Fifty Before '50: NICKELODEON

 by JB

Gee, you would think that something like this would be right up my alley.

Peter Bogdanovich’s Nickelodeon hit American theater screens at a crazy time. The “Auteurist Seventies” were drawing to a close, about to be eclipsed by the “Blockbuster Eighties.” We can see this schism quite clearly in 1976’s Best Picture Oscar nominees: Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Nashville, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. All terrific films: four personal director’s visions and one blockbuster.

Nickelodeon is neither of these; it’s an inert object, not entertaining enough to be a roaring crowd-pleaser and not personal enough to be a singular director’s unique vision. It just sits there, wasting everyone’s time, neither fish nor fowl. This is the raw potato of film history.

Nickelodeon is the type of film for which the term “lame-brained” was coined.

THE PLOT IN BRIEF: In 1914, hapless, ambulance-chasing lawyer Leo Harrigan (Ryan O’Neal) stumbles into directing films via a chance encounter with bombastic producer H.H. Cobb (Brian Keith). Cobb sends Harrigan to California, the better to hide from Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company, which sought to close down any film company not sanctioned by Edison himself. Harrigan quickly falls in with other fledgling filmmakers: cameraman Frank Frank (John Ritter), screenwriter and “Girl Friday” Alice Forsyte (Tatum O’Neal), actresses Kathleen Cooke and Marty Reeves (Jane Hitchcock and Stella Stevens), stuntmen Dobie and Jim (Harry Carey, Jr. and James Best), and actors Reginald Kingsley and Buck Greenway (George Gaynes and Burt Reynolds).

TANGENT: One measure of the film’s stupidity is that it clearly expects the audience to think John Ritter’s character name, Frank Frank, is hilarious. It is not.

Harrigan’s merry band has many adventures shooting pictures on the fly in the early days of Hollywood. All sorts of things happen that are supposed to be funny but are not. Nickelodeon suddenly gets strangely serious in its last half hour, when the entire cast attends the world premiere of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, and they all suddenly realize that they are now working in a new American art form.

That’s... comedy!

Nothing in this film works. The performances are pitched too big, the dialogue contains no jokes, not one aspect of the plot is interesting or entertaining, the direction is aimless and lackluster, the editing is languid, the sets and costumes are bland and lack imagination, the score seems to be multiple variations of a single annoying piano melody, and every performer seems to be appearing in a different film. (To be fair, Burt Reynolds acquits himself nicely.) The audience watches the film in silence and wonders why we are supposed to care about these characters or invest two hours into their supposed antics.

This film has all the makings of an epic historical farce: a director steeped in Hollywood lore, a young cast that is more than up the job, and an award-winning cinematographer well-versed in both color and black and white photography. Okay, the composer might have left something to be desired. Richard Hazard was most famous for scoring Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla and episodes of TV’s Mannix.

The problem here is clear. Although Bogdanovich had written seven books of film criticism before becoming a director, he couldn’t write a screenplay to save his life. Bogdanovich’s breakthrough film was 1971’s The Last Picture Show, based on a novel by Larry McMurtry and co-written by McMurtry and Bogdanovich. His second smash was What’s Up, Doc? with a script by Buck Henry, David Newman, and Robert Benton. (Incidentally, Buck Henry wrote the screenplay for The Graduate; Newman and Benton wrote Bonnie & Clyde and Superman.)

Bogdanovich's third hit was Paper Moon, based on a novel by Joe David Brown, with a screenplay by Alvin Sargent. Sargent famously penned the screenplays of Julia, Straight Time, Ordinary People, Unfaithful, and Spiderman 2. Maybe these earlier Bogdanovich hits were hits because of their screenplays... rather than their direction.

Every source suggests that W.D. Richter’s original script for Nickelodeon was wonderful, but when Bogdanovich signed on, he completely rewrote that script into the mess that it ended up being. Bogdanovich added episodes based on true tales of the silent days that he had gleaned from interviews he'd done with elderly directors Alan Dwan, Raoul Walsh, and Leo McCarey. According to producer Irwin Winkler, “What he filmed had nothing to do with the original script. I know it meant a lot to Peter to have all of the authentic stories about the silent period in the film, but Rick's script, authentic or not, was terrific. It was just a great drama. By the time Peter was done with it, it was authentic, but it wasn't dramatic anymore.”

No one at the studio questioned Bogdanovich because he had directed three big hits in a row. (Epic stinker At Long Last Love, Bogdanovich’s paeon to classic musicals, had yet to be released.) Columbia studio head David Begelman thought Bogdanovich was a genius.

YOU'RE WELCOME, HOLLYWOOD: Here's how producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff and director Peter Bogdanovich could have fixed this picture. Instead of relying on anecdotes from the director’s own interviews, they should have paid for the film rights to Kevin Brownlow’s 1968 book The Parade’s Gone By, perhaps the best book I have ever read about the early days of the silent cinema.

In the words of a Goodreads critic Steven Paine, “[...] For many, this is understandably the bible for the lover of silent films. It's written with genuine love, enthusiasm, and knowledge... The book is full of stories from the days these films were made, told by the people who made them. In many cases Brownlow was lucky to capture the interviews just before it was too late.”

Sony/Columbia has released a new special edition Blu-ray of Nickelodeon, featuring two versions of the film: the 122-minute theatrical cut in color and the 125-minute director’s cut in black and white, which is how Bogdanovich originally wanted it released. I would say that both are unwatchable, but I only watched the black and white version!

For you, Dear Reader. For you.