Peter Bogdanovich, Director of 'Paper Moon,' Dead at 82

Peter Bogdanovich, the ascot-wearing cinephile and director of 1970s black-and-white classics like “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon,” has died. He was 82.

Bogdanovich died early Thursday morning at this home in Los Angeles, said his daughter, Antonia Bogdanovich. She said he died of natural causes.

Considered part of a generation of young “New Hollywood” directors, Bogdanovich was heralded as an auteur from the start, with the chilling lone shooter film “Targets” and soon after “The Last Picture Show,” from 1971, his evocative portrait of a small, dying town that earned eight Oscar nominations and catapulted him to stardom. He followed “The Last Picture Show” with the screwball comedy “What’s Up, Doc?,” starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal, and then the Depression-era road trip film “Paper Moon,” which won 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal an Oscar.

His turbulent personal life was also often in the spotlight, from his well-known affair with Cybill Shepherd that began during the making of “The Last Picture Show” while he was married to his close collaborator, Polly Platt, to the murder of his Playmate girlfriend Dorothy Stratten and his subsequent marriage to her younger sister, Louise, who was 29 years younger than him.

A native of New York, Bogdanovich started out as a film journalist and critic, working as a film programmer at the Museum of Modern Art, where through a series of retrospectives he endeared himself to a host of old guard filmmakers including Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, and John Ford.