INT: Hi, I'm Raymond De Felitta, it's November 10, 2005, and I'm at the Directors Guild in New York, on West 57th Street interviewing Peter Bogdanovich.

INT: And your name is? And you were on born when? 

PB: This is the tough one. [INT: This is the tough question of the day.] Peter Bogdanovich, born in Kingston, New York, on July 30, 1939. [INT: July 30, I think you share Rudy Vallee's birthday.] Yeah. [INT: How does that make you feel?] And what else do you want to know? I have no nicknames. I used to have a nickname, they used to call me "Bugs." [INT: Bugs?] That was in school. [INT: But that's because you always did imitations.] I did a Bugs Bunny impression that was very popular.

INT: So, you actually started as an Actor as a child doing impersonations. 

PB: Five years old. I was known as the kid that does Bugs Bunny. [INT: I remember talking with you once about making tape recordings of when you were a kid.] Yeah. [INT: Because I did the same thing and in a way it was sort of my how I learned how to put together a story. Can you talk a little bit about...?] I did it, yeah. I ... my parents gave me a Revere reel-to-reel tape recorder when I was 12, which I had wanted. It was a huge thing. And I taped a couple of radio shows like SUSPENSE, "Auto-Lite presents SUSPENSE," you know? And then transcribed the entire show by hand and then typed it, I remember, and then I proceeded to do it again, this time doing all the roles; I did two I think like this, one was called MATE BRAM, and it was with Dick Widmark [Richard Widmark], who I was big fan of at the time, and I did all the... There was nine roles, including a woman. And I did all the parts, and the announcer, and did all the sound effects, again, and put in music. That's where I started using records, which I did on a lot of movies. I got in the habit of using records. So, but I used you know Stravinsky and Mussorgsky and guys like that. My father helped me. I said, "Do you know what kind of music would be good for, you know, this kind of thing?" He said “Try Stravinsky and Mussorgsky, NIGHT ON A BALD MOUNTAIN," which was very good. And then I did it, and I didn't know, I did it in pieces, I did all the sound effects, roar, crash, you know all that. It was fun. [INT: And in a sense, what I love about that is it's sort of how you teach yourself drama. You taught yourself storytelling.] I guess, I guess I did, yeah. It was fun. [INT: And the half-hour radio show was still in its heyday, I guess this is the late '40s [1940s], you're talking about.] When I did that it was the early '50s [1950s], but radio, I was a... My first love was radio, even though it was on its way out. I didn't realize that at the time. [INT: Sure.] Radio sort of went belly-up, around '53 [1953] it was over. [INT: Rather...] Dramatic and comedy radio, the big last big show was THE BIG SHOW with Tallulah Bankhead. [INT: Right, right.]

INT: Rather than asking what's your favorite movie, which don't worry I won't ask you that, what were the first movies that made you realize that filmmaking was the work of a filmmaker, that there was a Director there? 

PB: I don’t think I did for years. I don't think it was till CITIZEN KANE, because Orson [Orson Welles] had directed it and he was in it, and I could see him. So, I could imagine him directing it, because I could see him on the screen. I mean it was just as dumb as that. But I mean, I'd heard of directing. This is when I was about 15 by then. So, I don't know that I really, the conception of what a Director did or what he, I don't know, I don't know that I really, it all kind of came together for me, until I saw Orson Welles' CITIZEN KANE, till saw him in it. [INT: When did you see KANE?] Probably about 15. But there were Directors that I'd heard of, because my parents would speak about certain Directors, Eisenstein [Sergei Eisenstein], my father could... my father was a very pro-Russian kind of guy. [INT: He was a painter?] My father was a painter, and he was Slavic, he was Serbian, so he'd talk about Eisenstein, and POTEMKIN [BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN], I remember him talking about, but I didn't see that for years. And then, but there were Directors that my parents liked like John Ford, that name was used in the house, "John Ford, John Ford," and Orson. They talked about THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS as being one of the great films. Because they'd seen it, they saw it shortly after they came to America; it opened a couple of years after they got here, so they remembered that. And Lubitsch [Ernst Lubitsch], I think, and I think those were the, maybe not Lubitsch, but I know Ford was definitely named. I knew about Ford. That was--but I didn't know what they did. I had no idea what they did. And I... it didn't all come together until Orson.

