RIP Peter Bogdanovich.

Hollywood lost one of its visionary directors when Peter Bogdanovich died. A writer, actor, and producer, Bogdanovich, like the Cahiers du Cinema critics he so admired, started out as a film critic, and a very good one. He was an early champion of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles. He adored classic cinema and interviewed all of the studio directors, befriending many of them. He matriculated through the Roger Corman film school. Corman gave him some equipment and an absurd shooting schedule, and threw in the actor Boris Karloff, who owed Corman two days. The resulting movie is Targets, a razor-sharp low-budget picture that is sharp, witty, unsettling. He then made three astonishing films in a row: The Last Picture Show; What’s Up, Doc?; and Paper Moon. They are brilliant, sparkling, funny, melancholic, wise movies; I would stack them against any other director’s best films. But Bogdanovich had a self-sabotaging streak that began to assert itself. He broke up with Polly Platt, the brilliant writer/costume designer who helped him shape and conceive of his movies. He made duds. He butted heads. He lost his way. His ego ballooned. The wunderkind director lost almost everything, but he kept making movies. At the end of the 1970s, he made one more great film with Saint Jack, an overlooked little gem about an American trying to run a brothel in Thailand. But after that it was decline and despair, his towering talents wasted on mediocre projects. He ended his career making knock-off remakes for TV, misfires, and two flat attempts at recapturing the old fire. But he never lost his love for cinema, his admiration for the great artists, or his mentorship of new directors; both Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson considered him a mentor. His book, Who the Devil Made It?, remains an essential piece of writing for film buffs. He leaves us with a handful of masterpieces and yet another Hollywood cautionary tale.