Nickelodeon

Bogdanovich succeeds in portraying a world of amateur outsider film makers dreaming in celluloid, but he undermines the potential depth of the material through an over reliance on frivolity and cardboard cutouts; it's only in the final reel that these characters even begin to feel real. The end result feels like an ackward mix between What's Up Doc and Paper Moon when it probably should have resembled Paper Moon more closely in tone. A missed opportunity.

A fun re-visioning of early movie making with a lot of people falling down. You just have to love the speech at the end by Mr. Cobb.

B&W Director's Cut: Generally fun homage to silent screen comedy (but with dialogue!) works best when it sticks to comedy, and the surprisingly accomplished pratfall skills of O'Neal and Reynolds (hilarious as a countrified hayseed). Sudden u-turn to melancholic nostalgia at the halfway mark doesn't quite work, and self-serving speeches about the director's right of final cut give the film a self-serious tone which doesn't mesh with the lightness of what's come before.

Horribly unfunny, but that doesn't stop it from being a generally entertaining look at the early days of cinema.