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Irreconcilable Differences -- The Peter Bogdanovich Story (In Disguise)

posted 3 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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RIP and...

...to get a sense of "the Peter Bogdanovich story" there is a movie made in 1984 called "Irreconcilable Differences" (awkward title based on divorce law) which pretty much tells the story of his rise and fall in Hollywood.

The "pitch" for the movie was: a little girl (Drew Barrymore) seeks a divorce from her parents. (Ryan O'Neal and Shelley Long.) But the reality of the movie is that O'Neal was playing Bogdanovich, Long was playing his first wife, Polly Platt, and newbie Sharon Stone was playing Cybill Shepard -- the sexy blonde star who took Peter away from Polly. I guess the "child tries to divorce parents" angle was developed to sell this roman a clef.

The movie has an interesting and evidently true enough arc for the Bogdanovich career -- from living in an apartment and struggling, to living in a huge mansion as a star director, and then to plummeting back into bankruptcy and back to living in an apartment when the money stops rolling in.

All of this really happened to Peter Bogdanovich -- along with a whole lot more, the ugliest being the murder of his girlfriend, Playboy playmate , Dorothy Stratton, by the woman's estranged husband. (Bogdo later married Dorothy's much younger sister, got divorced, and then brought her back into his apartment in later years.)

The movie drops the Stratton part, but pretty much gives us the earlier years, which centered on three hits -- The Last Picture Show, What's Up Doc, and Paper Moon -- that were followed by three misses -- Daisy Miller, At Long Last Love, and Nickelodeon (two of which starred Cybill Shepard, the studio refused to allow Bodgo to cast her in Nickelodeon.)

Those are not the titles of the movies in "ID," but the gist of Bogdo's rise and fall is there.

Except: the movie came out in 1984. As Hollywood down-and-outers with a name sometimes do, Bogdanovich clawed his way back with Mask (1985), some other movies, some TV movies and...a second career as an actor(owlish and irritating as Dr. Melfi's own shrjnk on The Sopranos) and in countless Classic Movie DVD documentaries extolling on Hitchcock and Hawks and the like.

The movie remains an interesting companion piece to a man's life. Its surprising that it got a green light -- I guess that many people in Hollywood hated Bogdanovich enough to allow for a movie to be made humiliating him.

Hollywood can do that to some people, if they dont' invest properly.

[–] [deleted] 3 years ago

I remember seeing that in the 80's but now I never see it playing on television or on screening services. It seems to have been largely forgotten despite being, from.what I remember,, an entertaining film. I wonder if Bogdanovich had attornies file lawsuits over it at the time since it is such a thinly-disguised version of his life. I have often thought behind-the -scenes legal threats from Bogdanovich might be why the character based on him in Bob Fosse's STAR 80 has a different name even though it's quite well known who he was supposed to be.

I would love to see IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES again because it's a movie for people who like movies. And you're right about the fact that much of Hollywood had an aversion to him in the early 80s. "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" mentions that he had become known as a pompous ass all over LA by the mid-70s and kept foisting the largely untalented Cybil Shepherd on the American public in flop after flop. When "At Long Last Love" and "Nickelodeon" bombed, the book mentions you could hear the sound of champagne bottles popping all over Hollywood because Bogdanovich was largely detested in those days. Luckily for him, the negative reaction dissipated in more recent decades.