- The original sign read: HOLLYWOODLAND.
- The Hollywood Sign was built in 1923 to advertise a housing development.
- Today the ticket is protected under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security.
Overlooking the movie capital of the world, the Hollywood sign has been a symbol of the mythical world of show business for nearly 85 years. And yet, once you know the precise history slack the most famous imprint on the planet, you will find it to be one of the most unlikely icons ever built.
The Birth of Tinsel Town
The early days of movies were controlled by Thomas Edison and the Motion Pictures Patents Trust. Operating out of New York, Edison and company controlled movie production and ruthlessly stamped out any competitors. To avoid the trust, a few filmmakers headed about as far away from New York as you can possibly get without getting your feet wet – a sleepy little town of orchards and sheep farms known as Hollywood.
A Quiet Little Nowhere
Ironically, Hollywood got its name from the wife of a Kansas prohibitionist named Harvey Wilcox, who had moved to the Cahuenga Valley station to set up a itsy-bitsy community that reflected his conservative beliefs. He bought 120 acres of land and built a ranch in the middle of a fig orchard. Wilcox’s wife, Daeida, while returning home by train from an East Coast prance, struck up a conversation with another woman on the negate who called her summer home Hollywood. Daeida liked the name so much, she decided to borrow it as the name of her ranch. By 1897, the area surrounding the ranch became known as Hollywood, and in 1903 the town was incorporated.
Enter the “MoviePeople”
In 1907 the first filmmakers came to Hollywood and status up shop. The sunny climate and expansive distance from Edison and the Patent Trust made Hollywood an ideal location for shooting movies. Five years later, over a dozen film companies had moved into Hollywood, but the real jabber hadn’t started yet. Films were shot all over town, with many ’studios’ setting up shop in former barns and unused cowsheds. Cecille B. DeMille worked out of a barn on Vine Street.
The New Gold Rush
By 1915, Hollywood was a boomtown. Studios were springing up all over town. Young hopefuls gathered by the hundreds for a shot at breaking into the movie industry. Established stars built glamorous mansions. The town was literally transformed overnight, from a sleepy conservative backwater to a bustling metropolis where fortunes were won and lost every day. As more and more people flocked to Hollywood, the staunch estate market exploded.
Here’s Your Sign
In 1923, the Hollywoodland Genuine Estate Group decided to promote some of their prime real estate by erecting a massive sign on the side of Mount Cahuenga. The sign simply read: Hollywoodland, but that was the only thing simple about it. Built at a cost of $21,000 dollars the enormous sign was made of 13 letters. Each letter was 30 feet wide and 50 feet tall. The letters were made of metal barn roofing and held up by a framework of pipes and telephone poles. Below the sign was a large white circle, 35 feet in diameter. The message was meant to say: “Hollywoodland! Period.” The sign originally was studded with 4,000 20-watt light bulbs that blinked “Holly” then “Wood” then “Land” out into the clear California sky and was visible at a distance of 25 miles. As a promotional gimmick, the label was meant to last about a year and a half. Obviously, the promotion is still going on. Only the product has changed.
Hard Times
The Tremendous Depression hit Hollywood hard. Salary cuts were implemented; jobs slashed. The Hollywoodland sign stood as a symbol of hope for thousands of actors and actresses struggling to make it in movies. One such hopeful was a Broadway actress named Peg Entwistle who tried desperately to make it into movies but failed. In 1932, she climbed to the top of the 50-foot “H” and jumped off into the night, committing suicide from Tinsel Town’s most famous symbol.
The Depression also forced the real estate developers who built the sign into bankruptcy. By 1939, all maintenance on the sign had stopped. All 4,000 light bulbs were stolen. Vandals removed pieces of the sign, and the elements wore away at its supports. Holes and gaps began appearing in the sign, which was becoming an unstable, grisly mess. Many neighborhoods in Hollywood lobbied for the sign’s removal
The rationing during World War Two meant that no resources could be spared to repair or fix the sign. Near the end of the war, the bankrupt real estate developer who had built the sign, gave the city of Hollywood his remaining acreage high up in the Hollywood Hills – sitting on a slight parcel of this land, sat the rapidly deteriorating sign.
By 1949 the ticket was in crude disrepair – the letter H had fallen face down. Something had to be done. Later that year, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, the new owners of the sign removed the “Land” part of the mark and repaired the remaining letters.
I’d Like to Buy a Vowel
In 1973 the notice was declares a historical monument by the cultural heritage Board of Los Angeles. It’s new, official status as a monument, meant that much-needed restoration and repairs would take place. The repairs would be expensive, so to raise money, the fresh Hollywood Sign trust put together a star-studded fund raiser, during which, individual letters of the sign could be “adopted” for $28,000 each. The fundraiser was hosted by Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion and featured a unique mix of celebrities rallying around the sign. Gene Autry adopted one of the L’s. Alice Cooper bought an O. Paul Williams sponsored the W. With new financial backing, the Sign Trust unveiled a fresh Hollywood mark in 1978.
