Peter Bogdanovich

Peter Bogdanovich reached cinema first as a viewer and a writer. In the early sixties he was programming films at the Museum of Modern Art in New York while writing criticism for magazines such as Esquire. His first film as a director was Targets, in which Boris Karloff plays a horror star whose moment has passed and the stories told seem at first to have nothing to do with one another. The Last Picture Show was the breakthrough, an elegiac black and white account of growing up in a dead-end Texas town with Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd. Paper Moon, a rueful black and white comedy set during the Great Depression, put Ryan O'Neal on screen with his daughter Tatum.