INT: Was then the theater more of an influence in your childhood than films? 

PB: No, I was a big fan of movies. I'm, you know, I was taken to see movies at the Museum of Modern Art by my father when I was five or six, he'd take me to silent pictures: Chaplin [Charlie Chaplin], Keaton [Buster Keaton], some Griffith [D.W. Griffith], I think. My father was a good deal older than my mother, so he grew up with silent pictures. Well, my mother did, too, to a degree. And so, I think it was a huge help to me to see silent movies at a very young age. I also was taken to see opera at a young age, so my boredom quotient was, I wasn't bored by these things, because it was when it was all, you know… I remember seeing DON GIOVANNI when I was about five or six or seven, because my parents were friendly with Zinka Milanov who was a great Yugoslav singer and at the Met [Metropolitan Opera]. And so we got free tickets I think, and I remember seeing DON GIOVANNI and being terrified when he went to Hell at the end. The thing opened up and sort of... And I saw Ezio Pinza at the Met, and I think he did DON GIOVANNI, he was quite extraordinary of course. And so those are my earliest experiences. I didn't see a play until I was 13, on Broadway. [INT: And which was it?] It was, I remember it very well; it was POINT OF NO RETURN, sort of drawing room drama by Paul Osborn, with Henry Fonda. And I didn't want to go to the theater at all. I wanted to see the new Martin and Lewis [Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis] movie, we were living out in Queens [Queens, NY] at that point, for about six months we were living in Queens, between apartments, from when my sister was born. And my mother said, "You're going to go to a play." She said, she knew that I was in theater, I mean, that I was interested in acting, I was acting all the time, that was what I was doing, and she thought I should see a play on Broadway. And I had no interest at all, and I had a big fight with her. I was, you know, right at the prime of adolescence, I was about 13. And you know, threatened to throw a typewriter down the stairs at her. Something terrible like that. She said, “Well, you can yell all you want, but you're not going to the movies, you're going to go see a play. If you're not gonna see a play, you're not gonna do anything." That was her attitude. So I went all by myself to a matinee, absolutely loved it, just loved it. I sat in the last row of the balcony, could barely see Henry Fonda, but it was, you know, very impressive to me to see this movie star on the stage. And it was, I don't remember what the play was about, but it was... but I loved the experience. And there was one moment that was memorable, which was at one point Fonda said, "Goddamn," in the play, and I was, you know, in those days they didn't swear in movies. So, I remember turning red and looking around me, "Did anybody else, was anybody horror, shocked by this “Goddamn it,” you know? Can you imagine how sad that nobody could possibly be shocked today? [INT: Did you ever tell Fonda that?] I don't know if I did. I don't think so. I met Fonda--[INT: Because basically 20 years later you were interviewing him in DIRECTED BY JOHN FORD.] About 20...it was probably 20 years later, yeah. [INT: I mean--] No, more than 20 years later. No, it was about, you're right, about 20 years later I was interviewing him for the documentary on Ford. I liked Fonda, he was a wonderful Actor. And so, after that my mother was right, and after that it became, I went almost every week to the theater, and saw all the great stuff in the '50s [1950s] in New York.

INT: Did you think you were gonna be an Actor? 

PB: I was going to be an Actor, definitely. [INT: Tell me a little bit about your training with Stella Adler and--] But before I went to study with Stella, I had been acting in school, in high school. I acted--and not just in high school, what am I saying? In junior high I played the lead in FINIAN'S RAINBOW at school, and then played the heavy in my freshman year, I played a huge role in the school production, was acting all the time, that was what I--everybody figured I was gonna be an Actor. It was like a joke around school, "Oh, Peter's an Actor. Peter's an Actor." First thing I did was then my parents sent me to Saturday, Saturday afternoon acting classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. And this must've been when I was 15, 14 or 15, and I went for one semester, whatever it was, and the teacher was a very nice woman named Eleanor Gould [Eleanor Cody Gould], who can be seen briefly in a rather shocking sequence from HUSBANDS. She's the woman with, that they make her sing, you know, "No, no cute! Sing it real!" That scene in the bar... [INT: That's her, huh?] Eleanor was my teacher. And she thought I was pretty good, and asked me if I would want to come and be an apprentice in Summer Theater in Traverse City, Michigan, at the Charity County Playhouse in the summer of '55 [1955], and that was my first professional job in the, in show business. [INT: What did that entail?] Fifty years ago, but don't tell anybody. [INT: I won't.]