Sign Sponsors:
H — Terrence Donnelly, Publisher of the Hollywood Independent Newspaper
O — Giovanni Mazza, Italian movie producer
L — Les Kelley, Creator of the Kelley Blue Book
L — Gene Autrey, singing cowboy, Owner of KTLA
Y — Hugh Hefner, Creator of Playboy magazine
W — Paul Williams, Singer/composer * (some sources attribute this to Andy Williams)
O — Warner Brother’s Records
O — Alice Cooper, rock fable (in tribute to Groucho Marx)
D — Dennis Lidtke
The Sign Today
In 1992, Dan Lungren, California Attorney General specified a plan to acquire the notice. Under the plan, The Hollywood Sign Trust was to preserve and promote the sign as a symbol of the entertainment industry. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce was entrusted with protecting the image of the sign, ensuring that any images of the sign are properly licensed. The City of Los Angeles was required to maintain and protect the restricted area of Griffith Park that’s home to the sign. They also provide park rangers and security for the sign.
The entire area around the mark is restricted and monitored by a state-of-the-art security system. External alarms, motion sensors and digital surveillance cameras constantly monitor the entire mark area.
In 2006, the Hollywood Sign Trust integrated the sign’s security system with the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that the sign is protected as a national treasure.
You can see the conception from the sign’s webcams and security cameras HERE.
Only in America – Fate of the Current Sign
When the original trace was torn down the pieces were purchased from the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce by Hank Berger, a nightclub promoter for $10,000. Berger cut up small sections of the sign and sold them as framed collectables. Sales were slow and Berger eventually gave up on the project. The crumbling, modern sign then sat in storage for 25 years.
Dan Bliss, who knew Berger through business dealings, purchased the sign for an undisclosed six-figure amount in 2003. Bliss auctioned off larger pieces of the sign on eBay, including a 5′x3′ section of the H to the Hollywood History Museum for $11,766. The rest of the ticket sat stacked in a storage building. In 2005, Bliss auctioned off the rest of the sign on eBay. He opened the bidding at $300,000. Bliss wanted to exercise the money to fund a documentary to see if Elvis was still alive. On December 6, 2005 the remaining sections of the recent Hollywood tag sold for $450,400. Ah, only in America.
You can see the new ebay listing for the sign HERE.
From a true estate ad to federally-protected icon of the American entertainment industry, the Hollywood sign has endured as a lasting tribute to the dreamer in everyone.
Sources: City of Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, CBC.ca
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Filed under Stock Bankruptcy by on Nov 29th, 2011. Comment. 
The son of immigrants fleeing the Nazis–his father was a Serbian painter and pianist and his mother was descended from a rich Jewish Austrian family–Peter Bogdanovich was conceived in Europe but born in America. He originally was an actor in the 1950s, studying his craft with legendary acting teacher Stella Adler and appearing on television and in summer stock. In the early 1960s he achieved notoriety for programming movies at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. An obsessive cinema-goer, sometimes seeing up to 400 movies a year in his youth, Bogdanovich prominently showcased the work of American directors such as John Ford, about whom he subsequently wrote a book based on the notes he had produced for the MOMA retrospective of the director, and the then-underappreciated Howard Hawks. Bogdanovich also brought attention to such forgotten pioneers of American cinema as Allan Dwan.
Bogdanovich was influenced by the French critics of the 1950s who wrote for Cahiers du Cinema, especially critic-turned-director Francois Truffaut. Before becoming a director himself, he built his reputation as a film writer with articles in Esquire Magazine. In 1968, following the example of Cahiers du Cinema critics Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer who had created the Nouvelle Vague (“New Wave”) by making their own films, Bogdanovich became a director. Working for low-budget schlock-meister Roger Corman, Bogdanovich directed the critically praised Targets (1968) and the not-so-critically praised Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968), a film best forgotten.
Turning attend to journalism, Bogdanovich struck up a lifelong friendship with the legendary Orson Welles while interviewing him on the residence of Mike Nichols‘ film adaptation of Catch-22 (1970) from the novel by Joseph Heller. Subsequently, Bogdanovich has played a major role in elucidating Welles and his career with his writings on the great actor-director, most notably his book “This is Orson Welles” (1992). He has steadily produced invaluable books about the cinema, especially “Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors,” an indispensable tome that establishes Bogdanovich, along with Kevin Brownlow, as one of the premier English-language chroniclers of cinema.
