Nickelodeon

The critical "view" of this film is that it's a dog. But that's only true if you want to see films through the eyes of critics; and when this one came out, the critics were gunning for Bogdanovich. Why? Who knows. They were gunning for Spielberg when "1941" came out, the difference being that Spielberg bounced back. Bogdanovich never really did, but that doesn't make "Nickelodeon" a bad film. True, it has no appreciable story, but it's a nifty little love letter to the makers of those early movies; which is why it has equal parts slapstick and straight drama. It's affectionate rather than melodramatic, and has a convincing evocation of what it must have been like to be around, scuffling on the edges of fame and fortune with this weird new invention, motion pictures. It's not going to scare you, or thrill you with wall to wall CGI pyrotechnics, it doesn't have a cast of thousands, and it didn't bankrupt a studio to make it. It's a good little film, well made, solidly cast and directed, and in general, well acted. A lot of what we like in film depends on our expectations. The critics were gunning for Bogdanovich because they were expecting Art with a capital A; instead what they got were a lifelong film fan's notes. Enjoy.

I have very mixed feelings about 'Nickelodeon', a movie by a director (Peter Bogdanovich) whom I find deeply self-indulgent. On the favourable side, 'Nickelodeon' is about the early days of film-making: a subject which passionately interests me ... and Bogdanovich makes clear that he shares that passion. Even more remarkably, 'Nickelodeon' makes considerable effort to get the historical facts straight. Much of the material here is adapted from personal experiences in the early film careers of Allan Dwan and Raoul Walsh, two directors unfortunately forgotten and whose work is often unfairly neglected. So, what went wrong?

To be getting on with, Bogdanovich might have had a better film if he'd done a straightforward bio of either Dwan or Walsh (especially Walsh, whose life was fascinating). Instead, the real incidents from their lives are incorporated into the much less plausible slapstick shenanigans of some blatantly fictional characters. Throughout 'Nickelodeon', I had the nagging feeling that this was a roman-a-clef, with each fictional character based on an actual person from the early days of cinema. For instance, Tatum O'Neal (age 13 here) plays a girl who earns a living writing movie scenarios. I suspect that this character was inspired by Anita Loos, who actually did earn money writing movie scenarios while still a teenager. (Sadly, the late Ms Loos told some very vicious lies about other show-business figures -- including Paul Bern and Alexander Woollcott -- so I'm reluctant to believe anything she said about her own life.) All through 'Nickelodeon', I kept trying to guess which character was based on which real-life film figure ... and the problem is, there's not enough reality here to go round.

We do get, commendably, a very accurate depiction of the Patent Wars. Thomas Edison held exclusive patents on several crucial components of the motion-picture camera: he hired men to shut down all film productions that used his technology without paying him royalties, and some of Edison's hirelings actually went so far as to fire handguns into the mechanisms of unsanctioned movie cameras. ('Nickelodeon' gets this right.) Most of the period detail is accurate throughout this film.

Regrettably, the character played by Burt Reynolds is given too much slapstick material: a decision which annoyed me even more because Reynolds's character is clearly based more than slightly on the young Raoul Walsh, a film pioneer who didn't deserve to have his life and career reduced to pratfalls. Reynolds is also lumbered with an unwieldy script device which I call the Convenient Excerpt. We see him reading aloud Owen Wister's novel 'The Virginian', which was a best-seller at the time when this film takes place. Fair enough ... except, to my annoyance, the only time when we actually see and hear Reynolds doing this -- presumably working his way through the entire novel -- he conveniently happens to be reading the one and only passage in 'The Virginian' which would be recognised by people who haven't actually read the novel. (I refer to the "When you call me that, smile!" quote ... which was reworded for the film, so please don't 'correct' my version.)

Brian Keith has a good supporting role in 'Nickelodeon', except that he delivers all of his dialogue with some peculiar sort of speech defect. Here, too, I got the impression that the fictional character on screen was based on a real person: in Keith's case, the early film producer Colonel Selig. Less effective here is John Ritter, who shows no sense of period and seems to be living about six decades later than the other characters.

