Targets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TARGETS                    C+                                                                                                          USA  (90 mi)  1968  d:  Peter Bogdanovich                         

Targets are people…and you could be one of them!                                                             —Tagline for the film

Peter Bogdanovich, like the young French New Wavers from Cahiers du Cinéma before him, was first a film critic and historian, taking an interest in recorded interviews with earlier directors in the twilight of their careers, exactly how he was portrayed in the unfinished final film by Orson Welles, The Other Side of the Wind (2018), where he was affectionately known as “the human tape recorder.”  Writing articles for Esquire in the early 60’s while curating film programs at MOMA that showcased early American film pioneers, he moved to Los Angeles in the mid 60’s and began a collaboration with renegade director/producer Roger Corman, as did many other young American directors at the time, such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Monte Hellman, Jonathan Demme and John Sayles, finding himself working on the biker flick THE WILD ANGELS (1966) with Peter Fonda, a surprise hit, grossing over $15 million dollars in 1966, which was 15^th overall at the box office that year, where he’s an uncredited writer, cinematographer, and editor, while also working as an extra and assistant director.  In his essay on this film, Targets | New Beverly Cinema, Quentin Tarantino best describes Corman’s unorthodox working methods, cannibalizing existing footage from one film and putting it in another, surrounding it with newly shot material, essentially churning out an assembly line low-budget style of moviemaking that was in stark contrast to the high-powered studio system that existed at the time.  So if Bogdanovich wanted to make his own film, he’d have to meet several seemingly odd Corman requirements, incorporating twenty minutes of footage from Corman’s Gothic horror snooze THE TERROR (1963) starring Boris Karloff (and a young Jack Nicholson), shooting an additional two days (twenty minutes of new footage) with Karloff (time still owed on his contract), while he was free to invent the rest.  Surprisingly, Bogdanovich jumped at the offer, shot by László Kovács, receiving uncredited (free) advice from none other than Sam Fuller behind the scenes, releasing the film between Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969).  Working with his wife at the time, Polly Platt, they constructed a modern day horror film, one that marked the passing of the torch from one generation to the next while accentuating the calamitous horrors leaping out of modern era newspaper headlines, in this case, the story of ex-Marine Charles Whitman, who became known as the Texas Tower Sniper, climbing to the top of the observation deck from the Main Building tower at the University of Texas at Austin carrying a bag filled with weapons, where for the next 90-minutes he proceeded to take sniper pot shots at anyone wandering by, slaughtering 16 people, wounding 32 others, and traumatizing many more in what at the time was considered the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in U.S. history, now surpassed by the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, almost all using semi-automatic weapons, with the U.S. having the highest per-capita gun ownership in the world with 120.5 firearms per 100 people, the only nation in the world with more guns than people. 

Made for $130,000, shot in 23 days, the film is an orgy of gunfire, critically praised at the time of its release for its social commentary on the prevalence of guns (though hardly the masterpiece claimed by some), but the public had little appetite for it.  Although completed in late 1967, it was released the following year after the assassinations of Civil Rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. in April and aspiring Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in June, not to mention an endless war raging in Viet Nam, coming on the heels of earlier assassinations of President Kennedy’s in 1963 and Muslim activist Malcolm X in 1965, creating a political vacuum and a void in the heart of a surging 60’s leftist cultural ideology, leading to a right-wing law and order purge afterwards with the election of Richard Nixon as President in the fall of 1968.  Opening with a movie-within-a-movie, playing the finale of THE TERROR, the dual storyline has aging 80-year old actor Boris Karloff as horror legend Byron Orlok disgusted with the irrelevance of the film, viewing himself as an extinct dinosaur (appearing in 140 films, including 40 silents, starting as an extra in 1916), with horror films not scaring anyone anymore, retiring right there on the spot after viewing a preview with the studio heads, walking out as a supposedly free man, cancelling all his scheduled appearances, no longer beholden to the studios.  A secondary story follows Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Keefe, bearing a surprising resemblance to Matt Damon), viewed as your typical All-American boy next door, clean cut, polite, and unassuming, still addressing his father as “sir,” yet both have an obsessional devotion to guns, seen practicing together at the firing range, while Bobby has a trunkful of guns in his car.  With such a stockpile, it seems strange that he revisits gun stores regularly for still more rifles and ammunition.  Viewers learn he served in Viet Nam, and despite his passive nature around the house, he seems disturbed about something (“Sometimes I get funny ideas”) and tries unsuccessfully to talk to his wife before she’s off to work on the night shift, spending the rest of the night brooding alone.  By morning, he’s flipped out, losing his grip, crossing over to the dark side.  Bogdanovich plays a scriptwriter, Sammy Michaels (using Sam Fuller’s middle name) who offers a script to Karloff, disappointed that he decides to retire just at the moment he’s written something promising for him, which turns out to be the film we’re watching.  He’s got a fling going on with Karloff’s attractive young personal assistant Jenny (Nancy Hsueh, excellent, very surprising she didn’t have a more prominent career), who may be following Karloff back to England, though Orlok graciously releases her, not wanting to interfere with their budding romance.  Orlok changes his mind, however, and agrees to make one final scheduled appearance at the Reseda Drive-In Theater screening of his film, offering fans one final chance to see him.  Meanwhile, Bobby goes on a shooting rampage, shooting his wife and parents at home in the morning before heading out to a nearby oil refinery and climbing to the top of the tanks, in something of an homage to James Cagney in White Heat (1949), shooting randomly at passing cars on the freeway, with viewers seeing through the high-powered scope of the rifle, intentionally resembling the Zapruder tape of President Kennedy's assassination.  Never receiving permits to make a film along a busy LA freeway, this example of guerilla filmmaking best reflects Roger Corman’s economical style of filmmaking, getting in and out before drawing attention of the police.

