Peter Bogdanovich

Peter Bogdanovich was born in Kingston, New York, to Serbian and Austrian-Jewish refugee parents. Immersed in cinema from boyhood, he curated film programs at the Museum of Modern Art and conducted landmark monograph interviews with Orson Welles, John Ford, and Howard Hawks. Mentored by Roger Corman, he directed his breakout thriller Targets in 1968.

In 1971, at age 32, Bogdanovich directed the coming-of-age masterpiece The Last Picture Show. Shot in melancholic black-and-white in a dying Texas town, the film received eight Academy Award nominations, winning two Oscars and drawing comparisons to Citizen Kane. He followed with back-to-back triumphs: the screwball comedy What's Up, Doc? (1972) starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal, and the Depression-era road comedy Paper Moon (1973), which won ten-year-old Tatum O'Neal an Oscar. Bogdanovich remained a devoted guardian of cinema history, completing Orson Welles' unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind in 2018 and playing psychotherapist Dr. Elliot Kupferberg in HBO's The Sopranos.