Notes on…

Paper Moon(1973)

Dir. Directed by Peter Bogdanovich

Pretty sure that typeface is Baby Teeth, by Milton Glaser.


Over the course of the 21st century, this dead-eyed worship of a nebulous “success” has been so thoroughly metabolized into the culture that it’s impossible to escape. [B]ullshit is now big business, and therefore no longer bullshit; there are no little girls smoking in a motel room a mile away, plotting on your last 10 dollars. [And] we’ve become so starved for artful bullshit that we strain to see it where none exists.

Paul Thompson (Los Angeles Review of Books)


I don't know whether Paul Schrader ever saw Paper Moon, but its central relationship beteen a slow-witted man and a streetwise girl surely presages that between Travis Bickle and Iris in Taxi Driver (1976). Incidentally, when Jodie Foster was cast as Iris, she'd just finished starring in a one-season TV spin-off (1974-75) of Paper Moon.

— Christopher Bray (Cineaste, Spring 2025)

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Synopsis: A bible salesman finds himself saddled with a young girl who may or may not be his daughter, and the two forge an unlikely partnership as a money-making con team in Depression-era Kansas.