David Hast: Scott, have you seen Targets?
Scott Vander Werf: I have seen Targets. I watched it recently and I saw it originally probably in the early 1980s around the time that I was in film school. A great movie.
DH: Yeah, I'd never seen it at all until a couple weeks ago, but we've done a couple of shows on Peter Bogdanovich and Targets was his first film, first movie he directed in 1968, and is overlooked by me and lots of other people. You go right to the last picture show, most people. But Targets is a surprisingly good first film. It's certainly not the masterpiece of the last picture show or a great film like What's Up Doc or Paper Moon, but it's an interesting start.
SVW: Very interesting start, and it's also a movie that although it presents itself as a sort of pulp fiction type of movie or exploitation film, low budget Hollywood movies. There are two parallel stories and one is about an aging actor, a horror movie actor named Byron Orlok, who's portrayed by Boris Karloff and it's clearly about Karloff himself.
DH: Yeah, they sound, Boris Orlok or Byron Orlok, Boris Karloff. It's kind of obvious.
SVW: And then the other story is about a disturbed young man who's obsessed with guns. Clearly inspired by, at the time, the first mass shooting in the US history in 1966, a 25-year-old gunman climbed the clock tower on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin and he killed 14 people with a high-powered rifle. And even now when we're kind of numbed by mass murder and mass shootings, the depiction of the gun violence in targets is realistic and it's very chilling.
DH: Yeah. It's still kind of an interesting realistic film to watch now. I like it a lot because of just where the movie came from. Bogdanovich was a protege of the famous Roger Corman, the Corman who made all these, he was famous for shooting B movies on the cheap and, you know, he employed this army of budding filmmakers, so many of whom are household names, right? People now that became great filmmakers who worked for him, like Francis Ford Coppola, for example.
And Bogdanovich was given this film because he'd done some good work for Coppola, I mean, for Roger Corman. But as he usually did, Corman was incredibly efficient. He made these really low-budget B-movies, and he would do things like he'd shoot two movies at the same time. Like if he had a location like a gothic castle he'd figure out two different movies he could work on. And while the director was there, he'd just make him shoot the stuff for both movies, right?
And for Targets, Korman had, because of work that Karloff had done before him, he had Karloff for two days. Boris Karloff, you know, the great Boris Karloff, who played the monster in Frankenstein. We all know him, right? Frankenstein's monster. He was 79 years old at the time. He was nearing the end of his career and he was going to get $15,000 for two days' work. So how could Corman leverage two days' work into a movie? So he told Peter Bogdanovich, this young new director, the movie had to have Boris Karloff and he had two days to shoot him, so get as much as you could done. But he also, and this was gonna actually make it easier for Bogdanovich, he had to repurpose a bunch of footage from this box office flop he'd released in 1963 called The Terror, and The Terror had Boris Karloff in it. So he's got all this footage of Karloff. Also, by the way, a very young Jack Nicholson is in that movie, 1963, The Terror. And so he recycles, there's a good 10 minutes or more of that movie in this movie.
And so Bogdanovich, he was given the script to write, but he knew he only had a little time to work with Karloff, so he wrote two parallel stories, as you said. One is about this young man who's obsessed with guns and is gonna do something horrible. And the other is about this aging horror movie star, very clearly Karloff himself. And he's sick of being in movies and doesn't wanna go on doing it anymore. And so he was able to shoot, you know, he shoots the one story about the young man with the guns. That takes up a lot of screen time. I haven't, I didn't time it, but it might even be more screen time in the Karloff story.
SVW: I would think so, yes.
DH: Was it? Okay. And then he's got all the footage from the old movie. So yeah, Boris Karloff seems to be on screen a fair amount, but you can see how he also shot it in a couple of days.
SVW: And the story about the young man is presented in a very chilling way too, because he's this very like all-American white boy, you know, boyish, handsome, you know. He's got the all-American, what looks like the all-American family in terms of the nuclear family unit is he lives with his father and his mother and he's married to a lovely young lady who works for the phone company and it looks like he's got this wonderful life and he presents himself as being, you know, happy to his family but we know as the viewer from watching him that there's something wrong with him.
SVW: Yeah, you can tell. I mean, well, early in it he goes out and buys a bunch of guns and you see he has an armory of guns in the trunk of his car. But then he's just, yeah, he's clearly got this psychotic personality because he's just so under control and everything's okay.
SVW: And they also sort of show you that the veneer of this all-American family that the father is very controlling, that the mother is very like we're following a schedule, and his wife seems to be in between there.
DH: Yeah, but here's what I love the most about this movie. It's part of why I love Peter Bogdanovich in general, and it was interesting to see right from his first movie, he's showing how much he loves the movies and knows the old movies and old Hollywood, right? You see a lot of that in his later films because Bogdanovich was not just a director and a writer and an actor sometimes, but he was also very much, he was a critic and he did documentaries about great Hollywood filmmakers.
So, he's sitting there at one point. He's playing the director in the movie, and Karloff is the actor, and they're sitting in Karloff's hotel room, and an old movie comes on TV, and it's The Criminal Code, which is an early Howard Hawke sound film. It was made in 1930, and this is actually the movie that was responsible for elevating Karloff to stardom. It was the movie that got the attention of James Whale, who directed Frankenstein, who then the next year cast Boris Karloff in Frankenstein. And in the movie Targets, Karloff says to Bogdanovich,
“It was really my first important part,”
And then Bogdanovich says, “Yeah, Howard Hawks really knows how to tell a story,”
And Karloff responds, “Yes he does.”
And these lines apparently weren't even in the script. They were literally just Karloff and Bogdanovich ad-libbing about Howard Hawks while the camera rolled.
SVW: And, you know, I would say that this little scene works really well, and it's around a scene in Karloff's, the character's hotel room, and this is where Bogdanovich is intoxicated, he's drunk, and my only criticism of the film is Bogdanovich, who later actually became a really good actor along with being a director. I think that the acting, and you can see that Boris Karloff is a master and that he's an amateur.
DH: Yeah, I mean, this is his very first film of any kind, right? So he's like 20 some years old, and I don't think Bogdonovich had any acting training.
SVW: But there's also scenes in the drive-in. And I remember talking to you about this, about the projection system that they show.
DH: Well, this was a personal favorite for me. And I loved it because I was a movie projectionist for several years when I lived in California. And I worked as a projectionist in many theaters, but one of them was a drive-in, and Bogdanovich, the climactic scene of the movie is in a drive-in theater when they're showing this Borys Karloff film in the theater, and Bogdanovich takes his camera, I mean the movie goes inside the projection booth, and we get to see as the viewer exactly how 35 millimeter film works.
He shows the old two projector setup with 20 minute reels, manual changeovers, right, so nothing's automated. The projector has carbon arc lamps instead of bulbs. Most projectors, as we got later into the 70s, 80s, they had big bulbs. But these are the kind of carbon arcs like they used to use in the lights in Hollywood movies in the old days. And it shows closeups of the projectionist threading the projector and the little bell ringing on the feed reel when it's time to change over and all these little details. So just made me very happy.
For anyone who's nostalgic for movies and the medium itself, like Bogdanovich obviously loved just the physical film and the machinery. You know, if you're someone like that who has movies in your blood, you can see that in this movie. Or if you're someone who's only familiar really with our newer technology, here's a good place to see it.
SVW: So, Target's works as a really good film from 1968, a Roger Corman film which would have been looked at as maybe an exploitation film at the time, but it very much represents the reality that we live within today with mass shootings.
DH: Yeah, it's still relevant that way, but also a fun film from the 60s.