The 32-year-old Bogdanovich was hailed by a critics as a Wellesian wunderkind when his most famous film, The Last Picture Show (1971) was released. The film received eight Academy Award nominations, including Bogdanovich as Best Director, and won two of them, for Cloris Leachman and “John Ford Stock Company” veteran Ben Johnson in the supporting acting categories. Bogdanovich, who had cast 19-year-old model Cybill Shepherd in a major role in the film, fell in fancy with the young beauty, an affair that eventually led to his divorce from the film’s spot designer Polly Platt, his longtime artistic collaborator and the mother of his two children.
Bogdanovich followed up The Last Picture Show (1971) with a major hit, What’s Up, Doc? (1972), a screwball comedy heavily indebted to Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940), starring Barbra Streisand and ‘Ryan O’Neal’. Despite his reliance on homage to bygone cinema, Bogdanovich had solidified his status as one of a novel breed of A-list directors that included Academy Award winners Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin, with whom he formed The Directors Company. The Directors Company was a generous production deal with Paramount Pictures that essentially gave the directors carte blanche if they kept within strict budget limitations. It was through this entity that Bogdanovich’s next big hit, the critically praised Paper Moon (1973), was produced.
Paper Moon (1973), a Depression-era comedy starring Ryan O’Neal that won his ten-year-old daughter Tatum O’Neal an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress, proved to be the highwater mark of Bogdanovich’s career. Forced to section the profits with his fellow directors, Bogdanovich became dissatisfied with the plan. The Directors Company subsequently produced only two more pictures, Francis Ford Coppola’s critically acclaimed The Conversation (1974) which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture of 1974 and garnered Coppola an Oscar nod for Best Director, and Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller (1974), a film that had a quite different critical reception.
An adaptation of the Henry James novella, Daisy Miller (1974) spelled the beginning of the end of Bogdanovich’s career as a popular, critically acclaimed director. The film, which starred Bogdanovich’s lover Cybill Shepherd as the title character, was savaged by critics and was a flop at the box office. Bogdanovich’s follow-up, At Long Last Love (1975), a filming of the Cole Porter musical starring Cybill Shepherd, was derided by critics as one of the worst films ever made, noted as such in Harry Medved and Michael Medved’s book “The Golden Turkey Awards: Nominees and Winners, the Worst Achievements in Hollywood History” (1980). The film also was a box office bomb despite featuring Burt Reynolds, a hotly burning star who would conclude super-nova status at the end of the 1970s.
Once again beholden to the past, Bogdanovich insisted on filming the musical numbers for At Long Last Love (1975) live, a process not stale since the early days of the talkies, when sound engineer Douglas Shearer developed lip-synching at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The decision was widely ridiculed, as none of the leading actors were known for their singing abilities (Bogdanovich himself had produced a critically panned album of Cybill Shepherd singing Cole Porter songs in 1974). The public perception of Bogdanovich became that of an arrogant director hamstrung by his own hubris.
Trying to recapture the lightning in the bottle that was his early success, Bogdanovich once again turned to the past, his own and that of cinema, with Nickelodeon (1976). The film, a comedy recounting the earliest days of the motion picture industry, reunited Ryan O’Neal and ‘Tatum O’Neal’ from his last hit, Paper Moon (1973) with Burt Reynolds. Counseled not to use the unpopular (with both audiences and critics) Cybill Shepherd in the film, Bogdanovich instead outmoded newcomer Jane Hitchcock as the film’s ingenue. Unfortunately, the magic of Paper Moon (1973) could not be repeated and the film died at the box office. Jane Hitchcock, Bogdanovich’s discovery, would make only one more film before calling it quits.
After a three-year hiatus, Bogdanovich returned with the critically and financially underwhelming Saint Jack (1979) for Hugh M. Hefner’s Playboy Productions Inc. Bogdanovich’s long affair with Cybill Shepherd had ended in 1978, but the production deal making Hugh M. Hefner the film’s producer was share of the settlement of a lawsuit Shepherd had filed against Hefner for publishing nude photos of her pirated from a print of The Last Picture Show (1971) in Playboy Magazine. Bogdanovich then launched the film that would be his career Waterloo, They All Laughed (1981), a low-budget ensemble comedy starring Audrey Hepburn and the 1980 Playboy Playmate of the Year, Dorothy Stratten. During the filming of the record, Bogdanovich fell in love with Stratten, who was married to an emotionally unstable hustler, Paul Snider, who relied on her financially. Stratten moved in with Bogdanovich, and when she told Snider she was leaving him, he shot and killed her, sodomizing her corpse before committing suicide.