Instead of a musical score, scattered throughout the film are lengthy stretches of loud radio noise playing during Bobby’s many car rides and banal, mind-bogglingly dull family conversations at home, drowned out by an always turned on television, adding a mindless tone to each sequence, lending an air of shallow superficiality to his psychological mindset, as endless layers of brainless mush are drummed into his head, suggesting the dumbing down of America.  While this doesn’t play a part for his gun obsession, it does weigh into his thoughtlessness and lack of remorse, as he simply doesn’t question what he’s doing, as if led by voices in his head, unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality.  With endless violence capturing the television replays and newspaper headlines, author Tom Wolfe coined the phrase “porno-violence,” suggesting viewers were becoming addicted to even more violence, adopting the point of view of the shooters instead of the victims, dulling one’s senses for empathy.  This film exploits that mentality, allowing the shooter to dominate the film, all done so casually, as if he’s at a sporting event picking off targets, overshadowing any link to an otherwise genuinely affecting performance by Karloff.  After evading police during his first shooting rampage, Bobby plans yet another, this time arriving early at the Reseda Drive-In Theater, eventually wandering to a sniper’s position behind the screen and shooting indiscriminately at cars, apparently attracted to lights, offering him an easy target, turning the evening’s events into utter chaos and bloody mayhem, with Karloff’s film playing on the screen, a symbol of Victorian horror that has been outdated by a prevalence of graphic war and violence imagery, becoming a link to our historical fascination with violence.  Even after the first few shots, the drive-in continues uninterrupted, with business as usual (there is a lovely tribute to another dying breed, the projectionist), as viewers have no idea what’s happening unless a body happens to fall nearby.  Downplaying the victims, always viewed in a detached manner, never accentuating the graphic horror, instead viewers see a collecting body count laying on the ground.  The focus, however, remains the shooter, which is a disturbing aspect of the film, as he’s a blank slate, learning next to nothing about him, seemingly without any real motive, where he could be anybody.  Even 50 years later, this is a difficult film to endure, watching him repeatedly load and reload, accompanied by an incessant sound of gunfire, a reminder of all the senseless shootings, over one-and-a-half million American gun related deaths since the release of the film, more than all those lost in wars since the Revolutionary War, with our nation failing to learn how to prevent these devastatingly traumatic events from happening, where there were more mass shootings than days in 2019, rarely even mentioned on news reports anymore unless they reach epic death count proportions.  What this suggests is that as a nation, we have built up a tolerance for these heinous sorts of activities, where the regular loss of lives is deemed acceptable, not out of the ordinary, requiring no lawful cure or remedy.  This era of filmmaking in the late 60’s and early 70’s opened the floodgates not just to excessive violence permitted onscreen, but an overtly stylized realism, exacerbated by these young American directors who were equally enthralled and fascinated by what they could get away with, which is starkly different than the previous generation.  Later surpassed by Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974) and a host of other films, this film was largely forgotten, drowned out by the mainstream commercial success of The Last Picture Show (1971), placing the director among the Hollywood elite. 