INT: What was being an apprentice [in summer stock theater]? 

PB: It was heaven. First of all it was the great thing, in those days they had, so this was star summer stock, so a different star would come to Traverse City [Traverse City, Michigan] every week. Meanwhile, the resident company would rehearse the next week's play all week, and play whatever the current play was at night. Then the star would arrive a couple of days before we opened and run through it once or twice, and then we'd open. The star was on the road doing this and other resident companies. It was wonderful. We had, imagine the people we had: Edward Everett Horton and ZaSu Pitts, and Richard Arlen and Veronica Lake. [INT: Really?] Sylvia Sidney, Signe Hasso, I played Signe Hasso's son, I got to actually by the seventh week, I got a leading role. The rest of the time I had bits or I moved furniture around. [INT: And this was then really your first experience with Old Hollywood in that sense?] Yes, but I--because I was, you know, I didn't know that much, obviously. I was 15, turned 16 that summer. I didn't know a lot of the people. I didn't know Veronica Lake was in, you know, SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS, I hadn't seen it yet. Within three years I knew all about it, didn't know who Sylvia Sidney was, Richard Arlen had worked with Howard Hawks. I didn't know any of that. I recognized Edward Everett Horton from some movies, but I didn't know what he'd done. [INT: Probably from--] Worked with Lubitsch [Ernst Lubitsch] five times. I could've asked him all these questions. Didn't know. [INT: You probably knew him from an Astaire [Fred Astaire], Rogers [Ginger Rogers] movie or something.] Maybe, I don't think I'd seen any of those. It might have been from ARSENIC AND OLD LACE.

INT: It's curious then, that since your beginnings really were as an Actor, your route to directing wasn't via acting, but actually writing. How did the...? 

PB: It was weird, because I directed... Then I started after that summer, I started studying with Stella Adler, because one of the other apprentices said, "Stella Adler's great, you ought to go study with her." I was too young to get in her classes, but I lied and said I was 18 and got into her classes and studied with her for four years. I had to get special dispensation from the high school to skip athletics in the afternoon and go to acting classes. I did it for four years, she was extraordinary, Stella. [INT: And what did she--I'm curious about why did you have to be 18 to study acting?] I don't know. [INT: That's strange.] Because they didn't want to take responsibility for--[INT: Or something like that. Yeah.]--you know, underage, you know. [INT: Did she ever find out?] No, that must have been the reason. [INT: But did she ever find out?] Yeah. [INT: Did you get fired.] She did. No, by then it was o... The sad thing was I wish I--I was cast in a play that she was directing, called JOHNNY JOHNSON, and because of my age they had to let me out of the play when they found out how old I was. That was sad. [INT: You stayed close with her throughout her life.] I...she sort of became my second mother and she outlived my mother by, my own mother by 20 years.

INT: Do you find that she [Stella Adler], I imagine she influenced you as a Director. Can you talk a little about her? 

PB: She influenced me, you know, she had in common with my father and my mother a kind of unshakeable integrity. And Stella would constant... That was the one thing she would constantly harp on, you know, "Don't sell out." And when I went to Hollywood and made a success there, that's all she could talk about was, you know, "Have you still got your integrity? You're not gonna sell out?" you know. And I think there were some things I did where I think I lost my integrity to a degree, and she, you know, was quick to point it out, or at least quick to warn me that it, you know, not to go any further in that direction, whatever direction that might've been. [INT: She was an artistic conscience.] She was an artistic conscience, and you know believed that art, that being an Actor was an important thing, that acting was important, that making, that writing, that playwriting was important, that being a Director was...meant you could do some great work, influence people. It was important, it wasn't just, it wasn't entertainment. It wasn't something that would pass, it was something that was there for, that had meaning, substance, and was important. And that was the one thing I got, it was the important thing I got from her, a sense of that. I got that from my parents, too. Also, "If you're gonna do it, do it fully. Get into it, really know about it, know it, don't be superficial." So, I studied acting and you could almost say that she was ... she didn't just teach acting, she taught… She had one of her great classes was scene breakdown where she would breakdown the scene, but also breakdown the playwright. Her classes about, you know, Odets [Clifford Odets] or Williams [Tennessee Williams] or Miller [Arthur Miller] or Ibsen [Henrik Ibsen], I mean, they... she went into depth with all of these things. I wish I had taken notes. She used to say, "Stop taking notes! I'm going to go to jail." She was also very much of an old, she was a kind of personality you don't see anymore. She was very much of the theater. And very grand. And larger-than-life always. And wonderful that way. And funny, and just really a strong person, strong woman, great woman.

