Everyone should have affectionate, but nonetheless ambivalent feelings towards director and cineaste Peter Bogdanovich.
Admiration for his encyclopedic cinephilic knowledge, impossibly good use of ridiculous neck scarves and comedically oversized spectacles and the ability to worm up to Orson Welles and not get bounced out the room immediately…
….and disappointment, perhaps disgust, for trading in on the promise of his early trifecta of immutable classics — “The Last Picture Show,” “What’s Up, Doc?,” “Paper Moon”; all impossibly released between the year 1971-73, dude was on fire — with the subsequent releases of sub par, not-up-to-snuff pictures that most people have forgotten (not to mention disdain for his hubristic success-to-his-head trading-up maneuvers: ditching longtime artistic collaborator and wife, Polly Platt for the younger Cybil Shepard, which perhaps resulted in the karmic comeuppance that was the failure of everything since, aside from “Mask”; we won’t even go into the ignominy of the Dorothy Stratten fiasco).
Personal feelings about his personal life aside, the DVD re-release of his 1976 picture, “Nickelodeon” led to some alarming and eyebrow-raising concerns of revisionism on the part of the ’70s filmmaker when it was announced the color-film would be rendered into a version of black-and-white. Perhaps a sly way to insinuate that this newly-transferred, now-black and white film should be retroactively reevaluated, perhaps corresponding in quality to his aforementioned triumvirate? Hmmm…
Not so says Bogdanovich in an interview with AMC. He claims this is the way the film was always intended to be – sans color. “Well, I always wanted it to be in black and white because it would be better able to convey the period — 1910 to 1915,” he said. “[Cinematographer] László Kovács and I kept in mind that we might one day be able to print the color [film] into black and white, and eventually we did. We finally convinced the powers-that-be to let us put the DVD out in both versions — the color and the slightly longer black-and-white version.”
So wait, he was forced to shoot it in color by the studio? This is only implied by his response, but not directly stated. Fine, we can buy that… we suppose….With the recent release of 1981’s interesting, but not-entirely-successful “They All Laughed” (which of course makes it a Tarantino favorite) and now “Nickelodeon,” should we expect a deluge of lesser Bogdanovich on DVD for reevaluative purposes? As much as many are sure to infuriate with their lost-opportunity elements, yes. We do begrudgingly love the shit out of you, Peter Bogdanovich.