Beauty Break: Ryan O'Neal

Baby Tatum and dad RyanToday is the 75th birthday of early 70s cinema's golden boy Ryan O'Neal. Happy Birthday Father o' Tatum. The picture to the left is just the cutest thing ever, don't you think? If not you don't cherish and worship and love to revisit Paper Moon (1973) in which the real life father & daughter stars played a fictional father and daughter, and played it to perfection in one of the greatest movies of that enormously fine cinematic decade.

But today, perhaps, younger readers don't really know Ryan O'Neal. In today's celebrity parlance I would suggest that he's something like a cross between Ryan Phillipe (all-american golden boy, super young dad as celebrity parenting goes, who remains more famous for his personal life than his career) and Leonardo DiCaprio (I shall explain). After coming to fame on television's Peyton Place (1964-1969) O'Neal was Oscar nominated for the #1 box office behemoth Love Story (1970) which we presume was something like the Titanic of its day. A bold statement you say? Perhaps not so bold...

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Peter Bogdanovich Gives Good Quote

on the set of What's Up Doc (1972)Peter Bogdanovich, one of the leading directors of the early Seventies, has finally made another movie at 76 years of age. She's Funny That Way, which stars Jennifer Aniston and opens today, is his first since The Cat's Meow (2001) with Kirsten Dunst. His career has been very quiet since his last true hit (Mask, 1985) but he hasn't been.

Bogdanovich's lack of inhibition when talking to the press has surely caused him problems in his career, but it's a source of joy for movie fanatics.It's all too rare to get unmassaged opinions from powerful artists who aren't worried about ruffling the feathers of other artists.

He just gave good quote to the Hollywood Reporter on Barbra Streisand in What's Up Doc? (1972) who originally wanted to do a drama with him instead of a comedy, Cher in Mask (1985) --  he doesn't exactly flatter her but to say he believes she should have won the Oscar that year, and making Paper Moon (1973) with the O'Neal's. That's our favorite of his pictures as you probably noted during the 1973 Smackdown last year.

But his quote on The Last Picture Show (1971) is the best:

[The scene in which] Cloris Leachman [who won the best supporting actress Oscar for her role] throws that coffee pot and yells at Timothy Bottoms — Cloris did it brilliantly. She wanted to rehearse it and I kept saying, “I don’t want to rehearse it; I want to see it for the first time when we actually roll.” I had learned that idea — to not let the actors show you an emotional scene before they shot it — from John Ford through Henry Fonda. It was Hank Fonda who told me that for the big climactic scene with the mother in The Grapes of Wrath, [Ford] wouldn’t let the actors play it for him — he wanted it to be fresh when they did it and of course he used the first take.

So I said, “Action!” and she was extraordinary. [But] she said, “I can do it better.” I said, “No, you can’t; you just won the Oscar.” And to this day — Jeff Bridges told me that he [recently] ran into Cloris and that she said, “Oh, I’m so angry at Peter. That was the first take. I could have done it better.” And Jeff said: “Oh, Cloris. You won the Oscar!”