They All Laughed (1981) could not attract a distributor due to the negative publicity surrounding the Stratten murder, despite it being one of the few films made by the legendary Audrey Hepburn after her provisional retirement in 1967 (the film would prove to be Hepburn’s last starring role in a theatrically released motion characterize). The heartbroken Bogdanovich bought the rights to the negative so that it would be seen by the public, but the film had a limited release, garnered weak reviews and cost Bogdanovich millions of dollars, driving the emotionally devastated director into bankruptcy.
Peter Bogdanovich turned wait on to his first avocation, writing, to pen a anecdote of his tiresome cherish, “The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten (1960-1980)” that was published in 1984. The book was a riposte to Teresa Carpenter’s “Death of a Playmate” article written for The Village Voice that had won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize. Carpenter had lambasted Bogdanovich and Hugh M. Hefner, claiming that Stratten was as great a victim of them as she was of Paul Snider. The article served as the basis of Bob Fosse’s film Star 80 (1983), in which Bogdanovich was portrayed as the fictional director “Aram Nicholas”.
Bogdanovich’s career as a noted director was over, and though he achieved modest success with Mask (1985), his sequel to his greatest success The Last Picture Show (1971), Texasville (1990), was a principal and box office disappointment. He directed two more theatrical films in 1992 and 1993, but their failure kept him off the titanic screen until 2001’s The Cat’s Meow (2001). Returning once again to a reworking of the past, this time the alleged murder of director Thomas H. Ince by Welles’ bete noir William Randolph Hearst, The Cat’s Meow (2001) was a modest critical success but a flop at the box office. In addition to helming some television movies, Bogdanovich has returned to acting, with a recurring guest role on the cable television series “The Sopranos” (1999) as Dr. Jennifer Melfi’s analyst.
Peter Bogdanovich’s personal reputation suffered from gossip about his 13-year marriage to Dorothy Stratten’s 19-year-old-kid sister Louise Stratten, who was 29 years his junior. Some gossip held that Bogdanovich’s behavior was akin to that of the James Stewart character in Alfred Hitchcock’s necrophiliac masterpiece Vertigo (1958), with the director trying to remold Stratten into the image of her late sister. The marriage ended in divorce in 2001.
Now in his mid-60s, Bogdanovich clearly has imitated his hero Orson Welles, but in an unintended fashion, as a type of monumental failure much beloved by the mythmakers of Hollywood. However, unlike the widely acclaimed master Welles, the orbit of Bogdanovich’s reputation has never recovered from the apogee it reached briefly in the early 1970s.
There has been speculation that Peter Bogdanovich’s ruin as a director was guaranteed when he ditched his wife and artistic collaborator ‘Polly Platt’ for Cybill Shepherd. Platt had worked with Bogdanovich on all his early successes, and some critics acquire that the controlling artistic consciousness on The Last Picture Show (1971) was Platt’s. Parting company with Platt after Paper Moon (1973), Bogdanovich promptly slipped from the heights of a wunderkind to a has-been pursuing epic folly, as evidenced by Daisy Miller (1974) and At Long Last Love (1975).
In 1998 the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress named The Last Picture Show (1971) to the National Film Registry, an honor awarded only to the most culturally significant films. Viewing Daisy Miller (1974) alongside The Last Picture Show (1971) should be a standard part of film school curriculum, as it tends to debunk the auteur theory. Bogdanovich’s career gives truth to the contention that film is an industrial process and each movie has many “authors,” not just one (the director). If the auteur theory were true, Bogdanovich arguably would have returned to form eventually and produced more good films, if not another masterpiece.
He didn’t – he didn’t even come stop. Thus, Peter Bogdanovich will remain a footnote in cinema history, more valuable for his contributions to the literature of film than to the medium itself.
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Filed under Stock Bankruptcy by on Sep 8th, 2011. Comment.
Have you ever wondered what venture capital is and what it is for? Well, venture capital is capital that is allocated for business ventures. If you are an entrepreneur and having a small business is being too difficult for you to run by yourself, you might think of obtaining venture capital or private equity to expand your business and turn it into a big company. To do this, you will need to know the difference between venture capital and private equity.
Venture Capital
Venture capital is funding that is usually given as an investment by a venture capital or VC firm. These VC firms could be financial institutions that are strictly dedicated to investing in entrepreneurs who have an innovative product prototype or service that has great market potential. Investing in entrepreneurs is not charity work for VC firms. In investing, VC firms also expect to get suitable returns on their investments. Other VC firms can also be an investing arm of expansive corporations that seek entrepreneurs who have a product or service that could benefit the business of that particular corporation. Banks can also provide venture capital as well as private equity.
Private Equity
Private equity is basically the same thing as venture capital. The difference is that venture capital is distinguished to be money provided by institutions or private investors who have strictly allocated the funding for investments in business ventures, whereas private equity is money that is from private individuals. Equity is also capital, but it does not necessarily have to be allocated for business ventures. Private equity can also be used to fund charities or other ventures as well.
