Nickelodeon

O’Neal stars as a bumbling barrister who literally stumbles into a job first writing, then directing silent movies for an unruly pirate ship of an upstart film company run by brash mini-mogul Brian Keith. O’Neal soon finds his perfect leading man in Burt Reynolds, a charismatic hayseed whose ascent to movie stardom is every bit as half-assed and random as O’Neal’s path to the director’s chair. But their personal and professional bonds are threatened by O’Neal’s lingering infatuation with Reynolds’ wife, played by model-turned-actress Jane Hitchcock.

Nickelodeon gleefully inhabits the Wild West era of film, a lawless time when pretty much everyone was an enthusiastic amateur making up the rules as they went along. Bogdanovich’s affection for film’s embryonic beginnings informs every frame, from the machine-gun crackle of snappy banter smartly executed to meticulously choreographed pratfalls and comic fights to silent-movie-style intertitles. Nickelodeon begins to sag in its third act, as the pace slows and O’Neal and Reynolds’ dull romantic rivalry dominates the proceedings. But it recovers spectacularly during a movie-mad climax featuring the première of Birth Of A Nation and a stunning, succinct monologue from Keith about the transformative power of cinema.

Key features: The theatrical and director’s-cut version, plus a Bogdanovich commentary that discusses the many scenes inspired by the real-life travails of directors like McCarey, Allan Dwan, and Raoul Walsh. There’s also a director’s cut of Bogdanovich’s most widely admired film, The Last Picture Show.