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Peter Bogdanovich, the Oscar-nominated writer-director of The Last Picture Show whose career, which also included hits like What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon, put him on a path toward living up to the example of those like Orson Welles and John Ford he so lionized, has died. He was 82. Bogdanovich died shortly after midnight Thursday of natural causes at his home in Los Angeles, his daughter Antonia Bogdanovich told The Hollywood Reporter. Bogdanovich, whose ever-present horn-rimmed glasses and ascot imbued him with a professorial air as he recounted the Hollywood lore he relished, catapulted to A-list status with his...

Peter Bogdanovich, the legendary director, has broken ranks with his Hollywood brethren. He may never eat lunch in that godless town again. In a disarmingly-honest first-person jeremiad appearing in the August 3 issue of the Hollywood Reporter, the auteur known for such films as “The Last Picture Show,” “Paper Moon” and “Mask” indicts the motion picture industry for playing a role in last week’s massacre in Colorado. “People go to a movie to have a good time,” said Bogdanovich, “and they get killed.” “At first,” he noted, some of those watching the massacre unfold inside the theater, “thought it was...

Peter Bogdanovich is no stranger to violence -- either onscreen or off. In an eerie foreshadowing of the Colorado tragedy, his very first film, 1968's Targets, starring Boris Karloff, ends with a sniper, an angry Vietnam War vet, picking off teenagers at a drive-in movie theater. But while that movie reflected the rising discord of the late '60s, it wasn't until 1980 that Bogdanovich experienced, first-hand, the full impact of violence when his companion, Dorothy Stratten, the Playboy model and actress, was brutally murdered by her estranged husband. People go to a movie to have a good time, and they...