#or what's up doc. that's the pb that i'm colder on than most. it is funny though.

[lesbiancolumbo]

What's your take on Peter Bogdanovich's work overall? I've only seen Last Picture Show, which I enjoyed but wasn't exactly blown away. I want to see his collabs with Ben Gazzara, but wasn't sure if it's worth going through the rest of his CV.

his collaborations with the true genius in his first marriage, polly platt, are fantastic. these are the first four films of his career, which she worked on as production designer and in the case of targets, helped write AND effectively produced the entire damn thing uncredited. polly made peter a better filmmaker and no one likes to admit that, least of all peter, but i don't care. i like these films a lot.

i don't care for his first film with ben, saint jack, if we're being fully honest, but his second collaboration with ben, they all laughed, is probably the non-polly collab of peter's that i like the most. it's a beautiful film and the beginning and sad end of dorothy stratten's career. even if it's just to see her budding talents as a comedienne, you should watch they all laughed.

i have a lot of thoughts about peter as a person that is divorced from his work, and i won't get into That here (it's mostly very negative - i fucking hate that guy) but his early period is honestly the best he ever was (he knew it too, i think) and then he went through a lot of ups and downs, career-wise. a lot of people love to give his more maligned works credit in retrospect, and i respect that for them but i'm really just not interested in watching anything that isn't they all laughed or paper moon or last picture show.