[2] In 1914, Leo Harrigan goes from being a lawyer to a writer and then to a film director while having problems, such as being hopelessly smitten with Kathleen Cooke.

While directing a scene of his friend Buck rising in a balloon, Kathleen gets trapped in a rope and is hoisted in a most undignified manner.

Leo moves from New Jersey to California to keep one step ahead of the Motion Picture Patents Company, which is out to destroy any non-authorized equipment violating the Edison Trust.

Leo finally settles in with other filmmakers in Hollywoodland, California, and makes a series of dramatic, romantic, and comedic shorts as throwaways.

While initially believing movies are just a brief flickering kind of entertainment, Leo and the crew are profoundly affected when they go to see the 1915 world premiere of D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, which transforms the motion picture industry.

Richter's final script was called Starlight Parade, and attracted interest from United Artists and Columbia.

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.

I'd been planning to do a big picture about the silent era, largely based on the interviews with Dwan, Walsh and McCarey.

Bogdanovich said his original choices for the leads were Jeff Bridges, John Ritter, Cybill Shepherd and Orson Welles.

[6] However Columbia Pictures head David Begelman refused and Burt Reynolds and Ryan O'Neal were cast in the leads.

[7] He also refused to let Bogdanovich's then-girlfriend Shepherd in the female lead out of fear of a public backlash against her, following the poor box office performance of Daisy Miller and At Long Last Love.

Peter wrote the film for Ryan O'Neal and me; he sees me [in real life] as that shy guy.

"[9] Tatum O'Neal, who had won an Oscar appearing in Paper Moon with her father and Bogdanovich, joined the supporting cast.

[3] Winkler says when he saw a rough cut of the final film he thought it was "atrocious ... for Peter to blame the movie's failure on the casting and not being in black-and-white is a really terrible excuse for a guy who simply screwed up a really terrific script.

"[5] For the Los Angeles premiere, all guests (and some critics) paid five cents to see the movie in honor of the film and early Hollywood ticket prices.

[16] However, the movie was unsuccessful at the box office, and was Bogdanovich's third flop in a row, after Daisy Miller and At Long Last Love (the latter of which was also an attempt to revive an older style of film making).

Bogdanovich reminisced in 2004: The previews were edgy and the studio wanted me to take most of the drama out, play it more comedy and turn it more into a What's Up Doc?, which it really wasn't.

[1]After making the film, Bogdanovich felt he had compromised so much he took three years off directing, before returning with Saint Jack (1979).

Among contemporary reviews from critics, Roger Ebert gave the film two stars out of four and called it "a curiously flat movie.

The laughs are telegraphed, the actors are lifeless (with the exception of Burt Reynolds), and the movie does an abrupt turnabout, from comedy to elegy, about two-thirds of the way through.

Recreating a cultural era in terms of some of its artistic forms and cliches emerges as an uneven dramatic device though it sometimes works.

"[19] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two stars out of four and wrote that it "really bogs down with incessantly inept pratfall comedy" and "is successful only when it captures the innocence of the period.

"[20] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "In the first part of the film O'Neal, Reynolds and Miss Hitchcock often seem merely silly as they carry on like the exaggerated characters in their own movies.

Alas, the effect is to make the latter portion of the movie unduly static and drawn out in comparison to its frenetic beginning.

Indeed, 'Nickelodeon' is most affecting for the cineaste, and its culminating tribute to D. W. Griffith as the screen's first great artist brings tears to the eyes.

"[21] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote that while Bogdanovich's new film was not quite a disaster on par with his previous flop At Long Last Love, "this elaborate, rambling and ultimately tedious period comedy about the pioneering years of the movie business in Hollywood does not lack for crippling deficiencies, miscalculations and self-indulgences.

"[22] Critic John Simon called the film "a sanity test: anyone who catches himself laughing at any of it at this late date should seriously consider committing himself to the nearest mental hospital even though in his case a cure is hardly to be hoped for.

"[23] Filmink magazine argued, "even different casting would have fixed other issues with the film… it’s overlong running time, the fact that it spans years, all the endless zappy talk that isn’t particularly witty (a hallmark of Bogdanovich written dialogue), characters falling in love at the drop of a hat (ditto).