’s reputation has improved over time, buoyed by its serio-comic treatment of a brazen American flirt (Cybill Shepherd) in Europe and her trampling of social mores. Leachman’s role as the young woman’s mother carries some of the timidity of her character in “The Last Picture Show,” but here it’s covered by a nervous chattiness that is scarcely less vulgar and conspicuous in their upper-crust surroundings.Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.‘Young Frankenstein’ (1974)The running gag most associated with Leachman in Mel Brooks’s Universal monster-movie spoof requires little acting on her part, but it speaks to her presence as a severe German housekeeper that all the horses whinny in terror whenever someone utters the name Frau Blücher. Blücher’s roots in the Frankenstein estate in Transylvania are explained in hilariously dramatic fashion later, but in the meantime, her dedication to the mad vision of Dr. Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) and his monstrous creation (Peter Boyle) is unrivaled. She also stands ready to offer Herr Doctor a brandy before he retires for the night. Or some warm milk. Or Ovaltine.Stream it on Starz.‘Crazy Mama’ (1975)Leachman in a rare lead role, in the early Jonathan Demme film “Crazy Mama.”Credit…via Getty ImagesA young Jonathan Demme (“Silence of the Lambs”) hadn’t quite matriculated from the Roger Corman school of filmmaking when he agreed to direct this low-budget Corman production on short notice. But he and a brassy Leachman, in a rare lead role, play the material for all it is worth. Although it was a follow-up to the “Bonnie & Clyde” knockoff “Big Bad Mama,” “Crazy Mama” emphasizes comedy over violent mayhem as three generations of Stokes women, led by Melba Stokes (Leachman), embark on a rolling crime spree from California to their ancestral home in Arkansas. Nothing about the film (or Leachman’s performance) is underplayed, but it has an affectionately rollicking spirit, underscored by a terrific ’50s rock soundtrack.Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.‘Castle in the Sky’ (1986)Throughout the back half of her career, Leachman was a sought-after voice talent in animated films, with vocal turns in films like “My Little Pony: The Movie,” “The Iron Giant” and “Beavis and Butt-Head Do America.” But Leachman also contributed substantive work on English dubs of Hayao Miyazaki’s 2009 fantasy, “Ponyo,” and of his breakthrough film, “Castle in the Sky,” a bewitching steampunk adventure about the search for a floating castle. As Dola, the bossy leader of a band of air pirates, Leachman initially suggests a menacing adversary. But as more is revealed about Dola’s motives, the character’s hidden nobility turns our heroes (and the viewer) around.Stream it on HBO Max.‘Spanglish’ (2004)In the rom-com “Spanglish,” Leachman slung one-liners as the boozy but earnest mother of Téa Leoni.Credit…Melissa Moseley/Sony PicturesOver 30 years after they worked together on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” Leachman and the writer-director James L. Brooks re-teamed for this romantic comedy about the relationship between a wealthy, laid-back chef (Adam Sandler) and a single mother from Mexico who gets a job as the family’s nanny and housekeeper (Paz Vega). Leachman plays the boozy mother of Sandler’s high-strung wife (Téa Leoni), which mostly gives her the opportunity to sling tart one-liners in the middle of a domestic meltdown. But she sobers up long enough toward the end of the film to give her daughter an urgent piece of advice, and Leachman’s motherly earnestness in this moment is as touching as it is unexpected.Stream it on Crackle. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.‘Malcolm in the Middle’ (2000-2006)There are shades of Frau Blücher to Leachman’s recurring and Emmy-winning role as Ida Welker, a comprehensively evil grandmother of vaguely Eastern European descent who occasionally drops in to visit the Wilkersons, irritating and embarrassing them with her nastiness and bigotry. Leachman turned up periodically in episodes from the second season through the series finale in the seventh, and she brought with her an air of toxic, manipulative narcissism that rival Livia Soprano’s. In one episode, she sues her own daughter and son-in-law after slipping on a leaf in their driveway; in another, she reveals all the Christmas presents she has decided to withdraw from the family for minor offenses. Her cartoon villainy suits the tone of this slap-happy sitcom.Stream it on Hulu.‘Beerfest’ (2006)Late in life, Leachman (pictured with Mo’nique) continued to push boundaries, as she did in her role as an enthusiastic former prostitute in “Beerfest.”Credit…Richard Foreman Jr./Warner Brothers PicturesThroughout her career, Leachman was willing to do absolutely anything for a laugh, so she was right at home in this raunchy comedy from the comedy troupe Broken Lizard (“Super Troopers”) about a secret Oktoberfest competition where teams vie for beer-game supremacy. Dressed up like Heidi gone to seed, Leachman plays Great Gam Gam Wolfhouse, who isn’t ashamed to talk about her past as a prostitute or use a piece of summer sausage to demonstrate some tricks of the trade. It’s a minor part that’s intended for shock, but Leachman’s lack of shame is totally disarming, a sharp contrast to the frat-guy boorishness that surrounds her.Stream it on Hulu. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.‘Raising Hope’ (2010-2014)As the dementia-addled “Maw Maw” in this offbeat working-class comedy, Leachman mostly drifts in and out of the background, chain-smoking cigarettes, eating pickles from the jar and sometimes mistaking her great-grandson Jimmy (Lucas Neff) for her dead husband. Only occasionally is Maw Maw lucid enough to notice that her granddaughter Virginia (Martha Plimpton) and Virginia’s screwed-up family are living in her dilapidated house rent-free, raising the daughter Jimmy got from a one-night stand with a serial killer. The role calls on Leachman as a primary source of its sitcom surrealism, relying on her willingness to play embarrassing flourishes to the hilt.Stream it on Hulu. Buy it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play and Vudu.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More