Movie Details
| Title: | Nickelodeon | |
| Director: | Peter Bogdanovich | |
| Year: | 1976 | |
| Genre: | Movie About Movies | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 04.02.23 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (7)
- Directed by John Ford
- The Great Buster
- The Last Picture Show
- Paper Moon
- Saint Jack
- Targets
- They All Laughed
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 04.02.23 | Internet | Tonight's double feature is a couple movies about movies that I mentioned in my notes on Damien Chazelle's Babylon. I said these two movies were better than that movie but it'd been a long time since I've seen either so I figured why not revisit them and see if I was right or not. The last time this happened, where I watched True Lies after The Gray Man I was really surprised at how not great True Lies has held up! Will the same hold true for these? Let's find out. Nickelodeon takes place about ten years before Babylon, before Los Angeles was where movies got made. Ryan O'Neal stars as a lawyer cum director who looks like Harold Lloyd and Burt Reynolds as a cowboy drifter who becomes a leading man. Tatum O'Neal is also in it along with a young John Ritter as a location crew making these early one-reel movies that would play at the titular venues (way before the kid's cable network). I saw this movie in the early 2000s right after reading Bogdanovich's tome of interviews Who The Devil Made It where he talked to Allen Dwan and Raoul Walsh (among many many others) and got great stories of the very beginning of the artform. So when those stories showed up in this movie, I was pleasantly surprised and my lasting memories of the movie are positive. The film has a pretty dreary reputation however. It was a huge flop for Bogdanovich in a string of flops that was a momentous fall from grace after his early career. Watching it again, I can see how this wouldn't have fit in the zeitgeist of 1976. I mean that was the year of Taxi Driver, Rocky, Carrie, All the President's Men. Pretty much right in the middle of that miserable malaise of gritty 70s filmmaking, and here comes this bright almost slapstick love letter to silent film, I think the same year as Mel Brooks' send-up of them! So to me that would account for some of the negative reactions. I also get the sense that it was fashionable to hate both Bogdanovich and his then-wife Cybil Shepherd because of their outlandish earlier success. But what about the movie itself? Well, it's not great. It's not terrible I don't think, but it's also not without issue. It's about a half an hour too long, takes way too long to get going, barely has enough time for this love triangle which is really the only plot hooking these fun anecdotes of early filmmaking together, and this is weird but Ryan O'Neal and Burt Reynolds don't have that much chemistry, either with the leading lady or each other. The passage of time and title cards also give the story a disjointed vibe, and lastly it hooks into what was cool back in the 1910s, which is apparently the ku klux klan. It gets harder and harder to see the historical significance of Birth of a Nation these days when shit like Friends is getting criticized for its cultural insensitivity. But you know... there's a lot of it that I did like. For one, having most of the music be diagetic from the guy in the crew with a harmonica or squeezebox is great. Loved seeing it in Life Aquatic; it's way more believable here than dragging a full orchestra out into the desert (that's a dig on Babylon). You see the same reproductions of early sets all in a row, re-cutting dramas into comedies by the studio men back east, early stunt work, all basically right out of the interviews with Dwan and Walsh and to my memory faithfully and entertainingly depicted. You also get a good sense of wonder of going to an early movie palace with the orchestra and sound effects behind the screen and that thrill of seeing something you'd never seen before. I loved the wide shot of Griffith coming out for a curtain call. I feel like you get a great sense of how wild west it actually was without need for over embellishment or fabrication. A quick note on how I watched this. I guess it's kind of a hard movie to see? The imdb trivia says that Bogdanovich owns/owned the rights so it's never had a real home release. I caught it on TCM way back when (they have films that are otherwise unavailable and they'll play them like once a year with no fanfare). But thanks to the age we're living in, I found two copies of it online. Archive.org had a copy that was broadcast on TCM in 2020 and it was a black and white version which I thought would be better, but somehow it was a low-quality rip of a VHS recording. I don't know who's still rocking a VCR with blank tapes and taping shit off TCM like they don't have a DVR in 2020, but it gave me a hell of a nostalgia wave since that's exactly how I first saw this movie 20 years ago. It was Ben Mankiewicz instead of Robert Osbourne but I love how they intro the film and give it a little context at the start. This one also had a plug for TCM's podcast series where they talk to Bogdanovich about his career (which I'll need to check out at some point). However, the source material was full-frame 480p and the bitrate of the rip was low enough to where I couldn't read words on screen or really discern faces. Plus there was a VHS-era buzzing on the audio that proved too annoying to slug it out through so I found a cleaner digitization on another site to watch the second half. It was still standard definition and it was the original color version but at least the sound was clear and it was the original aspect ratio. |