INT: Did you find by being this influenced by her [Stella Adler], did you start looking at, at that point in your life at Directors, and seeing through her eyes, perhaps, how an Actor might view a Director? In other words, was your point of view the Actors? 

PB: I was very much into the theater then. I did go to the movies quite a bit, but the movies became a bigger thing later. So, I was going to see, you know, Kazan [Elia Kazan] stuff and with Tennessee Williams, and Tyrone Guthrie directing on Broadway. I went to see a lot of Broadway stuff all through those years, because that was what I was doing with Stella was theater.

INT: So, where was the moment that it changed for you, that the movies sort of swarmed you? 

PB: Well, I ... What happened was I was very much, I thought that the theater would be a stepping-stone into the movies for me. But I was interested in theater, and when I was 19, and I wish I could remember how this happened, but I don't. I remember that a bunch of Actors from Stella's [Stella Adler] and I were sitting around and I said, "Why don't I direct you guys in a scene?" There were five of us, six of us. And you know most scenes in acting class were two Actors or a monologue, you never had more than two. So, I said, "Let's take this scene from THE BIG KNIFE," and I don't know why we chose that play, it has five Actors and there was a big scene in the second, the second act, third act, and I directed the five Actors in this scene, a long scene, and we put it on at Stella's. The guys got up, did it. Stella got up and had no notes. She just said, "Brilliant, darlings. Brilliant. But you've been directed, who directed you?" And they pointed, "Peter." And I was standing in the back, and she just turned to me and said, "Brilliant, darling. Bravo." So I thought, "Well," with that encouragement, I thought, "Maybe I should do THE BIG KNIFE Off-Broadway." And one of the Actors knew Clifford Odets, knew his address and knew him, and gave me his address and I wrote him a letter. I don't have a... I have a copy somewhere, but it was a single-spaced, long letter explaining that I wanted to do THE BIG KNIFE, Off-Broadway. To my astonishment, about two weeks later I get a handwritten note from Clifford Odets on 20th Century Fox stationary, written in pencil, I remember, saying, "You have herein, my permission to do it." Out of the blue, I was 19. [INT: He called your bluff.] He did. I remember my mother bringing the letter in. She says, "You have a..." she said, "You have a letter," she woke me up, "You have a letter from Hollywood." I remember walking down the street that day, feeling like I was definitely a foot or two above the ground. [INT: Yeah, yeah.]

INT: How was the show [THE BIG KNIFE]? How did it turn out? 

PB: It took me, it took me six months, no more. It took me nine months or something to get the money, $15,000 to put on a first class production Off-Broadway, it was first class. I discovered an Actor, a young Actor named Carroll O'Connor, who played the studio head. I discovered him; it was his first thing he did in New York. Years later, I found out he was so broke that when I called him to come back for another reading he had to come in from Queens and he was cursing me, because he had to turn in pop bottles to get enough money for the subway. And it was quite an experience, it ran for 69 performances or something, it wasn't a success, but it was a success to steam, it got very good reviews. [INT: Where was it?] I was 20 when it opened. A theater that doesn't exist anymore called the Madison, Madison Avenue Playhouse or something like that. It was 30th Street, near Madison. It ran for a while, it got... as I said, it got quite good reviews, and I was written up in a few places, and that was the beginning of my career as a Director.

