[2] Ford occasionally found himself exasperated by Bogdanovich's questions, but also enjoyed his company, and amused himself by needling the young man and pulling his leg.

[4] He was also unhappy with the tone of the piece, entitled "The Autumn of John Ford", because he resented the implication that his time as a director was nearing its end.

[8] Ford, who was partially deaf and who did not enjoy discussing his work, would routinely make interviewers sit on the side of his bad ear, and then indicate that he was unable to understand the questions he was being asked.

[8] He delivered a pitch to producer Frank Marshall, an old friend with whom he had first worked on the 1968 film Targets, promising to "use all the good stuff and do some interviews with new people and jazz it up a little bit and make it more commercial, faster and incisive, and also more revealing.

[7] To supplement them, he conducted additional interviews with actors Harry Carey, Jr., Clint Eastwood and Maureen O'Hara, and directors Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Walter Hill.

[7] An unattributed review in Time characterized the initial cut of the film as a "piece of lightweight scholarship", in which Ford's "every blemish is a virtue, and no detail is too trivial to examine.

"[9] Though dismissive of Bogdanovich's critical analysis within the film, the reviewer was more positive about the interview segments, in which Fonda, Stewart, and Wayne displayed the "terror and awe" of young and callow actors when discussing Ford.

[9] Reviewing the film for The New York Times, critic Roger Greenspun praised it as "workmanlike, amusing, [and] instructive," and noted that on several occasions he was "moved literally to tears" while watching it.

Bogdanovich later developed a one-man stage show called Sacred Monsters, in which he related anecdotes about his filmmaking career and performed impressions, including one of Ford.