Funding Rounds
If you are intending to become an entrepreneur, you need to know a few things about how venture capital is administered. Most VC firms are very choosy about whom they invest in and in what stage they invest in. Some VC firms like to invest in the early stages of a company, whereas others like to invest in the later stages of a company when a company is more mature and well-established. Others yet like to invest in all stages of a company’s life. When a VC firm invests in a company, it usually invests in funding rounds, which are periods of funding that are labeled as follows:
1. Seed funding is the very first funding round that a company receives. Seed funding is the funding that actually does what its name implies. It sows the seeds of the company. It is the vital capital that allows a company to launch its product to market and accept the basic business needs accomplished
2. Series A funding is a funding round that is invested in a company that is still in its early stages but already has its feet on the ground. This round of funding usually follows the seed funding. When a company receives series A funding, it already has a product that is on the market and aims to grow. Series A funding can be feeble to expand a company’s product line or advance marketing efforts.
3. Series B funding is a funding round that is invested in early stage in companies who are growing at a steady pace. Funding from series B financing usually goes to ramp up sales and marketing efforts in new areas and expand sales into new markets. Usually companies that receive series B funding are looking to expand their marketing efforts into recent geographic locations.
4. Series C through F funding is received by companies that are already well-established. These are companies who are in either their middle to late stage companies. These funding rounds are often invested in companies that provide large returns for their investors.
5. Mezzanine funding is a funding round for weak companies that are contemplating to be publicly traded in the stock market.
How To Apply for Venture Capital
Applying for venture capital can be a very challenging process. There are many factors that can come into effect whether or not a particular entrepreneur can win investors or not. Some of these factors are as follows:
1. Poor economic times tend to scare investors. Today, the economy is not the greatest in the world and many people are less eager to invest, fearing that they could loose out and not have positive returns. Other investors, however, who are more daring to take risks, tend to invest most during dreadful economic times. In fact, it was Warren Buffet who said “When people get greedy, I salvage scared and when people get insecure, I get greedy.” What does this exactly mean? Simple. During tough economic times, the majority of people, including financial institutions, like to be tight with their money and tend to exercise less. This causes demand to decrease and in turn can generate opportunities that would not necessarily be there during good economic times.
2. Product prototype can be very important in winning investors. Many investors like to see a product prototype that is unique and can meet a need or set a trend that can go viral in the marketplace. If your product prototype is a current invention and has a patent or patent is pending, that can be a good distinct in the eyes of most investors.
3. Exceptional Service for those who are entrepreneurs in the service industry can be key to net that needed investment. There are many companies that provide different services; from internet-based services to physical services. Your service needs to stand out. It needs to have some swagger to it that investors can see good potential in it. If you have a service that can meet an unmet need, that’s even better. Many internet entrepreneurs now develop something known as SaaS or Software as a Service. This is actually software that is used online and provides a service for all kinds of businesses or individuals. SaaS can be faded in the business service industry to do everything from managing security to payroll and time. SaaS can also be used for the individual consumer. Some consumer based SaaSs can be faded to share photos and videos to friends and relatives, etc. The SaaS is a big industry nowadays and if this is something you plan to do, it must stand out to win an investment.
4. Company management teams and how they perform are crucial in winning investments. If your management performs poorly and you are loosing more money than you are gaining, it will not win you an investment. On the other hand, a management team that is disciplined and runs a tight ship is more likely to win investments from investors. Remember, investors invest in your company because they are looking to profit from your business. They want to peek how you are doing in the marketplace. If you beget a profit, your investor will also make a profit.
5. A good business strategy is impartial as crucial as what is mentioned above in number four. How do you plan your business strategy? Can it be effective? Do you have an exit strategy if your business fails? All these are vital to investors.
What is an Exit Strategy?
An exit strategy is a strategy to get out of your business if it is failing. Some exit strategies can range from filing for bankruptcy, though that is not a good one, to selling your company out to another more sound company. Corporate mergers are another common exit strategy.
What ever you do, presenting yourself, your management team and your product or service is crucial in winning the venture capital you need to build your idea or business into a strong company.
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Filed under Stock Bankruptcy by on Apr 20th, 2011. Comment.
The son of immigrants fleeing the Nazis–his father was a Serbian painter and pianist and his mother was descended from a rich Jewish Austrian family–Peter Bogdanovich was conceived in Europe but born in America. He originally was an actor in the 1950s, studying his craft with legendary acting teacher Stella Adler and appearing on television and in summer stock. In the early 1960s he achieved notoriety for programming movies at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. An obsessive cinema-goer, sometimes seeing up to 400 movies a year in his youth, Bogdanovich prominently showcased the work of American directors such as John Ford, about whom he subsequently wrote a book based on the notes he had produced for the MOMA retrospective of the director, and the then-underappreciated Howard Hawks. Bogdanovich also brought attention to such forgotten pioneers of American cinema as Allan Dwan.
