best movie?

It was the 1st movie I hosted on StoneKeepers.

He didn't really make a lot of movies.

It was one of the fastest rises and falls in Hollywood history.

One fine debut thriller -- Targets -- in 1968.

Then three "big ones" in a row in the 70s:

The Last Picture Show
What's Up Doc
Paper Moon

Then three flops in a row, two of them starring Cybill Shepard:

Daisy Miller
At Long Last Love
Nickelodeon

(The studio refused to allow Bogdo to cast his girlfriend Shepard again in Nickelodeon.)

New Hollywood was jealous of Bogdo parading around with his girlfriend and even hosting The Tonight Show. Some of Old Hollywood didn't like Bogdo "homaging" their old movies like Bringing Up Baby (Billy Wilder said: "Bogdanovich isn't a director, he's a Xerox machine.) Everybody was rooting for the fall and it came HARD. Followed by something worse: the brutal murder of Bogdo's Playboy Playmate girlfriend, Dorothy Stratton, by her estranged husband.

Bankruptcy was part of Bogdo's later years, but he did manage to make Mask and some more movies.

I think his problem is that he was given too much praise too soon (one critic calling The Last Picture Show the best debut since Citizen Kane -- except it wasn't his debut film after all) and his type of movie (homages of old classics) wasn't where the movies were going to go -- Lucas and Spielberg would soon set the table, with Scorsese on the art/violence side.

So not too many movies.

I'll pick What's Up Doc as his best..a legitimate big audience hit with a funny Barbra Streisand, a funny and handsome Ryan O'Neal and a supporting cast of funny people led by Madeleine Kahn.