Peter Bogdanovich

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“Dorothy Stratten Was A Corporate Treasure”

May 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Posting an interview earlier with Peter Bogdanovich reminded me of “Death of a Playmate,” Teresa Carpenter’s searing, Pulitzer Prize-winning Village Voice article, which not only excoriated the estranged husband of Dorothy Stratten, who brutally murdered the Playboy centerfold and actress in 1980, but also pilloried Bogdanovich and Hugh Hefner for the objectification and commodification of the young woman. Of course, Carpenter, who later sold the rights to her article to Bob Fosse to serve as the basis of Star 80, could be accused of the latter herself. The piece’s opening:

It is shortly past four in the afternoon and Hugh Hefner glides wordlessly into the library of his Playboy Mansion West. He is wearing pajamas and looking somber in green silk. The incongruous spectacle of a sybarite in mourning. To date, his public profession of grief has been contained in a press release: “The death of Dorothy Stratten comes as a shock to us all. . . . As Playboy’s Playmate of the Year with a film and television career of increasing importance, her professional future was a bright one. But equally sad to us is the fact that her loss takes from us all a very special member of the Playboy family.”

That’s all. A dispassionate eulogy from which one might conclude that Miss Stratten died in her sleep of pneumonia. One, certainly, which masked the turmoil her death created within the Organization. During the morning hours after Stratten was found nude in a West Los Angeles apartment, her face blasted away by 12-gauge buckshot, editors scrambled to pull her photos from the upcoming October issue. It could not be done. The issues were already run. So they pulled her ethereal blond image from the cover of the 1981 Playmate Calendar and promptly scrapped a Christmas promotion featuring her posed in the buff with Hefner. Other playmates, of course, have expired violently. Wilhelmina Rietveld took a massive overdose of barbiturates in 1973. Claudia Jennings, known as “Queen of the B-Movies,” was crushed to death last fall in her Volkswagen convertible. Both caused grief and chagrin to the self-serious “family” of playmates whose aura does not admit the possibility of shaving nicks and bladder infections, let alone death.

But the loss of Dorothy Stratten sent Hefner and his family into seclusion, at least from the press. For one thing, Playboy has been earnestly trying to avoid any bad national publicity that might threaten its application for a casino license in Atlantic City. But beyond that, Dorothy Stratten was a corporate treasure. She was not just any playmate but the “Eighties’ first Playmate of the Year” who, as Playboy trumpeted in June, was on her way to becoming “one of the few emerging film goddesses of the new decade.”

She gave rise to extravagant comparisons with Marilyn Monroe, although unlike Monroe, she was no cripple. She was delighted with her success and wanted more of it. Far from being brutalized by Hollywood, she was coddled by it. . . . “Playboy has not really had a star,” says Stratten’s erstwhile agent David Wilder. “They thought she was going to be the biggest thing they ever had.”

No wonder Hefner grieves.

“The major reason that I’m . . . that we’re both sittin’ here,” says Hefner, “that I wanted to talk about it, is because there is still a great tendency . . . for this thing to fall into the classic cliche of ‘small-town girl comes to Playboy, comes to Hollywood, life in the fast lane, and that somehow was related to her death. And that is not what really happened. A very sick guy saw his meal ticket and his connection to power, whatever, etc. slipping away. And it was that that made him kill her.”

The “very sick guy” is Paul Snider, Dorothy Stratten’s husband, the man who became her mentor. He is the one who plucked her from a Dairy Queen in Vancouver, British Columbia, and pushed her into the path of Playboy during the Great Playmate Hunt in 1978. Later, as she moved out of his class, he became a millstone, and Stratten’s prickliest problem was not coping with celebrity but discarding a husband she had outgrown. When Paul Snider balked at being discarded, he became her nemesis. And on August 14 of this year he apparently took her life and his own with a 12-gauge shotgun.•

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Dorothy Stratten visits Johnny Carson in 1980, four months before her murder.

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“I’d Like To Shoot A Lot Of Pictures”

May 28, 2013 in Film, Videos | Permalink

A 1979 TV interview with director Peter Bogdanovich conducted when he was still brash and pretentious, having made the unlikely leap from film historian and unsuccessful actor to A-list filmmaker who palled around with Orson Welles. 