Bogdanovich was influenced by the French critics of the 1950s who wrote for Cahiers du Cinema, especially critic-turned-director Francois Truffaut. Before becoming a director himself, he built his reputation as a film writer with articles in Esquire Magazine. In 1968, following the example of Cahiers du Cinema critics Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer who had created the Nouvelle Vague (“Original Wave”) by making their own films, Bogdanovich became a director. Working for low-budget schlock-meister Roger Corman, Bogdanovich directed the critically praised Targets (1968) and the not-so-critically praised Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968), a film best forgotten.
Turning back to journalism, Bogdanovich struck up a lifelong friendship with the legendary Orson Welles while interviewing him on the set of Mike Nichols‘ film adaptation of Catch-22 (1970) from the novel by Joseph Heller. Subsequently, Bogdanovich has played a major role in elucidating Welles and his career with his writings on the gigantic actor-director, most notably his book “This is Orson Welles” (1992). He has steadily produced invaluable books about the cinema, especially “Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors,” an notable tome that establishes Bogdanovich, along with Kevin Brownlow, as one of the premier English-language chroniclers of cinema.
The 32-year-old Bogdanovich was hailed by a critics as a Wellesian wunderkind when his most famous film, The Last Picture Show (1971) was released. The film received eight Academy Award nominations, including Bogdanovich as Best Director, and won two of them, for Cloris Leachman and “John Ford Stock Company” veteran Ben Johnson in the supporting acting categories. Bogdanovich, who had cast 19-year-old model Cybill Shepherd in a major role in the film, fell in love with the young beauty, an affair that eventually led to his divorce from the film’s set designer Polly Platt, his longtime artistic collaborator and the mother of his two children.
Bogdanovich followed up The Last Picture Show (1971) with a major hit, What’s Up, Doc? (1972), a screwball comedy heavily indebted to Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940), starring Barbra Streisand and ‘Ryan O’Neal’. Despite his reliance on homage to bygone cinema, Bogdanovich had solidified his status as one of a new breed of A-list directors that included Academy Award winners Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin, with whom he formed The Directors Company. The Directors Company was a generous production deal with Paramount Pictures that essentially gave the directors carte blanche if they kept within strict budget limitations. It was through this entity that Bogdanovich’s next big hit, the critically praised Paper Moon (1973), was produced.
Paper Moon (1973), a Depression-era comedy starring Ryan O’Neal that won his ten-year-old daughter Tatum O’Neal an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress, proved to be the highwater mark of Bogdanovich’s career. Forced to portion the profits with his fellow directors, Bogdanovich became dissatisfied with the arrangement. The Directors Company subsequently produced only two more pictures, Francis Ford Coppola’s critically acclaimed The Conversation (1974) which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture of 1974 and garnered Coppola an Oscar nod for Best Director, and Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller (1974), a film that had a quite different critical reception.
An adaptation of the Henry James novella, Daisy Miller (1974) spelled the beginning of the end of Bogdanovich’s career as a popular, critically acclaimed director. The film, which starred Bogdanovich’s lover Cybill Shepherd as the title character, was savaged by critics and was a flop at the box office. Bogdanovich’s follow-up, At Long Last Love (1975), a filming of the Cole Porter musical starring Cybill Shepherd, was derided by critics as one of the worst films ever made, noted as such in Harry Medved and Michael Medved’s book “The Golden Turkey Awards: Nominees and Winners, the Worst Achievements in Hollywood History” (1980). The film also was a box office bomb despite featuring Burt Reynolds, a hotly burning star who would attain super-nova status at the end of the 1970s.
Once again beholden to the past, Bogdanovich insisted on filming the musical numbers for At Long Last Love (1975) live, a process not used since the early days of the talkies, when sound engineer Douglas Shearer developed lip-synching at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The decision was widely ridiculed, as none of the leading actors were known for their singing abilities (Bogdanovich himself had produced a critically panned album of Cybill Shepherd singing Cole Porter songs in 1974). The public perception of Bogdanovich became that of an arrogant director hamstrung by his own hubris.
Trying to recapture the lightning in the bottle that was his early success, Bogdanovich once again turned to the past, his own and that of cinema, with Nickelodeon (1976). The film, a comedy recounting the earliest days of the motion represent industry, reunited Ryan O’Neal and ‘Tatum O’Neal’ from his last hit, Paper Moon (1973) with Burt Reynolds. Counseled not to use the unpopular (with both audiences and critics) Cybill Shepherd in the film, Bogdanovich instead used newcomer Jane Hitchcock as the film’s ingenue. Unfortunately, the magic of Paper Moon (1973) could not be repeated and the film died at the box office. Jane Hitchcock, Bogdanovich’s discovery, would accomplish only one more film before calling it quits.
