In preparation for this week’s episode of FilmCouch (which, as always, will premiere Friday morning here on SpoutBlog), I gave myself a bit of re-education on the life and career of Peter Bogdanovich. In the podcast, I reference a number of interviews. Because I can’t (yet) insert hyperlinks directly into the podcast, below the jump I’ve put together a basic glossary of the stuff I read in preparation for the segment. Past episodes of FilmCouch can be found at our Podcasts page.

Interestingly enough, I looked back and I realized that when I was 10 years old, two of my favorite films were Red River and I Was a Male War Bride, but I had no idea that the same director made them. Then I started putting it together. It wasn’t until after I saw Rio Bravo in 1959 that I started to get into what Hawks was doing. His personality was like his films. He was the perfect example of an American director who expressed his personality through multiple genres, like any creative artist does, though it was hidden behind the fabric of this factory system.

–Bogdanovich on Howard Hawks and Auteur Theory. Stop Smiling, November 2005.

Bogdanovich writes in the introduction to his amazing book of interviews with directors, Who the Devil Made It (1997), that They All Laughed was “…the last film to this date that I myself conceived and brought to fruition”. In the years since that film, then, Bogdanovich has been obliged to direct films which he’s not originated. Yet it would be ridiculously inaccurate to say that the resultant films aren’t personal, just as it’d be painfully reductive to say that the director (or any director) can only excel when he’s directing from a script of his own writing.

–From Peter Tonguette’s incredible profile of Bogdanovich for Senses of Cinema, November 2004

If I had a time machine? I’d pick the ’30s. I’d want to be a filmmaker under contract at Paramount as Lubitsch was head of the studio.

–Interview with Bogdanovich in Salon, 2005