As the love interest, Jane Hitchcock (who?) brings absolutely nothing to her role except a distracting surname and the same facial bone structure as Cybill Shepherd. The latter trait leads me to conjecture as to why Bogdanovich cast her.

I watched 'Nickelodeon' with a semi-consistent sense of enjoyment, but with a more prominent (and more consistent) sensation of "This could have been so much BETTER, if only...". Insert sigh of regret here. 'Nickelodeon' was a huge flop in its day, and I suppose that it deserved to be. At least it spawned one clever in-joke. Two years after starring in this flop, Burt Reynolds starred in the solid actioner "Hooper", in which Robert Klein played a character based on Peter Bogdanovich. When Klein starts spouting that movies are 'pieces of time' (a Bogdanovich quote), Reynolds hauls off and belts him. I'll rate 'Nickelodeon' 6 out of 10: it probably deserves less, but this poor movie is based on a subject very dear to me.

Just finished watching the color version on Turner Classic Movies. I loved "Paper Moon," especially the wonderful depression-era music, and "The Last Picture Show" (I grew up in Texas not so far from Archer City in the same era), so that's what I knew about Peter Bogdonovich, the director. I echo many of the reviews, without having known about the reception the film apparently received at the time. Even though I was grown when it came out, I just never got around to seeing it. Maybe I wouldn't have enjoyed it as much as now, as I approach 60.

Yes, it's filled with slapstick, sometimes goofy, but the audience is in on the jokes. I felt like I was invited to the party, with all these wonderful actors (not in the thespian sense, but in the popular sense)as friends. The magic is that it makes you feel comfortable, because loving movies and movie making is part of my life, too. It appreciates the audience and wants us to have a good time with it.

The director obviously loves the medium. In many ways, there was a Fellini-esque quality to it, as another reviewer wrote. The magic of Fellini was similar: he used the everyday strangeness of reality to make his films real. Hollywood is the make-believe; reality makes a better film.

This is art imitating life. It celebrates the birth of the industry and the magic of the universal language of moving pictures, captured beautifully and simply in Brian Keith's closing monologue. It is Peter's love letter to the industry and to the audience, as only a lover could compose. It is beautifully crafted, the acting balanced throughout the ensemble, and the message delivered with wry humor. Though I didn't see it when released, it may look better now, in nostalgic retrospect. It IS a love letter, and at my age, it is a delightful homage to an industry that just "doesn't make 'em like this anymore." Thank you, Mr. Bogdonovich and all the cast. Love you, too.

As Peter called it his Director's Cut and this was also a World Premiere. It was completely in black in white in a movie theatre for the first time ever. PB said he hadn't seen it ever on the big screen in this new and preferred way either. What a wonderful ode to the way that it was back in the 1910's.

I laughed frequently to the gags, film in-jokes, and silent film style action. Period detail was fun to see with the clothing, cars, white face for silent scenes, and silent inter-titles between scenes. All around this is one of those fun movies that's filled with a lot of info layered into the story. Even more so to those fans that know what it took to create and record performances on the first motion picture film stocks. The film score by Richard Hazard sounded like it was lifted from one of the Keystone Kops films. The cinematography by Laszlo Kovacs was superb. I loved the closing credits sequence showing a studio of glass with bright lights at night and showing the filming of soldiers marching through the set and then coming outside to go around again and again. The level of authenticity was undeniable and enjoying both at the same time. A Rare Feat.

Within the film it would show people watching silent films and what it took for those employees of that theatre to recreate with the in house orchestra and sound / special effects to be heard alongside the audibly silent film performance.

I miss John Ritter, Jane Hitchcock was gorgeous, James Best in his western garb, George Gaynes (the Commandant who got blown away in Police Academy 1), Harry Carey Jr, M. Emmet Walsh, Brian Keith, and the juicy Stella Stevens.

* Before the movie started there was a Q&A. Among the facts before the screening were these: Peter stated that the studio wouldn't let him use Cybil for this film (even though it was written only for her) or that if she would do Nickelodeon they would NOT let her do Taxi Driver. Also Peter wanted to go with Jeff Bridges in Burt's role.

