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The forerunner is the Boultings' The Magic Box, the beneficiary is the Tavianis' Good Morning, Babylon. The indie scene ca. 1910, a change of vocation for the bumbling lawyer (Ryan O'Neal), out of the courtroom and into the moving picture business. Scenarios come by way of paroxysms of inspiration or Shakespearean pilfering, the honcho (Brian Keith) has few requirements: "Make it juicy, print legibly." The born cowboy is really a Florida go-getter (Burt Reynolds) hired as a Patents Company goon, the link to the other feller is the myopic ingénue (Jane Hitchcock) with mixed-up suitcases. The new art is a continuation of the Old West, just amateurs discovering the craft in the empty California prairie, falling down a lot. "That's the camera. The first thing you do is tell me where to put it." "I'm about to." Peter Bogdanovich heard about Hollywood's knockabout infancy from those who were there, his antic and wistful salute scampers like a slaphappy The Day of the Locust. Melancholy trouper (Stella Stevens), owlish gopher (Tatum O'Neal), intrepid cameraman (John Ritter), theatrical gasbag (George Gaynes), perpetually on the verge of a Keaton chase or a Sennett food fight. The smitten director stages a sham wedding at the ostrich farm ("I carry a hell of a torch") and swiftly realizes the importance of the final cut, along with his lowly position in the public's appreciation of movies. "Oh, he just makes them." An extended lateral pan surveys the many simultaneous illusions separated by sheets, a besieged stagecoach next to a romantic palace next to a Biblical desert, the dream factory already in full swing. "Music for the eyes" is one metaphor for cinema after the epochal premiere of Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, another is the glass studio that fills the screen at the close like a snow globe. With Harry Carey Jr., James Best, Philip Bruns, John Chappell, Jack Verbois, and M. Emmet Walsh. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |