Nickelodeon, Peter Bogdanovich, 1976

It's Halloween. My neighbor came to the door with his little son. I didn't recognize him at first with his black wig, fake mustache and cowboy hat and it was only when he was walking away that I realized he was dressed as Burt Reynolds. I should have known. Just an hour or two earlier I received a DVD from Netflix of Nickelodeon starring Ryan O'Neal, Burt Reynolds and Tatum O'Neal. I had seen it in the '70's. I forgot that Brain Keith was in it. I was going to watch it in honor of Burt Reynolds' recent death.

Ryan O'Neal is a lawyer who finds himself working as a movie director in 1910. Burt Reynolds is a cowboy who first starts working for the Motion Picture Patents Company which targeted independent film producers.

I'm starting to understand why Nickelodeon bombed. It's just not very good. There are what I take to be references in it to What's Up, Doc, and Paper Moon.

Bogdanovich completely rewrote the original script.

This is from Irwin Winkler quoted on Wikipedia:

I know it meant a lot to Peter [Bogdanovich] to have all of the authentic stories about the silent period in the film, but Rick's [W.D. Richter] 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. Peter hadn't really experienced any failure yet -- we hired him before 'At Long Last Love' had come out -- so he was easily the most arrogant person I'd ever met in the business, before or since.

Arrogance serves people like Bogdanovich pretty well most of the time, but it can be a cruel mistress. It's amazing how bad he got. He made three great movies then made three terrible movies because he thought he could do no wrong.

In Nickelodeon, there was nothing about the style or process of making silent movies. In the one scene that shows them filming a movie, they keep filming as a series of accidents take place. I can't see how the film would have been usable. It's the way they film movies on TV sit-coms.

Contrast that with a Gore Vidal novel set in the silent era. In one chapter, they filmed a scene in a silent movie, everything looked good, but the director hadn't paid attention and asked what the actors had been saying during the scene. There were lip readers in the audience back then and they had to be careful.

In fact, one of the first cases of movie censorship for obscene language was in a silent movie.It was a comedy about a man who believes in the healing power of laughter. They filmed a scene of him telling jokes to men in a homeless shelter. They used actual homeless men in an actual homeless shelter as extras. The actor told jokes and the men sat stone faced. He could only get them to laugh by telling dirtier and dirtier jokes. They had to refilm the scene when offended lip readers complained.

Watch Gloria Swanson in Queen Kelly. I think that was the one where she was swearing constantly.

I haven't seen it in years and I don't know if it's available, but there was a better movie covering similar subject matter, Hearts of the West made in 1975 about the people making B westerns in the 1930s. With Jeff Bridges, Andy Griffith, Blythe Danner and Alan Arkin.