DIRECTED BY PETER BOGDANOVICH
TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET
There aren’t many critics who have gone from analyzing movies or TV to writing and directing them – but the best of that small list is impressive indeed. It includes French writer-director Francois Truffaut, who famously interviewed Alfred Hitchcock for a film-by-film dissection in Hitchcock/Truffaut, and brilliant British TV writer Dennis Potter, who began as a television critic before writing such epic miniseries as Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective. In this country, the short list includes James Agee, who worked with John Huston to co-write the screenplay for The African Queen – and film critic Peter Bogdanovich, who, like Truffaut, not only interviewed filmmakers, but emulated and joined them. The movies of Bogdanovich are featured this month on TCM, beginning with the first two dramas he directed under his own name: 1968’s Targets (televised at 8 p.m. ET), starring Boris Karloff, and his early masterpiece, 1971’s The Last Picture Show (shown at 9:45 p.m. ET), starring Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, Eileen Brennan, Randy Quaid, and Ellen Burstyn. What a cast! In between those two films was a 1968 movie directed by Bogdanovich, but released under a pseudonym, as “Derek Thomas.” The movie, starring Mamie Van Doren, was Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. Just the sort of nugget you can pick up here at TVWW. You’re welcome.