INT: And yet you were, forgive me, at the same time were you also writing yet, or...? 

PB: No, right after that. [INT: And that was with ESQUIRE, right?] No, right after that, I started getting interested, more interested in movies in that era, and started to go and see a lot of movies, and I was on... I had written a column for my high school paper about movies and theater. And suddenly I found out when I got out of high school that you could actually get in free, if you got on the screening lists. So, I put myself on screening lists and started writing... I was a very much of an operator, so I... Well, we had no money, my parents were broke, although I went to a very ritzy school, I don't know how they paid for it. I don't think they did pay for it. I think... I think we ended up owing them money. [INT: You were on scholarship.] I wasn't on scholarship, that's for sure. I wasn't a very good student. But I started writing little, free little, you know, like for program notes for some film society; I did one on INTOLERANCE, which was quite poor, note on INTOLERANCE. And then a guy named Dan Talbot opened a theater, or re-opened a theater called the Yorkville, he changed the name to the New Yorker, and, on 89th and Broadway, it's gone now. It was a big theater, it was about a 900-seat theater, and he decided to show a lot of American films. It was the first revival house in New York, or in the country that sort of predominantly showed older American films. And I lived a block or I lived right around the corner, so I came to see him one day, and I said, "I live around the corner, can I get in free?" And he said, "I saw your name on a program note, INTOLERANCE." I said, "Yeah, it wasn't very good." He says, "No, it wasn't very good." I said, "No." And then, after a while, I hung around and he... I gave him suggestions on movies I wanted to see and he would play them. And then I asked if I could write program notes for him, which I did and he paid me $15 a week. One of those program notes was on a film that we played called OTHELLO, directed by Orson Welles. And I said it was the best Shakespeare [William Shakespeare] movie ever made, which was absolute heresy at that point, since everybody thought Olivier [Laurence Olivier] made the best one.

PB: This program note [on Orson Welles' OTHELLO] somehow found its way to Richard Griffith, who was the curator of the Museum of Modern Art, and he called me out of the blue and said, "Would I like to write the monograph and organize a retrospective on Orson Welles at the Museum of Modern Art?" I was, must've been 20, I wasn't... I was 21, I think. And I said, "Why don't you do it yourself? You usually do these things." He said, "Well, I don't particularly like Orson Welles, but your program note indicates that you do, and we want somebody partisan to do this. And we feel that it's time to do an Orson Welles retrospective at the museum, even though I'm not a particular fan. We have many members who are, and our colleagues in France and England, so we..." So, I think I got paid 50 bucks to do the whole thing. And I organized the retrospective. And during that time, right around that time, I had saved enough money from writing little things here and there and so on, to go to California. I had decided I wanted to go to Hollywood and interview a bunch of people with the goal of getting somehow into the movies. THE BIG KNIFE hadn't done it. And so, I saved up enough money, and doing a job for the Museum at the same time I looked for Orson Welles, we found MR. ARKADIN at some TV syndication place, a print that had never been shown in America, and I went to Hollywood for two weeks, stayed at the Hallmark Hotel on Sunset [Sunset Boulevard], and interviewed everybody. I mean I met an enormous number of people. I got a letter from HARPER'S MAGAZINE, saying that they would ... they didn't give me an assignment, but Bob Silvers, who was an Editor over there at that time gave me a letter saying that they would look at a piece that I would I write. So, I just said, "I'm doing a piece for HARPER'S." Then everybody... [INT: Who did you... who were your first?] Hitchcock [Alfred Hitchcock], [INT: Yeah.] Well, I also wanted to meet Clifford Odets to see if I could get him to let me do another play of his, NIGHT MUSIC. He didn't let me do it. But he was very nice to me, but he decided he didn't want to do anything else right now. And through him I met Cary Grant. And then, through the publicity offices I went on the set of shooting WESTSIDE STORY, and met Dean Martin and Billy Wilder and Hitchcock, and Bill... William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Robert Wise, met Angie Dickenson, and... [INT: Did you interview them?] Yeah, a lot of them. Yeah. Jerry Lewis. [INT: But really, ostensibly...] Did a little section on Jerry Lewis, which ... well, anyway, I wrote this piece, I didn't write the piece, I did the research for the piece, came back to New York, got asked because of THE BIG KNIFE to be the artistic Director at a theater, a summer, a Season of Summer Theater, in Phoenicia, New York, not far from where I was born, and I agreed to do it. And I directed for that summer right when the Orson Welles retrospective was shown and the first book I ever published, THE CINEMA OF ORSON WELLES, a monograph about Orson was published.