That the then head of Columbia said it would be OK to film it in color and then we'll let you release it black and white. The studio also forced him to remove a scene of Ryan romancing Ritter's girl Stella. It was nothing more than Ritter seeing Ryan go into Stella's room and close the door. Ritter in that moment had Tatum at his side.

The copy we saw last night was on a Beta type tape. So there was a delay of perhaps 15 seconds in the theatre for switching the tapes. It came from the acting Columbia library mgr within the last few months. PB had only seen this print once before at Quentin Tarantino's house. QT has the gadgets necessary to play this apparently rare type of Beta stock. QT's quote for last night's theatrical screening was "It's F'ing Rad"; although QT was not in attendance.

Peter said that he hopes that there will be a future director's cut release onto DVD here in the states. As the abused Columbia release is so far only on DVD in the UK. I told him I'd love to hear his commentary for the movie. What a movie!!!

Oddly this is a film that I have always liked and still make a point to watch when it is televised. I say "oddly" because I find Peter Bogdanovich and Ryan O'Neal excellent examples of two people pretty much clueless about their chosen professions. Bogdanovich was a journalist/critic/film theorist turned director (who had the bad taste to be involved with Cybill Shepperd) and O'Neal was a Hollywood personality who occasionally acted (who had the good taste to marry Leigh Taylor-Young).

Jane Hitchcock is the most interesting thing about "Nickelodeon". Hitchcock was a magazine model who Bogdanovich hoped to groom into a star. Bogdanovich historically has had a weakness for beautiful women of marginal talent (Shepherd and Dorothy Stratten's sister come to mind). Unlike the others, Hitchcock was quickly turned off by both Bogdanovich and the movie game-she already had a lucrative modeling career and didn't have to put up with the Hollywood starlet system. Whether Hitchcock would have made it big in movies is hard to tell, but in "Nickelodeon's" "Kathleen Cooke" she found a character she could play with wide-eyed innocence and complete sincerity. While it doesn't hurt that Hitchcock is drop dead gorgeous, her Kathleen Cooke character is more than gorgeous, she is absolutely captivating. Which makes her completely believable as the object of the movie's love triangle and elevates her to the top of my list of the all-time most irresistible screen heroines (even ahead of Fay Wray's "Ann Darrow" and Clara's Bow's "Mary Preston").

But "Kathleen Cooke" is not the only good thing about "Nickelodeon". It has one of cinema's all time funniest sequences. O'Neal arrives by train at a remote shooting location out west. He steps off the train at a watering stop and looks out over the desert to the movie set 500 yards away. The sun is high overhead baking the desert landscape and O'Neal is not enthusiastic about the prospect of walking that far in such heat. A tiny dog with the movie company spots him from that distance and begins running toward him. The dog is making a bee-line for him, as it gets closer we wait for the happy reunion, but when it arrives it immediately bites his leg. The dog hates him so much that it was willing to run that far in the hot sun just for the opportunity to attack him.

It also is an excellent and generally accurate history lesson about the early days of movies and the serendipity that determined who became involved with the new industry. Serendipity is the theme of the film and the source of most of its comedy, as the expanding talent needs of the new movie industry were often met by whoever they happened to encounter at a particular moment and not through any systematic process. Thus Burt Reynolds (in his best comic performance) becomes a stunt man only because at that moment they need a stunt man and he needs a job. A running gag is his boastful declaration with each new job that the job title (whatever it might be) is his middle name. Also a great take on how milestones like "Birth of a Nation" periodically set the bar higher throughout film history and inspired those within the industry to stretch themselves to do better work.

Ryan O'Neal is fairly low-key and therefore tolerable. In addition to Hitchcock and Reynolds, Bogdanovich gets excellent performances from Tatum O'Neal (great negotiating sequences), John Ritter, Stella Stevens and Brian Keith.

The main problem with "Nickelodeon" is that the depth and breathe of early film history is too complicated for a small comedic treatment. As a film historian Bogdanovich was dealing with a subject near and dear to his heart. He appears to have borrowed heavily from Fellini's "Variety Lights" and "White Sheik" to construct his company of players but could not integrate the intimate and light-hearted flavor of those films with the huge historical subject he was documenting. "Nickelodeon" is still entertaining and informative but the whole is less that the sum of its parts.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.