A legendary raconteur who’s gift for gab rivals his cinematic output, Peter Bogdanovich is always a treat to watch or listen to. His career had many ups and downs—perhaps evinced in our recent feature, The Essentials: Peter Bogdanovich’s 9 Best Films—but he not only earned the approval and friendship of the iconoclastic Orson Welles at a young age, but his early cinematic trifecta (“The Last Picture Show,” “What’s Up Doc?” and “Paper Moon”) is unassailable. Name one filmmaker who had their first three movies become classics? (“Targets” being a hybrid film he was left to clean up, arguably isn’t his true first movie). And so, Bogdanovich in an hour and a half chat on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast is an absolute treat for your ears. Bogdanovich has a million stories and the 76 year old tells the comedian many epic tales. One of the most interesting that you may not know unless you’re a total Bogdanovich scholar is that he almost followed-up “What’s Up Doc?” with a Western instead of the father/daughter con-man story of “Paper Moon.”
As Bogdanovich tells it he was all set to direct a Western and commissioned Larry McMurtry (“The Last Picture Show”) to write one. Of course this is before McMurtry had ever written one for the screen. Bogdanovich told Maron he wanted it to star John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, the Clancy Brothers, Cybill Shepard, Ben Johnson, and Cloris Leachman. It was supposed to be “a trek” Western with and McMurtry turned in a 350 page screenplay, which Bogdanovich then whittled down and got it into shape.
Jimmy Stewart was on board as was most of the cast, but John Wayne turned it down because he said it was a “Western to end all Westerns” and he wasn’t ready to hang up his spurs. Bogdanovich didn’t want to make the picture without Wayne and so he turned his attention to an adaptation of the novel “Addie Pray” that Paramount wanted him to do and that turned into “Paper Moon.”
Bogdanovich told McMurtry to turn the screenplay into a novel or do with it what he liked and 13 years later the author turned it into the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lonesome Dove.” Interesting factoid of what could have been and who knows how it could have affected Bogdanovich’s trajectory which began to plummet after “Paper Moon.” Anyhow, it’s a great, must-listen conversation and you should give it a whirl below.
Bogdanovich\’s memory about that western screenplay with McMurtry is conveniently self-aggrandizing and incorrect. That western screenplay written by McMurtry was only 75 pages long, and was owned by a major studio. McMurtry later purchased the screenplay back from the studio and set out to write a novel (Lonesome Dove) which Bogdanovich had nothing to do with, nor did he have any input upon. The novel is 843 pages long; McMurtry\’s first draft manuscript of LD was over 1,500 pages long. It might be noted that once Bogdanovich\’s former wife Polly Platt was no longer involved with his films, his career took a downhill slide. It was Polly who read Last Picture Show and urged him to consider the book as a film, which Oscar-nominated screenplay was co-written by McMurtry. McMurtry\’s first draft of that screenplay was overly long and whittled down by the both of them.
"Targets” being a hybrid film he was left to clean up, arguably isn’t his true first movie" —
This is pretty misleading; Corman had Karloff on contract for two days work, and offered in addition unused footage from THE TERROR, which starred Karloff, and gave Bogandovich carte blanche (within budget limits) to write and direct a movie that used both. TARGETS was the surprisingly ingenious result — a thriller in the Hitchcock vein that is also a tribute to Karloff, and the movies in general, with enough metacinematic touches to fill an academic essay. It is absolutely his first film, and if not as polished and immaculate as the next three, deserves to be much more seen than it is.