Not the cable channel

I think I've got one movie left from last March's TCM programming tribute to Ryan O'Neal to do a post on. That movie is Nickelodeon.

In the early days of film, the cameras, film stocks, and projection equipment had only recently been invented, and the companies that held the still-extant patents on these inventions banded together to make the Motion Picture Patents Company, based on the east coast and doggedly trying to prevent little companies from making movies without paying royalties to the big players. This led to smaller companies decamping to the west coast and ultimately creating the Hollywood motion picture industry. This backdrop is mentioned in a couple of title cards before we get to the main action, which begins in 1910 and is in black and white.

Ryan O'Neal plays Leo Harrigan, a divorce lawyer in Chicago who is about to lose a case through incompetency, forcing him literally to flee the courtroom and his angry client. He tries running away, eventually winding up at the back door of the Kinegraph Studio, an independent producer based out of Chicago and run by H.H. Cobb (Brian Keith), who is unsurprisingly worried about the Patents Company. But when he finds out that Harrigan is not a patent attorney and is also on the run, they wind up on a train together, along with actress Kathleen Cooke. Harrigan cribs from a Saturday Evening Post story to give Cobb plot ideas, and since this was the era when anybody and everybody was able to get into movies -- no film school experience necessary -- Harrigan winds up joining the crew, while Cooke heads off to New York to try to make it on the stage.

Cut to New York, where Cooke shows up at the wrong hotel. Also showing up at the hotel is Buck Greenway (Burt Reynolds), claiming to be selling clothes and also claiming to be looking for the head of a traveling rodeo. Some theater producers overhear this last half and ask Buck if he can ride a horse, which gets him a job in their stage show. Buck and Cooke also find out they wound up with each other's suitcases, right out of director Peter Bogdanovich's previous What's Up Doc?. They meet up again on a train bound for California.

Also on that train is Harrigan, who somehow has a suitcase that looks just like Buck's and Cooke's, so of course that one gets switched too. Harrigan gets off the train in the middle of nowhere in California looking for one of Cobb's directors, and is met at the station by Alice (Tatum O'Neal), who is one of those snottily precocious little girls. At a bar, he meets the crew of that director Cobb is looking for. The director basically vanished after drinking, and the rest of the crew more or less adopts Harrigan as their new director.

Eventually, everybody meets up again as Harrigan and his company start to make movies, become more successful, and want more artistic independence. They've also got patents people chasing after them and Cobb wanting his piece too.

Nickelodeon is another of those movies where it's easy to see why all of the people involved would want to make it. Peter Bogdanovich, when he was getting his start in Hollywood, talked with some of the still-living legends from the silent era, and they must have told him some crazy stories. However, for me, Nickelodeon comes up a bit short in part because it's a bit too zany and slapsticky at times, as well as feeling too much like a product of the 1970s, or at least the then-present as to the sensibilities of the early silent era. Tatum O'Neal's Alice in particular feels like somebody who wouldn't have existed in real life. So I can see why Nickelodeon was not a critical or commercial success.