Bogdanovitch Offers Insight, Anecdotes at DeSales: The Writer, Director and Actor Talks About His 4 Decades in Hollywood.

By Len Righi, The Morning Call, Allentown, Pa.

Mar. 31–Few men can say they have shared mounds of Fritos spread across a table by a ravenous Orson Welles. Peter Bogdanovich is one of them — it happened during a very late lunch break on the set of Welles’ “The Other Side of the Wind.” As Welles and Bogdanovich, who had an acting role in the still-unreleased 1972 film, gobbled up the corn chips alone in a kitchen, Bogdanovich recalled being told by the director and his longtime friend, “You don’t gain weight if nobody sees you eating them.”

The loquacious and affable Bogdanovich used that Welles anecdote and many others from his four decades as a director, writer and actor, as well as clever voice impressions of the people he quoted, to offer vivid glimpses of Hollywood behind the camera on Saturday at two separate sessions during DeSales University’s eighth Student Film Festival.

Late in the afternoon, as he was quizzed by a group of about 75 students, Bogdanovich revealed that Welles was the one who urged him to ask permission to film arguably his best-known movie, “The Last Picture Show,” in black and white. “I had told Orson that I wanted to get the depth of field he did in ‘Touch of Evil,’ ” said Bogdanovich, “and he told me, ‘You’ll never get it in color.’ “

Pressing the producer paid off later as well. The next time Bogdanovich wanted to use black and white, for “Paper Moon,”"there was no struggle.”

Bogdanovich said that throughout his career, he has “always been interested in something I don’t have a clue about.” That is how he came to direct last year’s acclaimed four-hour Tom Petty DVD documentary, “Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down a Dream.” When he was approached about the project, “That’s why I didn’t say I didn’t have a clue who they were,” Bogdanovich said with a smile.

He said being on stage to film concert segments “made me wish I was a rock star,” adding with a sigh, “the instant gratification …”

Touching on two of his biggest flops, 1975′s “At Long Last Love” and 1976′s “Nickelodeon,” Bogdanovich warned the students against compromise, which he called “the enemy of the artist. If you compromise before, during or after, you’re going to end up with something you don’t like, and the audience doesn’t like.”

There were a couple of uncomfortable moments. Though the students seemed to recognize the names Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford and Jean Renoir, they drew a blank when the 68-year-old Bogdanovich mentioned Ernst Lubitsch, the director known for his masterful touch with witty, sophisticated romantic comedies and musicals. “I suggest you see all of his movies, starting with ‘Ninotchka.’ … He also did ‘The Shop Around the Corner,’ which was remade as ‘You’ve Got Mail.’ It was a scabrous remake.” Later, while discussing his screwball comedy “What’s Up Doc?,” Bogdanovich said he explained the picture to its star, Barbra Streisand, this way: “We’re going to do a [Dean] Martin and [Jerry] Lewis comedy. You’re Lewis.” Realizing the youth of his audience, he winced, and said to one of his hosts, “It went over their heads.”

Bogdanovich also spoke about “Wait for Me,” a screenplay he has been working on for more than 20 years. “It’s funny, personal and sad. … The best parts are funny and sad at the same time. It’s a complicated picture about a movie director who has been married six times and has six daughters. His sixth wife and two of his best friends die in a plane crash returning from the Grand Canyon.” Years later, as the director contemplates suicide by jumping into the Danube, “he runs into the ghost of his dead wife. … Will I ever make it? I don’t know. But asking about it may change its luck.”

To conclude the evening session, which drew about 150 people, Bogdanovich related what Jimmy Stewart told him makes movies special: “If you’re good and God helps you … you’re giving people a little, tiny piece of time that you never forget.’ ” Then Bogdanovich added: “That’s why we’re here tonight.”

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