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Peter Bogdanovich and The Cat's Meow
Director's Latest Film a Tale of Murder, Intrigue on the Ocean
 Listen to Bob Mondello's review of The Cat's Meow.
Listen to John Ydstie's conversation with Peter Bogdanovich.
April 22, 2002 -- In November 1924, newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst took his much-younger movie star mistress Marion Davies and a number of other well-known personalities out for a cruise on his private yacht. The pleasure trip ended with a murder, and became a true Hollywood scandal.
Now that scandal is the subject of a new film by one of Hollywood's most acclaimed directors, Peter Bogdanovich. For All Things Considered, guest host John Ydstie interviews the director; and NPR's Bob Mondello reviews the film, The Cat's Meow, which he labels an intriguing re-invention of history.
"This picture was full of happy accidents," Bogdanovich says. He was first told the true story of the fateful cruise by Orson Welles. Thirty years later, Bogdanovich says, he was on an ocean cruise aboard the Queen Elizabeth II when the story came up again during a conversation with movie critic Roger Ebert. And when he returned from that cruise, the script for The Cat's Meow was on his desk. "I felt maybe it was incumbent on me to make (the film).".
The story is told in flashback, beginning with a funeral -- so it's clear not everyone is going to survive this cruise. But the celebs arriving on the dock are all chipper, from down-on-his-luck producer Thomas Ince, who's seeking backing for his next project, to Charlie Chaplin who wants respite from a scandal involving a pregnant, teenage co-star. But to his dismay, he finds he'll be sailing with a giddy gossip columnist.
Presiding over the festivities is the newspaper baron known chiefly as the inspiration for Citizen Kane. William Randolph Hearst was famously prudish and paranoid. There are hidden microphones all over the yacht to allow Hearst to eavesdrop on his guests.
Bogdanovich is a Hollywood historian, so he delights in the story's inside jokes. Eddie Izzard as Chaplin, for instance, stares at a shoe and wonders whether a starving man trying to eat it would be funny -- a bit Chaplin would put in his comedy, The Gold Rush, that same year.
Bogdanovich has had his own share of tragedy and Hollywood scandal. In 1980, his girlfriend Dorothy Stratten was murdered by her estranged husband, who then took his own life. Stratten's short life and tragic death was made into a movie, Star 80. "I certainly understand the terrible reverberations enveloping anybody associated with a murder," he says. "One murder can affect someone terribly, and forever."
Bogdanovich combines period details with a murder-coverup scandal that feels as if it could have happened yesterday, Mondello says. The Cat's Meow is a Tinseltown portrait that jaded celebrity-haters can appreciate, but that only an insider like Bogdanovich could make.
And as a Hollywood insider, Bogdanovich tells Ydstie he was compelled to make the subjects of his drama -- who were often viewed as larger-than-life icons -- very human and accessible. "I thought it was important to their spirits... to try to get it right."
Other Resources
• The Cat's Meow official Web site.
• Bogdanovich's career highlights as director, actor, producer and writer are indexed in the Internet Movie Database
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