They'll Love Me When I'm Dead

Orson Welles

Orson Welles on the set

Orson Welles on the set with Peter Bogdanovich

Orson Welles on the set with Peter Bogdanovich and John Huston

Orson Welles on the set

Orson Welles with John Huston

Left to right, John Huston, Orson Welles, and Peter Bogdanovich

Left to right, Peter Bogdanovich in shadows, Orson Welles, and John Huston

Left to right, Dennis Hopper, John Ford, and John Huston

Left to right, Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich, and John Huston

Left to right, Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich, Oja Kodar, and Gary Graver

THEY’LL LOVE ME WHEN I’M DEAD               B                    

USA  (98 mi)  2018  d:  Morgan Neville

Struck by the inventiveness of Welles’ own F for Fake (1973), where the director felt he was creating not so much a documentary but a “new kind of film,” Neville modeled this documentary on that film.  Made by the director of 2013 Top Ten List # 8 20 Feet from Stardom, this is equally as entertaining, released on Netflix as an accompaniment to the long unfinished work of Welles, The Other Side of the Wind (2018), which is a histrionic look at what might have been, as it was left to others, namely editor Bob Murawski, to finish what amounted to 100 hours of unedited film and the result is impressive, though likely too avant-garde for a commercial audience and hardly a masterwork worthy of being called a Welles film.  This moody hodgepodge of self-reflective commentary is at the heart of Welles’ film, which is itself an autobiographical documentary on the difficulties of making of a film, largely improvised, shot over five years, where the mirror reflections of what transpired in Welles’ own life trying to complete the film are simply remarkable, as he was never able to complete the film due to a lack of funding, as it completely dried up after the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979, as the primary financier was the Shah’s brother in law, a Paris-based Iranian production operated by Mehdi Boushehri, with the new Iranian regime headed by Ayatollah Khomeini impounding the film along with all assets of the previous regime, and when brought to French court, they ruled that the film was owned by the producer, not the director, and impounded the original negative of the film, locked in a vault, completely inaccessible to Welles during his lifetime (though he smuggled out a print), dying in 1985 prior to completing the film.  When his estranged widow Paola Mori died the following year, the Welles estate was turned over to his daughter Beatrice Welles, and it was up to her to untangle the legal shenanigans that took more than two decades.  Making matters even more difficult, Welles left the controlling rights of all his unfinished film projects to Oja Kodar, his longtime companion, mistress and collaborator who co-wrote and co-starred in The Other Side of the Wind.  The contentious relationship between Oja Kodar and Beatrice Welles (who believed Kodar destroyed her mother’s marriage), each supposedly speaking for the true motives of the infamous director, led to a stalemate and power struggle that prevented any restoration and distribution of the film until Netflix got involved as late as 2017, with the original prints shipped from Paris to Los Angeles for a final restoration more than forty years after the shooting stopped, hiring a post-production team that included Bob Murawski as editor, Scott Millan as sound mixer, and Mo Henry as negative cutter.  Welles himself is seen waxing eloquently about the art of making movies, inspired by his belief in “divine accidents” that inevitably occur, claiming it is the director’s role to manage these unintended consequences.  Welles on camera is always viewed as a larger-than-life, Falstaff-like Shakespearean character with that deep resonant bass voice, a consummate showman, continually hyping a sales pitch for his latest idea or movie, all designed to promote interest in his latest project. 

With the overwhelming success of CITIZEN KANE (1941), many regarding it as the greatest film ever made, Welles was quickly blindsided by the Hollywood power elite who managed to get him sent out of the country as a goodwill ambassador to Brazil at the behest of Nelson Rockefeller, U.S. Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and a principal stockholder in RKO Radio Pictures, shooting a documentary there which produced the beautifully unfinished film IT’S ALL TRUE (1943).  While out of the country his next film was sabotaged, THE MAGNIFICENT ANDERSONS (1942), with the studio heads thinking the ending was too downbeat, so they destroyed the final prints and brought in the actors to reshoot the ending, with the lost footage still the stuff of legends, one of the colossal betrayals in Hollywood history, as no one will ever see the final vision conceived by the artist himself.  This betrayal destroyed whatever future Welles had in Hollywood and was a blow from which he never recovered, exiled to Europe in order to procure financing for his films in the 50’s and 60’s, as money completely dried up in the United States, so it was this film project that lured him back to Los Angeles, spending the last 15 years of his life there obsessed with the making of this film, confident it would resurrect his career and lead to a breakthrough, finally achieving the success he felt he deserved after all these years.  But that envisioned Hollywood ending was not to be, as evidenced by the heartbreak that followed what he thought was a door opening when he was awarded a lifetime achievement award at the American Film Institute in 1975, basking in the limelight of a room filled with stars and the Hollywood elite, receiving a standing ovation, screening two scenes from the film, all but imploring this august group for money to complete the film, but no one offered a penny.  It’s easily the saddest moment of the film, especially since he grew so euphoric at the prospect of a successful return.  The hypocrisy, of course, is that they’d recognize him with an award while still refusing to offer him work, continuing a pattern that existed for thirty years.  Similarly, the ultimate irony is that the prestigiously elite team of Hollywood specialists required to restore this film forty years after his death is way more extravagant than Welles would have required to finish the film himself.  It’s likely sometime late in life that he was alleged to have spoken the words of the film title as a befitting epitaph, as it’s completely in character with his morbid humor.  The clips of Welles that are splintered throughout the film are deliciously revealing, as he’s so in command of being in front of a camera, like a youthfully exuberant ham that never knows when to stop ogling for more laughs, but it shows just how comfortable he is in his own skin.  Revealing more about Welles than any other documentary, this also shows how much we miss him, as he remains curious and constantly inventive, seemingly with so much to offer, yet his life was filled with such disappointment, which may explain why he ballooned in weight in his final years, where the sad and pathetic reality is that his regular source of income was largely accumulated by becoming a pitchman for a variety of TV commercials.         

