have to level with you: this was a bit of a ruse. In truth, I had loved his movies for years, and I simply wanted to talk about them with him. My mind was overflowing with questions: How did he cajole Ben Johnson into taking the part of Sam the Lion in The Last Picture Show? Why did he open Paper Moon with a close-up of its young star, Tatum O’Neal? Was it just the way I saw it, or was They All Laughed more personal—more him—than anything else he’d ever done? If the only way I could ask him these (and many other) questions was by becoming a professional journalist and talking my way into an assignment to write an article about his work—well, so be it.
Let’s face facts: I began writing about movies in the hope that my job would one day give me an excuse to talk to Peter Bogdanovich. There are worse reasons to select an occupation, right?
I was, to put it bluntly, a fan—but if you knew all that I did, you would be, too. What was there not to like? Following his detours in print and on stage, Bogdanovich jumped into moviemaking with gusto, and he met with such instantaneous success—laudatory reviews, big box office—that it was as though the public and industry had been waiting for him. What took you so long? they might have been asking.
By 1971, when The Last Picture Show was released, it had been a rough few years for anyone who prized classical filmmaking and its attendant virtues. Tapping into the antiestablishment mood of some in the country, films such as Midnight Cowboy and Woodstock seemed to be multiplying—like a virus. For all their differences, they had much in common: they were morally incoherent and visually ugly, bearing scant relation to the art form built by the likes of D. W. Griffith, John Ford, and Orson Welles.
Into this noxious environment stepped Peter Bogdanovich, and the contrast could not have been more striking. Pauline Kael was never his most sympathetic critic, but she got one big thing right. “He has a real gift for simple, popular movies,” she wrote. “He can tell basic stories that will satisfy a great many people, and this is not a common gift.”4 Introducing Bogdanovich’s book Pieces of Time, Harold Hayes quoted a studio executive expressing a similar sentiment: “People don’t want to be reminded of their problems. They want to be diverted and entertained. They want a Paper Moon by Bogdanovich, not a reprise on the tragedy of Bobby Kennedy.”5
Recognizing an ally, veteran directors saw that Peter Bogdanovich was part of their tradition—“one of us,” as the cabal in Tod Browning’s great horror film Freaks says. But these were no freaks—these were the normal people, and Bogdanovich joined their ranks eagerly. He became a friend to Ford and Welles and many others, and the only thing that stood in the way of an apprenticeship with Griffith was that the maker of Intolerance and Broken Blossoms had died in 1948, when the future filmmaker was nine. Bad timing.
Director George Stevens, he said, sought him out and gave him a pat on the back: “You know what it’s about. These guys don’t know what it’s about. That’s why we need you.”6 Well, George Stevens wasn’t D. W. Griffith, but, still, he was the man who had made Shane and Giant and A Place in the Sun. “These guys” meant, of course, Bogdanovich’s peers—those much-honored filmmakers who emerged at about the same time he did, including Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and William Friedkin—but the most honest of them knew that Stevens spoke the truth. “The last person to make classical American cinema was Peter,” Scorsese said. “To really utilize the wide frame and the use of the deep focal length. He really understood it.”7 Observed writer Judy Stone in the New York Times in 1968: “Peter is under 30, but he doesn’t identify with his own generation.”8
Howard Hawks immodestly pointed out that Bogdanovich, in his capacity as a journalist, “sat on my set for two and a half years and on Ford’s for two and a half years, so he learned a few things.”9 Yes, yes, Howard—he had studied well. But he also benefitted from a more hands-on opportunity that presented itself soon after he made it to California with Polly Platt: he was brought on as an assistant on Roger Corman’s low-budget biker film The Wild Angels. So when Corman—as a kind of thank-you present—told Bogdanovich that could direct a movie, Bogdanovich was raring to go.
Rebellion was in the air in 1968, and it usually took the form of the young rising up against the old. In his debut film, Targets, Peter Bogdanovich reversed the equation, pitting a chivalrous senior citizen against a murderous postadolescent.
The hero of the story is Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff), a star of antediluvian horror epics. As the film opens, we find Orlok watching his current effort (actually recut scenes from the Karloff flick The Terror) in a dingy screening room in downtown Los Angeles. With its shots of crows shrieking and floods washing away damsels in distress, what we see of The Terror looks remarkably démodé, and by the time it is all over, Orlok—sitting stoop-shouldered in the third row—has decided to call it a career. With murder and mayhem having become daily realities, who in their right mind would be spooked by such stuff?
Before Orlok can slink away into the night, however, he has to answer to Sammy Michaels (expertly played by Bogdanovich), a greenhorn writer-director with whom he had promised to collaborate on a future project. Sammy implores Orlok to think twice about hanging it up, but Orlok refuses to budge. In their stubbornness, however, they prove themselves to be two of a kind: with his conservative dress and respectful manner, Sammy looks as out of place as Orlok in the Southern California of the late 1960s. About the worst you can say about Sammy is that he rudely tells Orlok to hush when the two find themselves watching one of Orlok’s old films on television (another Karloff project—this one, though, far more creditable than The Terror: Howard Hawks’s top-notch thriller The Criminal Code).
The character of Sammy makes for a ready-made contrast to Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly), a Vietnam veteran who, apropos of nothing, morphs into a serial killer. Like Sammy, Bobby is in his late twenties and sports a clean-cut appearance, but in every other way he is Sammy’s shadow. A dim fellow with a toothy, heartless smile, we first see him as he purchases munitions at a gun store across the street from the screening room where Orlok and Sammy haggle. Orlok goes out of his way to call Sammy “a sweet boy,” and one glimpse of Bobby explains why: in the world of Targets, civility and virtue are rare qualities indeed.
Yet the screenplay (written by Bogdanovich and Polly Platt, with uncredited rewrites courtesy of Samuel Fuller) avoids pinning Bobby’s crimes on his war experience. After all, unlike many of his comrades, Bobby has returned home in one piece and seemingly none the worse for wear. What—we might ask—does he have to complain about? His placid family life is also exempted from blame: the single-story suburban house he shares with his parents and wife may be bland and uninviting, but so are many other houses, and few of them incubate mass murderers. “We tried to avoid a specific reason,” Bogdanovich told Judy Stone. “We did a lot of research, and the most terrifying aspect of these crimes is that there is no answer. We can find no reason commensurate with the size of the crime.”10 Yet the not-so-subtle suggestion in Targets is that culture makes the difference: Sammy, with his appreciation of old movies, has it, whereas Bobby, forever gobbling Baby Ruths and listening to rock music, does not.
Bobby and Orlok encounter each other at the drive-in theater at which Orlok is to put in an appearance before sailing to retirement in England. Mayhem ensues when Bobby makes targets of those in the audience. With the police nowhere to be found, it is left to Orlok—unarmed and in a tuxedo—to confront Bobby. We suspect that their encounter will end in a blaze of bullets, but the film has a more clever—and more pointed—resolution in store for us. Cornered in a dark spot beneath the screen, Bobby sees Orlok loping toward him but becomes disoriented when he looks up to see a similar image of Orlok in The Terror. In his confusion, Bobby is left defenseless when Orlok approaches and slaps his face—an opprobrium far more humiliating than losing a gunfight. Bobby drops his rifle and curls up in a fetal position. Only a figure as virtuous as Byron Orlok could vanquish