INT: And was that [THE CINEMA OF ORSON WELLES] part of the retrospective [Orson Welles retrospective at the MoMA]? 

PB: Yeah. That was part of the retrospective, and it was distributed by Doubleday. [INT: Did Welles show up for the retrospective?] No. Never heard from Orson. [INT: So, this was not when you met him?] He was shooting in Detroit... no, I didn't meet him, until seven years later. It was not an interview monograph, the monograph on Orson was critical, was, you know, just me writing. But I said things, like, he was one of the great artists of American cinema and the dark poetry of Orson Welles and this and that and the other thing. It was the kind of stuff that nobody was saying about Orson at that time, except in France. And we sent a copy of it off to him, somewhere, he was shooting THE TRIAL, but I never heard a word for years, for seven years. Anyway, at the same time I was doing the retrospective came on in May, or May, June, and I then went to Phoenicia [Phoenicia, New York] and did this Season of Summer Theater for 10 weeks. And we did Tennessee Williams' CAMINO REAL and we did Kaufman and Hart's [Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman] ONCE IN A LIFETIME. I directed those. And Clifford Odets' ROCKET TO THE MOON and Agatha Christie's TEN LITTLE INDIANS. I did all of those. [INT: And you directed all of them?] All of those. And then, that was a lot of fun. And I was acting in a couple of other shows, and it was a great summer. I came back, and then wrote the piece about my trip to Hollywood, and couldn't get anybody to buy it. THE NEW YORKER turned it down, HARPER'S turned it down, ATLANTIC [THE ATLANTIC] turned it down, and then through an absolute fluke, a lot of things that happened in my life have been like this, just coincidental, you know. I was invited to a screening of Howard Hawk's HATARI and at that screening I met a young Editor named Harold Hayes, who was the manager Editor of ESQUIRE. And we insulted each other over dinner about each other's bad taste in movies, and before I knew who he was. And after I found out who he was I thought, "Oh my God..." But then I called him and said, "I'm the kid that insulted you at dinner, do you remember me?" He said, "I remember you." I said, "Well, I wrote this piece about Hollywood, I'm wondering if you'd be interested in looking at it." And he said, "Send it over." And he bought it. And then asked me to do a major profile on Jerry Lewis. I said, "Why?" He said, "I liked the little section on Lewis in your piece. We think it'd be interesting if you did a whole profile on him," which was prescient of him. And so I went and then I was gonna, and then I had this idea to ... I was falling in love with Howard Hawks, his movies, and I had this idea that I wanted to see every movie Howard Hawks had ever made. So, I called Dick Griffith [Richard Griffith] at the Museum of Modern Art, and I said, "Listen, if I can get Paramount to pay for a Hawks' retrospective, in connection with HATARI, would you do it at the Museum?" He said, "In a second." So, I called and said, "If I can get the Museum to do a retrospective on Howard Hawks would you guys pay for it?" And then got back to me and said, "Yes." So, I went to Hollywood, for ESQUIRE, to interview Jerry Lewis, I spent three weeks interviewing, spending three weeks with Jerry, at the same time interviewing Howard Hawks for the Museum of Modern Art. So, there I was... by that... suddenly I was a Writer. And my writings in ESQUIRE and the Museum attracted attention. And so I got a little bit known for that stuff. Because then, the following year I did Hitchcock [Alfred Hitchcock], and then I did a Bogart [Humphrey Bogart] piece for ESQUIRE, which is very much talked about.

INT: Well, if I'm not mistaken, I mean really you were the first to sort of resuscitate what was considered lost Hollywood, people just didn't care about Bogart [Humphrey Bogart] until you or you know or Hitchcock [Alfred Hitchcock]... You know, the way I see it, you were the first to say, "Take this stuff seriously." 

