Being Peter Bogdanovich

>> The outsider stages a comeback with The Cat’s Meow

by MATTHEW HAYS

“Yes, I understand I’m a punchline in the new Woody film,” Peter Bogdanovich says to me, on the phone from his New York home. The director behind The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc? and Mask hasn’t seen Hollywood Ending, so it’s up to me to explain the gag to him. Perhaps not surprisingly, it isn’t very flattering, having Woody’s onscreen persona hitting an all-time low by being passed over for a made-for-TV gig in favour of Bogdanovich.

But by this past week, when Ending was hitting screens across North America, the joke had already become passé. Bogdanovich, survivor of nasty career lulls and personal scandals of Soon-Yi proportions, is now having a pleasant renaissance of sorts. His latest, a sharp period piece about an infamous Hollywood scandal titled The Cat’s Meow, is getting solid reviews and playing to more-than-respectable houses. And true to many of Bogdanovich’s best pictures, the film has a sense of looking back on cinematic history as well as of looking forward.

The plot involves the mistress of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who was also romanced by Charlie Chaplin. Hearst was famous for taking various famous friends out for decadent cruises on his luxurious boat. But this time, jealousies would boil over, with disastrous results. This bit of speculative nonfiction is filled by an ace cast, including Edward Herrmann as Hearst, Eddie Izzard as Chaplin and Kirsten Dunst as Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies.

Bogdanovich says he was drawn to the film’s script immediately, having heard the notorious story (it’s recounted in Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon) from Orson Welles himself. “Orson told me the tale over 30 years ago. I thought it was riveting then. And yes, I think it’s a true story.”

Praise from Jerry

Bogdanovich was particularly proud to screen The Cat’s Meow for his old friend Jerry Lewis in Vegas over the weekend. “Eddie [Izzard] got a great compliment with that. Jerry saw the film and knew Chaplin quite well back in the ’50s and ’60s, both in Switzerland and America. He said Eddie really nailed it. He said Chaplin was very laid back.”

Bogdanovich says he’s definitely going to move forward with this big-screen comeback, and with his old friend Lewis, who will be cast in Bogdanovich’s next film, Wait for Me, a “ghost fantasy drama” he hopes to begin shooting in eight months.

Still, despite the good times, there are things in the universe for Bogdanovich to gripe about—in fact, there appears to be a rather long list. On all those new effects in movies: “No one’s going to invent the wheel anymore, it’s been done. The computerized thing just creates shots that draw attention to themselves, because you know when you’re watching it that it couldn’t be done without the use of a computer. I’m all for just shooting the damn thing.” On the dearth of any real auteurs left in the world: “There are a few, like Woody or Marty. The obvious ones. But everything’s become so automatic. It all seems so machine-made. They seem identical these days.”

Not like the good old days

On Cher, who starred in (and won an award at Cannes for) Mask: “I’m sick of her mouthing off about me. I worked hard on that performance with her and she knows it. I’m sick of her not owning up to what went on there. We all worked on it, she worked hard. She’s excellent in it. But I’m the one who fought to get her the part. The studio didn’t want her, they wanted Jane Fonda. I fought for her. No one thought of Cher for the part except me.” What has the press gotten flat-out wrong, in terms of all the scandals Bogdanovich has been through? “You should ask what they got right—that’s the short list.” Is there a young filmmaker today who can touch Welles or Hitchcock? “There are a lot of good people around, but no one in their league. There are some giants in popular culture, I just happen to feel that the generation that preceded us had a lot more of something going.”

But the best part comes when you get Bogdanovich going on the good old days, the Golden age of moviegoing. “DVDs are great, but part of the problem is that something was lost when you could take the movies home. You can stop ’em and start ’em. In theatres you could only see them once in a while and after they were gone you couldn’t see them for years. You also couldn’t stop them once they’d started. You were alone in the dark with a bunch of people. Screens were bigger. It was more special. Did you see those old film houses they were in? They were palaces.
“That was heaven!” :

The Cat’s Meow opens Friday, May 10