Peter Bogdanovich met me for lunch at the downtown branch of the chic and fabled Cipriani, where all seems well with the world. Mr. Bogdanovich is a writer, film historian (his books on Orson Welles and John Ford are standard texts), sometime actor (he played Lorraine Bracco’s shrink on The Sopranos), and, more to the point, director of The Last Picture Show, the 1971 classic, widely considered one of the greatest American movies ever made.

“You’ll be watching the Academy Awards ceremony?” I asked.

“Oh, sure. Wouldn’t miss it! It’s a movie circus! You know, when Dyan Cannon was divorcing Cary Grant, she said he was crazy because he would watch the Academy Awards every year and yell at the TV screen. And I thought, What’s crazy about that? Everybody does it.”

Cary Grant was a friend of his, and he can impersonate Grant perfectly (as he can other Hollywood stars). “Can you do Brad Pitt?” I asked.

He thought for a split second, as if trying to conjure him up. “He’s un-doable,” he concluded.

Tom Hanks? “He’s a good actor—but there are no stars today that you can imitate. They have no particular personality that people like Cary Grant or John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart had. During the Hollywood studio system, they looked for people who were unusual. The stars had peculiarities. Who talks like Jimmy Stewart or Jimmy Cagney or Cary Grant? Nobody does! They were versatile actors, yet they were themselves. Someone once asked Spencer Tracy, ‘Don’t you ever get tired of playing Spencer Tracy?’ And he replied, ‘Who else am I supposed to play?’ ”

A waitress came over to our corner table, and Mr. Bogdanovich, a careful, picky eater, took quite a while ordering a mixed salad without, it seemed, anything much but the lettuce, followed by grilled organic salmon—very well done, please, plain but with a little olive oil, lemon on the side. Not the spinach—the broccoli di rapa. No butter, no onion. And a cranberry juice with a straw.

“Thank you, my love,” said the waitress.

This son of a Serb painter and an Austrian-born mother is 74 now. (“I don’t feel as old as it sounds.”) With Martin Scorsese, he has always been given to a near un-American activity: a reverence for the past. His knowledge of movies is encyclopedic. (From the age of 12 to 30, he saw close to 4,000 movies and critiqued them all on index cards, which he still has.) With three hits in a row—The Last Picture Show (which made a star of Cybill Shepherd, who became Bogdanovich’s partner for seven years), What’s Up, Doc?, and *Paper Moon—*he became one of the new, young Hollywood elite in the 1970s. All the while, he continued seeking out the illustrious Old Guard—among them, Fritz Lang, Josef von Sternberg, George Cukor, and Howard Hawks—to promote their work and learn from them all he could.

But Mr. Bogdanovich, like one of his heroes, Orson Welles, became another example of the American Dream gone wrong, wunderkind success washed up. His early hits, he candidly admitted, were followed by three failures in a row, and he lost confidence in himself. And then, in 1980, Dorothy Stratten, Mr. Bogdanovich’s 20-year-old lover, making her major screen debut in his yet-to-be-released They All Laughed, was brutally murdered by her estranged husband, who committed suicide the same day. The grizzly tragedy all but finished off the movie.

“Her death pretty much wrecked me,” he said quietly. “I was crazy about her. We loved each other. It was the greatest time of my life making that film with her, and then it was destroyed with her, and I just didn’t give a damn if I ever made another movie again.”