When Welles concocted his plan to return to America in 1970, Hollywood was changing, as the power of the studios was dissipating and it was becoming a youth market targeting the younger generation, with films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967), MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969),  Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), The Last Movie (1971), or McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), a time when Welles was viewed with reverence in Europe and by this new generation, described as “somewhere between a Zen master and God,” where he should have been welcomed like a conquering hero, as John Huston was with THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975), yet he never completed another picture.  At the time he was living in the Beverly Hills Hotel, which was not concealed from the public, so up and coming cinematographer Gary Graver enthusiastically gave him a call expressing a desire to work with him.  Using a montage of his own collected films, Neville amusingly reassembles his telephone response, giving it a dramatic life or death urgency, testing the young cameraman in his hotel suite, agreeing on the spot to work with him, as he had a reputation for working fast and cheap, which turned into a Mephistophelean deal with the devil, with Graver having no life of his own after that, working with Welles for the next 15 years (the only person to work for both Welles and Ed Wood), ruining his family life by literally being worked to the ground for no pay, going to desperate measures, working in the porn industry under an assumed alias to earn a living, where in a hilarious moment Welles is seen ingeniously helping edit a porn film in order to get Graver back working for him.  Another interesting tidbit is Welles working with the comic impressionist Rich Little on his own television program, becoming enamored with his talent, an odd couple, to be sure, offering him a role in the film that was later filled by American director Peter Bogdanovich, as Little had a small window of opportunity to shoot with no possibility of working beyond a cutoff date, as he had touring commitments.  Welles took a gamble and nearly completed what he needed, but fell short, having to toss all that footage and start all over again with Bogdanovich.  That was really the beginning of the end on this project, as things started taking a turn for the worse.  This documentary, however, is unique in showing plenty of footage of Rich Little on the set that is not present in the film.  Bogdanovich, interestingly, does several impressions of Rich Little doing an impression.  Welles’ connection to Bogdanovich mirrors his own career, as Bogdanovich was the wonder boy whose first film was the highly acclaimed The Last Picture Show (1971), discovering a young 19-year old Cybill Shepherd, having an affair with her, with Welles curiously casting a young teenage blond in his own film meant to resemble her, Cathy Lucas as Mavis Henscher, though embraced by the aging director John Huston who lasciviously takes her under his wing.  Bogdanovich went on to have plenty of success before his career mysteriously fizzled out, exactly like Welles, and hasn’t had a hit movie in decades, though he recently completed a documentary on Buster Keaton, The Great Buster (2018).  It’s sadly curious that in the decade of making this film, both Huston and Bogdanovich were lauded by Hollywood for their work, but Welles was routinely ignored, becoming so desperate for an editing machine that he literally moved into Bogdanovich’s editing studio in the basement of his home, not for three weeks, as was expected, but for three years, happening during a particularly difficult turn in Bogdanovich’s career, becoming a huge strain on their friendship.  Interesting that Bogdanovich began as a young cinephile enthusiast idolizing Welles, recalling the morning Welles called telling him to meet on a roadway next to a runway at the Los Angeles airport, doing Jerry Lewis impressions for him during the shoot, then successfully directing his own films, with Welles moving into his own house in no hurry to move on.  Believing he was creating a masterpiece, though “maybe it’s just people talking about a movie,” the painful legacy of Welles’ film is beautifully detailed in this film, which is easier to follow and arguably much more enjoyable to watch than the doomed picture Welles shot.