Tomorrow is the grand opening of the new Warner Bros. Theater at the Smithsonian Institute. In celebration of the opening the theater will be screening four films featuring Humphrey Bogart, arguably the studio’s must notable star: Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of Sierra Madre and The Big Sleep. Stephen Bogart, son of film legends Bogart and Lauren Bacall, will be on hand for the inaugural presentation of Casablanca. I was lucky enough to speak with him briefly this morning about the new theater, his father’s legacy and some of his thoughts on Hollywood today.

CF: We would have loved to have seen you.
SB: How do you explain someone who gets to that level? When you become an icon – I guess that’s what you would call him – you can’t put it into words. There’s really nothing you can say that could explain, “oh this is why. . .this is why.” Because if it was, then of course you would just be able to bottle it and everyone would become that. “Oh I’ll buy some of that, I’ll become an icon, too.” It’s just moments in time and seems to just happen the way they happen. Besides the fact that you had a man with talent who was no-nonsense, wasn’t full of himself, just seemed to be a good person and a good guy and made some absolutely spectacular movies. A lot of them were with Warner Bros. When you put all that together, when you look at all the movies he made. You know, Maltese Falcon, High Sierra, Petrified Forest, To Have and Have Not and we could keep going. There aren’t that many actors who have been in films of that calibre throughout their careers. So I think it’s also a testament of my father’s choices and the people that he chose to surround himself with. He loved writers, he loved John Huston. Between the Dalton Trumbos of the world and the John Hustons of the world, you know what, you’re not doing bad. So I think that’s all part of it. And of course, as I said in the beginning, there’s this little thing that you can’t explain that puts you to the next level. There are other people who have made great movies, but there’s also the love affair that my father had with my mother and his great talent. He was an actor’s actor. He trained on the stage and he knew what he was doing and that’s how it happens sometimes.

CF: Speaking of your mother, she is one of five basically living legends from AFI’s list of the greatest Hollywood stars of all-time. What are your thoughts on that? How does she feel about being one of the few left?
SB: Well, if you know my mother at all, she’d be “oh the living legends! I hate every bit of it!” but really, she really appreciates it deep down. She’s not really into that stuff. She hasn’t come out very much with marketing her name and her likeness, which she certainly could do. I think she’s proud. I mean, to live a life like Lauren Bacall lived, is you know, a dream of 99.9% of people in the world, maybe more. I think she’s very appreciative of what’s happened to her in her life and how lucky she’s been. She met the man of her dreams and he died too soon, but how many of meet the person of our dreams? She married the greatest actor of his day and possibly the #1 movie star of all time. Then, she herself, went out and won a couple of Tony awards and just received a life-time Oscar award. That’s not so bad, you know? She’s led a charmed life. She’s been healthy. Her kids have been healthy. You can’t really beat that, can you? Then she married Jason Robards, possibly the greatest stage actor.

CF: Turning the questions a little bit on you, you’ve worked kind of behind the scenes in Hollywood. Did you ever think about becoming an actor like your parents, or were you always more interest in how it worked behind the scenes?

SB: I never wanted to be. I was General Snippet in a high school play – The Mouse That Roared – and I was really not a good actor. You have to really be able to let go of yourself and totally be inhibited with yourself. I just wasn’t like that. I think I could play me, but I don’t think I could be anybody else. Acting is not easy. Bad acting is very easy, as we see time and again. Mediocre actor is very easy. But being a good actor is not easy. I actually worked in news. I worked for The Today Show at NBC, The Early Show at CBS. I’ve worked for ESPN. I’ve been in television my whole life. I now actually have a script in pre-production. My concept and I’ve got a couple of writers working on it. Hopefully we’ll be able to make a movie.
CF: That’ll be exciting.

CF: I feel the same way. Does your mother have any opinions on the way Hollywood is now?
SB: Does my mother have any opinions? Anybody who knows my mother knows she absolutely has opinions. I think that she would rather have a little less bang-bang shoot em up and more good writing and thoughtful scripts. But there are a lot of those. Movie companies are taking a big shot with each movie, putting out fifteen, twenty million dollars. Plus, PR and stuff like that. And if you lose fifteen out of the twenty, that’s not very good. So the economics put movie companies in a tough spot. This is how films like The Artist get made. You know, Harry Potter, say, makes oodles of money and that’s what enables companies to make smaller films. So, what would my mother say? That’s what she’d say. That there are some fine, fine movies. Really, some fine, fine movies.
CF: Does she still go out to films or does she wait til she can watch them in her own home?
SB: She always used to go out to films, but now she really doesn’t because she’s 87 and she just had a knee replacement a year and a half ago.  But, she watches them all. When it comes to voting she’ll screen everything, watch every movie then cast her vote. She watches movies all the time. She likes movies, she loves old movies. When you’re 87 you like to think about when you were young. I mean, hell I’m 63 and I don’t mind thinking about when I was young. Although, 63 isn’t old people say.

SB: I’ll tell you about Gloria Grahame. I remember she had two Airedales and me and my friend Steve Cahn, who was Sammy’s son, we used to crawl over onto – she had a bunch of ivy all over her house – and we used to crawl over and get the Airedales to chase us and try to get back in time before they ate us up. Liza and Lorna are still great friends of mine and Tina Sinatra, Nancy and Frank, Jr. I don’t live out there. I live in Naples, Florida and as I said, I’ve been in the T.V. business. Specific memories, I remember playing with Diane Linkletter and climbing trees and stuff. Of course, she committed suicide, but. . . I left there when I was 8 years old and I wasn’t really in the milieu anymore. My mother then went into the theater, so I knew a lot of the theater people as opposed to movie people.
CF: What sort of theater people?
SB: Oh! Lemme see, Richard Burton was a good friend of the family and Cybil still is, that was when he was still married to Cybil before Liz came long. Of course, Elizabeth was a great friend of my mother’s. Roddy McDowall, Leonard Bernstein, Adolph Green and Betty Comden, who wrote New York, New York. People like that. Just theater people. I went away to boarding school when I was 13. So I wasn’t really living there, but I would meet these people and go to the shows. I saw most of the really good shows. Camelot with Julie Andrews and Richard Burton and Roddy McDowall and Robert Goulet. How can you beat that, right? So these are the people. Robert Preston, Rex Harrison. I remember meeting them. They weren’t obviously friends of mine, but these were the people my mother hung around, so I got to meet them.
CF: Are you pretty active in the Humphrey Bogart Estate’s online presence?