Movies - Targets

	Movies - Targets

Targets (1968) is a film written, produced and directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Bogdanovich got the chance to make Targets because Boris Karloff owed studio head Roger Corman three days' work. Corman told Bogdanovich he could make any film he liked provided he used Karloff and stayed under budget. In addition, Bogdanovich had to use clips from the Victorian-era thriller The Terror
in the movie. The clips from The Terror feature Jack Nicholson and Boris Karloff. Bogdanovich has said that Samuel Fuller provided generous help on the screenplay and refused to accept either a fee or a screen credit, so Bogdanovich named his own character Sammy Michaels (Fuller's middle name was Michael) in tribute.

The story concerns an insurance agent and Vietnam veteran, played by Tim O'Kelly, who goes on a shooting rampage at a Los Angeles drive-in theater where an aging horror film actor is making a final promotional appearance. The character and actions of the killer are patterned after Charles Whitman, the University of Texas sniper. The character of the actor is patterned after Boris Karloff, who in fact plays the part in his last appearance in a major film. In the finale, Karloff (the old-fashioned, traditional monster who always obeyed the rules) confronts the new, late-1960s monster in the shape of a clean-cut, junior Republican multiple murderer.

Although the film was written and production photography completed in 1967, it was released after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy and thus had some topical relevance to then-current events. Nevertheless it was not very successful at the box office.

However, Bogdanovich, who appears in the film as a young writer-director (i.e. like Karloff, playing a character very similar to himself in real life) credits it with getting him noticed by the studios, which in turn led to his directing three very successful films in the early 1970s.

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Movies - Targets

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