No Sense Makes Sense: Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets
Posted in Films, Retrovirus, Underground/Cult |By Less Lee Moore
“My father is the jailhouse. My father is your system. . . I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you.”
—From the testimony of Charles Manson in the Tate-LaBianca murder trial, November 20, 1970
The thrill that’ll getcha
when you get your picture…
Targets was filmed in April 1967, but its release was delayed to August 1968 because director Peter Bogdanovich couldn’t find a distributor and because Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated the next year. Paramount Pictures felt there were too many real-life deaths confronting Americans to justify putting Targets in front of audiences. These two deaths were not the only ones to affect the film.
Student protests of the Vietnam War began in 1963, although the U.S. bombing and subsequent deployment of troops didn’t begin until March 1965. Within a year of U.S. entrance into the war, Gallup indicated that 41% of pollsters thought the government was doing a good job, as opposed to 48% the previous year. (1)
On July 14, 1966, alcoholic high-school dropout Richard Speck murdered eight student nurses in Chicago, Illinois. Speck, who attempted suicide in the hotel where he’d been hiding out, was brought to a hospital, where a doctor recognized his “Born To Raise Hell” tattoo from news reports and called the police. (2)
The most significant event affecting Targets took place on August 1, 1966, when University of Texas student Charles Whitman murdered his wife and mother, and then, from the top of the observation deck of the University’s Main Building, shot and killed 14 people and wounded 31 others before being gunned down by Austin police. (3)
Charles Whitman on the
cover of Time, August 1966
It was this deadly rampage that inspired Targets. This and the fact that film legend Boris Karloff owed horror movie director Roger Corman two days of shooting time and Corman serendipitously bequeathed the proceeds of this debt on to Peter Bogdanovich.
Targets is not a horror movie although it depicts horror in the face of senseless violence. Other acclaimed films of the time, like Bonnie and Clyde, delight in orgies of bloody excess. The horror we experience in Targets is not gratuitous but is still a reflection of the times, including Hollywood itself.
The land of pretend was experiencing genuine upheaval through the disintegration of the studio system and the Hays Code, both of which had dominated since the late 1920s. Targets explores the conflict between old and new Hollywood through the characters of Byron Orlock and Sammy Michaels. Both are representations of the actors who portray them. Boris Karloff plays Orlock, an aging star who thinks he’s a relic among modern movies. Bogdanovich plays Michaels, a writer-director who wants to resuscitate Orlock’s career as Orlock himself is trying to end it.
Michaels is an embodiment of the new era of filmmaking but, like Bogdanovich, he’s in love with the old days. In one scene, we watch Orlok and Michaels watching Howard Hawks’ The Criminal Code on late-night TV, a movie starring Karloff as the heavy.
Michaels looks depressed and says, “All of the good movies have been made.” In the DVD commentary Bogdanovich admits this line of dialogue was adlibbed, but laughs and says that’s how he felt at the time and in fact, still does. Additionally, the Hawks scene foreshadows the climax of Targets: a confrontation between Orlok and antagonist Bobby Thompson. In doing this, Targets blurs the line between fantasy and reality, a motif that continues throughout the film.