Nickelodeon (1976)

• Year: 1976
• Released: 21 Dec 1976
• Country: United Kingdom, United States
• Adwords: 1 nomination
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074964/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/nickelodeon
• Metacritics:
• Available in: 720p, 1080p,
• Language: English, German
• MPA Rating: PG
• Genre: Comedy
• Runtime: 121 min
• Writer: W.D. Richter, Peter Bogdanovich
• Director: Peter Bogdanovich
• Cast: Ryan O’Neal, Burt Reynolds, Tatum O’Neal
• Keywords: hollywood, los angeles, california, 1910s, film director,

	6.2/10
	52/100

Nickelodeon Storyline

In 1911, Chicago lawyer Leo Harrigan and Florida proverbial snake-oil salesman Tom “Buck” Greenway, neither particularly committed or good at their respective jobs, accidentally get involved in the moving-picture-making business: one-, two-, three-, and four-reelers shown at nickelodeons–Leo initially as a scenarist turned scenarist/director/editor and Buck as an action actor, despite neither initially knowing anything about their jobs and Buck being afraid of heights and not knowing how to ride a horse–and being asked to do deal with both in front of a camera. Both get into the business working for independent producer H.H. Cobb at a time when the big moving-picture companies formed the Patents Company, using heavy-handed tactics to prevent small companies, like Cobb’s Kinegraph, from being able to make pictures by denying use of cameras under supposed patent. Via different routes, Leo and Buck initially meet at one of Cobb’s secret sets located in the backwater frontier railroad stop of Cucamonga, California, so chosen to hide from the Patent Company. Leo and Buck’s relationship becomes even more complicated as they both fall in love at first sight with Kathleen Cooke, an extremely nearsighted and klutzy Chautauqua girl on a national tour, who literally stumbles onto the Cucamonga set. Their personal and professional lives, presented over a four-year period, are not only affected by the ongoing battle with the Patents Company, and Leo and Buck’s love for Kathleen, but their own growth within the business, the struggle for artistic control, and the changing face of the business, which hits a milestone in 1915.—Huggo

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Nickelodeon Movie Reviews

Charming, very underrated comedy

When this movie was released they had a promotion for the premiere where you could see it for a nickel. So I went to the theater, stood in a very long line, and watched a very funny, entertaining movie that the audience seemed to quite enjoy. The next day I read a review that slammed it, and then another. And I have never understood it.

Over 30 years later I took a second look, and while sometimes you can’t for the life of you figure out why you liked a movie from the past, I still really liked this one. It’s a very funny movie that mixes in Keystone Kops-style slapstick with Howard Hawks-style screwball comedy. There are good performances by Burt Reynolds and Ryan O’Neal, and even better ones from Tatum O’Neal and, best of all, Brian Keith.

The strong negative reactions particular surprise me because the film is similar in feel to What’s Up Doc (Ryan even plays basically the same character) and yet that movie was much better received.

I found this movie funny and likable. Everyone’s good in it, including the lead actress, who apparently found film work so dispiriting that she gave up on them altogether and stuck with modeling. The first half is probably stronger than the second half, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

It could have been so much better…

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.

The early years

Nickelodeon must have been a labor of love for Peter Bogdanovich as both a filmmaker and film historian. Whatever else you can say about Nickelodeon it was certainly meticulously researched.

This film is a portrait of the early years of motion pictures. Forthose who doubt the veracity of the film you can find stories like this in the autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille. Back in the early teen years DeMille went to Californiawith his troop and made The Squaw Man against the trust who are the villains here.

His name is not mentioned, but the trust was an effort by Thomas Edison to control all aspects of film making with patents. Unfortunately while it is arguable he was the first to invent moving pictures, he was not alone. Melies in France and Friese-Greene in Great Britain were doing te same work not to mention others in the USA. Ultimately Edison lost the patent wars as portrayed here.

Lawyer Ryan O’Neal and conman Burt Reynolds become director and action star working for Brian Keith an independent producer. They also become romantic rivals for Jane Hitchcock.

Tatum O’Neal as a nicepartas a precocious adolescent with a good imagination who becomes a screenwriter. John Ritter is an early cameramanand Stella Stevens another actress.

I’m surprised at the tepid reviews that Nickelodeon got. It’s a well crafted film that shows the love Peter Bogdanovich has for his profession.