I await you Hollywood feverishly

At Long Last Love — Peter Bogdanovich's homage to 1930s Hollywood musicals, starring Burt Reynolds and Cybill Shepherd — was famously savaged by critics when released in March of 1975, to the point where it was very quickly pulled from theatres to minimise damage. A response soon materialised from Bogdanovich in the form of the following open letter, printed as a half-page ad in newspapers across the land.

Transcript follows. Image courtesy of The L Magazine.

Image: The L Magazine

Transcript

April 1975

In order to suppress my enemies my work will continue to be from one end to the other, a succession of violent, audacious, unfathomable, and subversive wonders that will embrace more mystery, more poetry, more madness, more eroticism, torment, pathos, grandeur, and the cosmology of synthesis because there is no point in bothering to see films that are not sensational!

Thus in accordance with this manifesto of my imaginative autonomy, one could subsequently try to bankrupt systematically the logical meaning of all mechanisms of the rational, practical, and effete form emerging from the 'new' and 'new new' Hollywood who are nothing more than snotty apologists of youth, of revolution, undulation, fossilized excrements of preservation and those who support the collective and therefore opposed to the individual!

I await you Hollywood feverishly,

(Signed)

Josef Bogdanovich