After a three-year hiatus, Bogdanovich returned with the critically and financially underwhelming Saint Jack (1979) for Hugh M. Hefner’s Playboy Productions Inc. Bogdanovich’s long affair with Cybill Shepherd had ended in 1978, but the production deal making Hugh M. Hefner the film’s producer was part of the settlement of a lawsuit Shepherd had filed against Hefner for publishing nude photos of her pirated from a print of The Last Picture Show (1971) in Playboy Magazine. Bogdanovich then launched the film that would be his career Waterloo, They All Laughed (1981), a low-budget ensemble comedy starring Audrey Hepburn and the 1980 Playboy Playmate of the Year, Dorothy Stratten. During the filming of the picture, Bogdanovich fell in love with Stratten, who was married to an emotionally unstable hustler, Paul Snider, who relied on her financially. Stratten moved in with Bogdanovich, and when she told Snider she was leaving him, he shot and killed her, sodomizing her corpse before committing suicide.
They All Laughed (1981) could not attract a distributor due to the negative publicity surrounding the Stratten murder, despite it being one of the few films made by the legendary Audrey Hepburn after her provisional retirement in 1967 (the film would prove to be Hepburn’s last starring role in a theatrically released motion picture). The heartbroken Bogdanovich bought the rights to the negative so that it would be seen by the public, but the film had a limited release, garnered weak reviews and cost Bogdanovich millions of dollars, driving the emotionally devastated director into bankruptcy.
Peter Bogdanovich turned back to his first avocation, writing, to pen a memoir of his dead love, “The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten (1960-1980)” that was published in 1984. The book was a riposte to Teresa Carpenter’s “Death of a Playmate” article written for The Village Assert that had won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize. Carpenter had lambasted Bogdanovich and Hugh M. Hefner, claiming that Stratten was as distinguished a victim of them as she was of Paul Snider. The article served as the basis of Bob Fosse’s film Star 80 (1983), in which Bogdanovich was portrayed as the fictional director “Aram Nicholas”.
Bogdanovich’s career as a noted director was over, and though he achieved modest success with Mask (1985), his sequel to his greatest success The Last Report Show (1971), Texasville (1990), was a indispensable and box office disappointment. He directed two more theatrical films in 1992 and 1993, but their failure kept him off the big screen until 2001’s The Cat’s Meow (2001). Returning once again to a reworking of the past, this time the alleged murder of director Thomas H. Ince by Welles’ bete noir William Randolph Hearst, The Cat’s Meow (2001) was a modest critical success but a flop at the box office. In addition to helming some television movies, Bogdanovich has returned to acting, with a recurring guest role on the cable television series “The Sopranos” (1999) as Dr. Jennifer Melfi’s analyst.
Peter Bogdanovich’s personal reputation suffered from gossip about his 13-year marriage to Dorothy Stratten’s 19-year-old-kid sister Louise Stratten, who was 29 years his junior. Some gossip held that Bogdanovich’s behavior was akin to that of the James Stewart character in Alfred Hitchcock’s necrophiliac masterpiece Vertigo (1958), with the director trying to remold Stratten into the image of her late sister. The marriage ended in divorce in 2001.
Now in his mid-60s, Bogdanovich clearly has imitated his hero Orson Welles, but in an unintended fashion, as a type of monumental failure much beloved by the mythmakers of Hollywood. However, unlike the widely acclaimed master Welles, the orbit of Bogdanovich’s reputation has never recovered from the apogee it reached briefly in the early 1970s.
There has been speculation that Peter Bogdanovich’s raze as a director was guaranteed when he ditched his wife and artistic collaborator ‘Polly Platt’ for Cybill Shepherd. Platt had worked with Bogdanovich on all his early successes, and some critics believe that the controlling artistic consciousness on The Last Recount Show (1971) was Platt’s. Parting company with Platt after Paper Moon (1973), Bogdanovich promptly slipped from the heights of a wunderkind to a has-been pursuing epic folly, as evidenced by Daisy Miller (1974) and At Long Last Love (1975).
In 1998 the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress named The Last Picture Show (1971) to the National Film Registry, an honor awarded only to the most culturally significant films. Viewing Daisy Miller (1974) alongside The Last Picture Show (1971) should be a standard part of film school curriculum, as it tends to debunk the auteur theory. Bogdanovich’s career gives truth to the contention that film is an industrial process and each movie has many “authors,” not just one (the director). If the auteur theory were proper, Bogdanovich arguably would have returned to form eventually and produced more good films, if not another masterpiece.
