Cover of But What I Really Want to Do is Direct

But What I Really Want to Do is Direct

My First Picture Shows: 1965–1971
Précommander avec l’abonnement
Listen to an unlimited selection of audiobooks, Audible Original creations & podcasts, and children's stories.
Receive 1 credit per month to exchange for the title of your choice - that title belongs to you.

But What I Really Want to Do is Direct

By: Peter Bogdanovich
Précommander avec l’abonnement

Pre-order Now for €17.99

Pre-order Now for €17.99

Season's Savings | 0.99 €/month for 3 months

5.99 €/month thereafter - terms apply. Cancel monthly.
A final gift from the great American director, writer, actor, producer, critic, and film historian, Peter Bogdanovich, a memoir based on intimate journals and charting his apprentice years leading up to the making of his iconic, Oscar-nominated film, The Last Picture Show.

Peter Bogdanovich liked to say "I was born. And then I liked movies." As a director, he soared to fame, becoming one of Hollywood's most revered directors of the 1970s, channelling his passion for Golden Age cinema into beloved films such as What's Up, Doc? and Paper Moon and becoming a central figure in the New Hollywood movement.

First, however, came his apprentice years as a young New York film critic who took the gamble to move, alongside his wife, the great production designer and producer Polly Platt, to Hollywood in the last days of the studio system. Here he found an extraordinary assemblage of legendary filmmakers, still working (or trying to). Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Renoir: they all befriended the young film obsessive.

But Bogdanovich, determined to make movies of his own, was a young man in a hurry. Based on the journals he kept between 1965 and 1971, this uniquely personal book charts his journey from Hollywood outsider sometimes watching three or four films a day to working filmmaker on the eve of his extraordinary first success, The Last Picture Show, and embarking on an affair with his star, Cybil Shepherd. It is a story shot through with later, hard-earned wisdom gleaned from a lifetime of professional ups and downs and personal tragedy. But What I Really Want to Do Is Direct is a remarkable show business memoir with the depth, audacity, and verve of peers like Act One and The Kid Stays in the Picture.

****

PRAISE FOR PETER BOGDANOVICH

'Peter Bogdanovich knows practically everything about the movies'
Ben Schwarz, The Atlantic

'Bogdanovich is one of America's finest writers on the cinema'
The Boston Globe

'Peter Bogdanovich is keeping history alive'
Martin Scorsese

'Bogdanovich is a true enthusiast and an insider who is not only one of the great chroniclers of the movies but one of its most gifted practitioners'
Paul Theroux©2026 The Estate of Peter Bogdanovich (P)2026 HarperCollins Publishers Art Entertainment & Performing Arts Film & TV Memoirs, Diaries & Correspondence
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet