Book review - "Who the Devil's in It?" by Peter Bogdanovich

A sort of follow up by Peter Bogdanovich to his earlier Who the Devil Made It - this one looks at film actors. It is more autobiographical than the earlier piece and concentrates a lot on Bogdanovich's friendships with actors - Cary Grant, James Stewart, River Phoenix, Jerry Lewis, etc. Some he really just interviewed (eg Jack Lemmon), others he became friendly with (Jerry Lewis), some he worked with (Audrey Hepburn, Ben Gazzara), a couple were actually close friends (John Cassavetes, Sal Mineo).

Interestingly, though, it doesn't look at the actors who really broke through in Bogdanovich pictures - Cybill Shepherd, Jeff Bridges, Ryan O'Neal, Tatum O'Neal, Eileen Brennan, John Ritter, John Hillerman, Eric Stoltz. Or Ben Johnson, who won an Oscar in Last Picture Show. He's also worked with a lot of stars who surely would have made a decent chapter - Barbra Streisand, Burt Reynolds, Cher. (You could argue they were new Hollywood and the book is old Hollywood, but then why include River Phoenix?) I guess they're all still alive.

Although Bogdanovich has worked as an actor he isn't really that good a one, certainly not as good as he is a director, and this book isn't as insightful as the one on directors. But it is always interesting and Bogdanovich is a talented writer. Many of the pieces appeared earlier in a collection of his writing, Pieces of Time.

Bogdanovich tried to get up a number of projects with stars that didn’t work. The one I think would have been great was John Wayne, James Stewart and Henry Fonda in a Larry McMurty script which would become Lonesome Dove (in the roles played by Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Duvall, and Robert Urich). However, I don’t particularly long for his project about degenerate gamblers with Sinatra, Martin and Lewis (degenerate gamblers are too depressing).

Particularly interesting is Bogdanovich’s relationship with Cary Grant, who was friendly with the director but also kept him at a distance. Bogdanovich seems especially keen to lap up any praise or recognition from Grant, like a worshipful freshman from the cool kid in high school; in return he tried to enlist Grant’s aid in the director’s fight against Universal when he made Mask (complaining about losing some scenes and Bruce Springsteen songs), even invoking Grant’s name in a letter to the studio.