A final gift from the great American director, writer, actor, producer, critic, and film historian, Peter Bogdanovich, a memoir based on intimate journals and charting his apprentice years leading up the making of his iconic, Oscar-nominated film, The Last Picture Show.

Peter Bogdanovich liked to say “I was born. And then I liked movies.” As a director, he soared to fame, becoming one of Hollywood’s most revered directors of the 1970s, channeling his passion for Golden Age cinema into beloved films such as What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon and becoming a central figure in the New Hollywood movement.

First, however, came his apprentice years as a young New York film critic who took the gamble to move, alongside his wife, the great production designer and producer Polly Platt, to Hollywood in the last days of the studio system. Here he found an extraordinary assemblage of legendary filmmakers, still working (or trying to). Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Renoir: they all befriended the young film obsessive. But Bogdanovich, determined to make movies of his own, was a young man in a hurry. Based on the journals he kept between 1965 and 1971, this uniquely personal book charts his journey from Hollywood outsider sometimes watching three or four films a day to working filmmaker on the eve of his extraordinary first success, The Last Picture Show, and embarking on an affair with his star, Cybil Shepherd. It is a story shot through with later, hard-earned wisdom gleaned from a lifetime of professional ups and downs and personal tragedy. But What I Really Want to Do Is Direct is a remarkable show business memoir with the depth, audacity, and verve of peers like Act One and The Kid Stays in the Picture.