1976 - NICKELODEON, Bogdanovich's last picture show

With the flop of Nickelodeon Peter Bogdanovich finally hit bottom but the fall was pretty far. When The Last Picture Show was released the reviewers amazingly compared the film to Citizen Kane. A filmmaker with an already inflated ego, Bogdanovich went on to direct What's Up Doc and Paper Moon. Those films didn't equal the quality of The Last Picture Show but were financially successful. However big time reality was starting to set in for the Hollywood genius. Daisy Miller was a critical and financial failure and his obsession with the talentless model turned actress Cybil Shepard was already starting to bite him in the ass. 

His disastrous attempt at a Lubitsch type musical, At Long Last Love had bombed the year before. To stay in the game he needed a commercial hit. Nickelodeon, a story about the early days of Hollywood should have been perfect. Bogdanovich probably seemed like the right director for the project. He had interviewed and written extensively about the silent film pioneers. He had studied the old Hollywood directors like Raoul Walsh, Allan Dwan, John Ford and Howard Hawks. He had a pretty good understanding of what did and didn't make their pictures work. 

 

Bogdanovich assembled a strong cast which included Brian Keith, Stella Stevens, John Ritter and Burt Reynolds. Ryan and Tatum O'Neal were back from a previous commercial hit Paper Moon. It should have been a winner for him. But the curious case of the film was that while Bogdanovich had carefully followed and copied from the old directors he failed to breath any life into their characters or situations. 

The staging of the slapstick scenes while technically competent seemed cold and unfunny. Bogdanovich idolized Howard Hawks and more importantly the ability to mix slapstick and comedy situations into films as Hawks had done with Hatari. Howevhe simply wasn't skillful enough to achieve this balance in this film. 

The film has a strange hollowness to it as it fails to draw the audience into its story. Nickelodeon also lacked any dramatic tension and frankly a film about the "patent wars" at the beginning of Hollywood probably wasn't a story subject that would interest the general film goer. Bogdanovich went on to direct other films but the failure of Nickelodeon finished him off as a mainstream director.

 

Written by Peter Bogdanovich and W.D. Richter, the running time is 121 minutes.