PB: Well, I wasn't the first to do it, because Andrew Sarris and Eugene Archer at the TIMES [THE NEW YORK TIMES] were saying it, but I got more notoriety because… And the French were saying it, but I was the first one in America to come out and get that much attention with it. And I did a piece of John Ford for ESQUIRE, which was unusual for ESQUIRE to do a piece like that, and I did Jimmy Stewart for ESQUIRE, and so on. [INT: What was your Ford piece? I don't know, I haven't read that.] THE AUTUMN OF JOHN FORD, it was 1964. And then I did a book on Ford [JOHN FORD] which was an interview book, and that was how I started... The whole '60s [1960s] period from about '61 [1961] till '67 [1967] or '68 [1968] I was doing books and stuff, until I started directing movies. And then I did continue to do it, but that was the thing. And then I also directed another play. I had a big hit in summer ... that summer with ONCE IN A LIFETIME, decided to do that Off-Broadway, got the rights, and raised the money, but didn't raise enough and it was a flop, it was a gigantic flop. We ran one night. After 13 wonderful previews where we thought we were gonna have a smash, we ran one night and we had to close, we didn't have enough money to keep going. [INT: Oh, how terrible.] It was horrible. [INT: Was that the last time you directed theater?] Yeah. That was the last time I directed the theater, '64 [1964]. And then six months later, less than six months later, five months later, we moved to California, my then wife Polly Platt, we decided that I wanted to get into movies, that I could easily write about movies from Hollywood easier, because that's where I ... that's what I was basically doing. And we moved to the Valley [San Fernando Valley]. And within a year, I had a job writing a script, and it was because Roger Corman, whom I met at a screening, said, "You're a Writer, aren't you?" And I said, "Yeah." He said, "Because I read your stuff in ESQUIRE. Would you like to write a screenplay?" That's how it happened. He didn't know I had ever directed in the theater or that I'd been an Actor, none of that. That's... so, that's how that all started.

INT: And yet it seems when one looks back at your career, it seems inevitable that you were leading ... Everything you were doing was preparing you on some level to be a filmmaker. Did you know that at the time? Did you know that was the direction you were heading? 

PB: When I finally went to California, by then I definitely wanted to direct films. I'd already given up acting. [INT: Uh-huh.] I thought I would act occasionally, but that wasn't what I was interested in. I wanted to direct films, and even when I did THE BIG KNIFE, even when I did the ONCE IN A LIFETIME, I was already thinking, I wanted to direct films. I was hoping I would be noticed and brought to Hollywood. [INT: Mm-hmm.] Why do you think both plays were about Hollywood? [INT: I was just gonna say, it's curious that you did Hollywood plays.] Well, I mean, I was hinting. [INT: Yeah. Yeah.] "Notice me." Nobody did. They noticed me in ESQUIRE and the Museum of Modern Art. [INT: Yeah.] It's so odd how it went. [INT: Yeah.] And so, then Roger was doing a movie which ultimately was called THE WILD ANGELS, a motorcycle picture, and asked me if I would rewrite the script, which I did for no money and no ... for a little money, very little money, $300. And no credit. And he said, "We're not gonna give you a credit." And I rewrote about 80 percent of the script. And then, he liked me and thought I knew what I was doing, and trusted me to direct the second unit on the picture, which it turned out to be quite an elaborate thing and quite a bit of film. Because he closed down the production after three weeks, first unit, he closed it down and said, 'We're wrapped." I said, "Roger, you haven't finished the script." He says, "That's all right, second unit." And I directed the leading Actors. So, it wasn't a second unit. I mean, I did a big sequence with Bruce Dern, I did a couple of sequences with Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra. So, it wasn't really second unit.

INT: But that was your first actual filmmaking [on THE WILD ANGELS]? 

PB: That was it. [INT: You'd never made a short, you'd never made a...?] No, that was it. Right then, THE WILD ANGELS. I remember when they wrote my name on the slate. I remember the, you know, they wanted to get, "How do you spell your name?" And that was it, I was shooting Peter Fonda on his motorcycle. [INT: Were you comfortable?] Yeah, I thought, "This is fine. This is easy." I mean, not easy, but this is... I felt comfortable, yeah. [INT: Right.]