Richard Brody at The New Yorker:
Even if Peter Bogdanovich, who died on Thursday, at the age of eighty-two, had never exposed a frame of film as a director, he’d be one of the history-making heroes of the world of movies. Bogdanovich, born in 1939, grew up in Manhattan as a precocious adolescent cinephile. In 1961, at the absurdly young age of twenty-one, he organized the first-ever American retrospective of Orson Welles’s films, at the Museum of Modern Art, and wrote a monograph about the director’s work. He did the same, at the same museum, the following year with the films of Howard Hawks, and, in 1963, with Alfred Hitchcock. These screenings, along with the symbolism of the entry into the museum’s ranks of three of the greatest filmmakers who were also Hollywood directors—and who were still working at the time—were something of a slow-motion coming-out party for the notion of Hollywood as a hotbed of directorial artistry.
more here.