He didn’t – he didn’t even come close. Thus, Peter Bogdanovich will remain a footnote in cinema history, more valuable for his contributions to the literature of film than to the medium itself.
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Filed under Stock Bankruptcy by on Jan 3rd, 2011. Comment.
- The hotel on this status opened in the 1920s.
- The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated here in 1968.
- The worn hotel and motel now house The National Civil Rights Museum.
The Lorraine Motel in Memphis has played an important role in African-American history. Many black celebrities stayed at the Lorraine before the 1968 assasination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. The Lorraine became an integral section of the Civil Rights Movement. It is now the home of the National Civil Rights Museum. Here is the story of the Lorraine Motel.
The Windsor Hotel, at the corner of Mulberry Street and Huling Avenue near downtown Memphis, opened in the 1920s. Walter and Loree Bailey purchased the Windsor in 1942 and re-named it the Lorraine Hotel.
In the days of legal segregation, the Windsor / Lorraine was one of the few hotels in Memphis initiate to shaded guests. Its location, walking distance from Beale Street, the main street of Memphis’ black community, made it sparkling to visiting celebrities. When Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, or Nat Cole, came to town, they stayed at the Lorraine.
Later, an annex, typical in develop of motels built along America’s novel Interstates in the 1960s, was added unhurried the original mustard-yellow brick hotel.
In March 1968, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King visited Memphis to support the city’s striking garbage collectors. He checked into the Lorraine, and led a march that, despite his policy of non-violence. turned violent. A second march was then planned.
On April 3, in a speech at Memphis Mason Temple, Dr. King said “We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountain top. I won’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life.”
Dr. King was assassinated at the Lorraine the next night, as he stood on the balcony outside room 306, on the motel’s second floor.
The official myth of the shooting named a single assassin, James Earl Ray, who fired one shot from the top floor of a rooming house whose rear windows overlooked the motel.
Many believed that Dr. King was the victim of a conspiracy involving the Memphis police department, the FBI, and the U.S. Army. His opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam war, and plans for massive protests, in the name of his Poor People’s Campaign, calling attention to poverty in America, have been cited as reasons.
Dr. King’s family eventually filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Memphis. The case was heard in November and December 1999. Loyd Jowers, owner of a restaurant in the building next to the rooming house, was found guilty of conspiring “with government agencies” to plan the murder and fined a symbolic one hundred dollars; the family’s goal being the truth and not compensation.
On the morning after the shooting, city workers were ordered to clear a low hillside between the rooming house and the Lorraine Motel, thus disturbing a crime scene. This fueled the conspiracy rumors. At least one sight claims the shot was fired from a spot closer to ground level and nearer the motel.
In this June 1996 report, taken below and in front of Room 306, looking in the direction of the shot, the trees have re-grown and are in full leaf. Trees whose branches are bare, as they would have been in April, would still obscure the view of the motel from the rooming house’s top floor.
The Lorraine became a residential motel Walter Bailey, who still owned it, operated at a loss. He declared bankruptcy in 1982, and the motel was ordered sold. The possibility of losing the historic buildings to developers grew. On the morning of the auction, a group of Memphis businessmen came up with enough in checks and pledges to buy the motel. The planned to remodel it and open a museum.
Jacqueline Smith, the Lorraine’s last resident, refused to leave. She was forcibly removed in 1988, and then maintained a permanent vigil of protest on the sidewalk across Mulberry Street. She had a couple weak sofas and some bedsheet signs, and claimed that money used to turn the motel into a tourist attraction could have been better spent on converting it to public housing.
The National Civil Rights Museum opened in 1992. Jacqueline Smith was at her post when I was there four years later. I didn’t photograph her because I was a tourist, and then she would be a tourist attraction, and I thought the motel’s value as a historic site and memorial to the civil rights movement exceeded its value as a residence. Dr. King’s legacy would be tarnished, I felt, if the room in which he spent the last hours of his life became someone’s apartment.
Room 306 is marked with a wreath. Inside, it’s as it was on the evening of April 4, 1968. The 1959 Dodge and 1968 Cadillac
under it are identical to the cars, in the same parking spaces, appearing in photographs taken moments after the shooting.
In 2002, the museum acquired the rooming house from where the fatal shot may have come, and opened exhibits on its top floor.
From the corner of Second and Beale Streets, where tourist Beale begins, walk one block west to Mulberry and five blocks south to Huling. From downtown, engage the Main Street Line trolley to the Huling Street stop. The rooming house is on that corner. The main museum is one block east.
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Filed under Stock Bankruptcy by on Dec 15th, 2010. Comment.