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“He Stood On The Runway, His Huge Wet Havana Cigar Tilting Just Below His Squinting Eyes And Sagging Eye Pouches”

June 27, 2012 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

Sorry to hear of the passing of Nora Ephron, who was one of the women who saved New Journalism in the ’60s and ’70s from being an all-boys school. From “Yossarian Is Alive and Well in the Mexican Desert,” her 1969 New York Times article about Mike Nichols filming Catch-22, a passage about the presence of Orson Welles and his legend:

“The arrival of Orson Welles, for two weeks of shooting in February, was just the therapy the company needed: at the very least, it gave everyone something to talk about. The situation was almost melodramatically ironic: Welles, the great American director now unable to obtain big- money backing for his films, was being directed by 37-year-old Nichols; Welles, who had tried, unsuccessfully, to buy Catch-22 for himself in 1962, was appearing in it to pay for his new film, Dead Reckoning. The cast spent days preparing for his arrival. Touch of Evil was flown in and microscopically reviewed. Citizen Kane was discussed over dinner. Tony Perkins, who had appeared in Welles’s film, The Trial, was repeatedly asked What Orson Welles Was Really Like. Bob Balaban, a young actor who plays Orr in the film, laid plans to retrieve one of Welles’s cigar butts for an admiring friend. And Nichols began to combat his panic by imagining what it would be like to direct a man of Welles’s stature.

‘Before he came,’ said Nichols, ‘I had two fantasies. The first was that he would say his first line, and I would say, ‘NO, NO, NO, Orson !” He laughed. ‘Then I thought, perhaps not. The second was that he would arrive on the set and I would say, ‘Mr. Welles, now if you’d be so kind as to move over here. . .’ And he’d look at me and raise on eyebrow and say, ‘Over there?’ And I’d say, ‘What? Oh, uh, where do you think it should be?”

Welles landed in Guaymas with an entourage that included a cook and experimental film-maker Peter Bogdanovich, who was interviewing him for a Truffaut-Hitchcock-type memoir. For the eight days it took to shoot his two scenes, he dominated the set. He stood on the runway, his huge wet Havana cigar tilting just below his squinting eyes and sagging eye pouches, addressing Nichols and the assembled cast and crew. Day after day, he told fascinating stories of dubbing in Bavaria, looping in Italy and shooting in Yugoslavia. He also told Nichols how to direct the film, the crew how to move the camera, film editor Sam O’Steen how to cut a scene, and most of the actors how to deliver their lines. Welles even lectured Martin Balsam for three minutes on how to deliver the line, ‘Yes, sir.’

A few of the actors did not mind at all. Austin Pendleton got along with Welles simply by talking back to him.

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like to say that line more slowly?’ Welles asked Pendleton one day.

‘Yes,’ Pendleton replied slowly. ‘I am sure.’

But after a few days of shooting, many of the other actors were barely concealing their hostility toward Welles–particularly because of his tendency to blow his lines during takes. By the last day of shooting, when Welles used his own procedure, a lengthy and painstaking one, to shoot a series of close-ups, most of the people on the set had tuned out on the big, booming raconteur.”

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Strange, Small & Forgotten Films: Targets (1968)

May 12, 2010 in Film | Permalink

Bogdanovich saved cash on the cast by playing across Karloff as filmmaker Sammy Michaels.

“I am big, it’s the pictures that got small,” protests Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd., but faded horror icon Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff) has a bitter riposte for her in Targets. “It’s not that the films have gotten bad,” he says with lacerating self-awareness, “it’s that I’ve gone bad.” The self-described “museum piece” was once the genre’s greatest star, but by the 1960s Orlok knows that Hollywood is no country for old men. His quaint spookiness can’t compete with the era’s very real and chilling newspaper headlines, which are drenched with more blood than any vampire could ever drink.

Orlok is retiring from showbiz as soon as he reluctantly fulfills one last  personal appearance at a Los Angeles drive-in. But his swan song may sound more like a death rattle if the party is interrupted by Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly), a fresh-faced insurance salesman from a middle-class Angeleno family who is in the midst of a killing spree. Toting a shoulder-bag full of high-caliber arms, Bobby descends on the drive-in the night of Orlok’s farewell, hoping to up his body count.

Peter Bogdanovich was so desperate to break into directing that he made this movie for Roger Corman, despite the numerous obstacles that accompanied the assignment: He only had Karloff’s services for two days, the film was shot on a a micro budget and the fledgling auteur was under strict orders to save money by incorporating some footage from Corman’s own schlocky 1963 flick, The Terror. Despite these challenges, the writer-director turned out a sharp-eyed view of the decade, one of the few times in his career he’s managed to speak to his time rather than relying on the nostalgia of period pieces. Karloff was never bitter like Orlok, but the role is especially poignant because it’s based on his own ebbing career and was his final good role. Like Orlok, Karloff had outlived his fame and seen his career assassinated by time itself. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)

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