The Thing Called Love

press release: USA | 1993 | 35mm | 116 min.  

Director: Peter Bogdanovich; Cast: River Phoenix, Samantha Mathis, Sandra Bullock 

A small circle of singer-songwriters fall in and out of love with each other while trying to navigate the modern Nashville country scene in this unjustly ignored late period Bogdanovich gem. Buoyed by a charming cast, as well as extended cameos from real-life country stars such as K.T Oslin, Trisha Yearwood, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, the film also boasts Phoenix’s final completed performance and a scene-stealing early-career highlight from Bullock.

All summer screenings take place at 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue. Admission free for all screenings, seating limited. No admission 15 minutes after scheduled start times. Please visit our website for a complete listing of programs and descriptions.

On Wednesday evenings this summer we will remember one of contemporary cinema’s most talented and most mercurial auteurs, Peter Bogdanovich (1939-2022). Before he became a writer, producer, and director, Bogdanovich was a curator of repertory film programs and a journalist who specialized in interviews with pioneering Hollywood actors and filmmakers, and his movies are suffused with cinephilia, especially for 30s and 40s Hollywood melodramas and comedies. Although he was widely celebrated for a trio of early 70s box office successes (The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, and Paper Moon), this series will focus on six Bogdanovich features made after he fell out of favor with American audiences and the Hollywood establishment. We start with his final narrative feature, Squirrels to the Nuts, a radically different director’s cut of the movie that became She’s Funny That Way, and shown here for the first time since its well-received premiere earlier in 2022 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The series also includes three other definitive director’s cuts of neglected Bogdanovich movies, as well as the theatrical release versions of two very fine movies, Saint Jack and The Thing Called Love.