Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [22]
PETER BOGDANOVICH, the critic, cinephile, and aspiring auteur, was sitting at home in Los Angeles watching television when the news broke that Martin Luther King Jr. was dead. Staring at the screen dumbfounded, he figured this was the end of his movie. He had recently finished his debut, Targets, which juxtaposes the story of the retirement of a fading horror movie star with that of a Vietnam veteran who randomly guns down audiences at a drive-in. American International Pictures turned it down because the idea of a movie about a sniper at a drive-in seemed like a preposterous thing to screen at drive-in theaters. Bogdanovich sent the reel to Robert Evans, who picked up the movie for Paramount. “[After the assassination] half the studio wanted to kill it,” Bogdanovich says, “and the other half wanted to release it immediately.”
Paramount ended up releasing it but on only a few screens, adding a self-serious disclaimer about the importance of gun control. After the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the country was traumatized by the prospect of mysterious killers in the crowd. Targets, an almost clinical portrait of a killer that anticipated movies like Taxi Driver, did nothing to help people looking for answers. With a chillingly matter-of-fact style, the movie followed the sniper as he bought his bullets, practiced his shot, kissed his mother, cheerily chatted at the dinner table, and went about the mundane task of preparing to commit his heinous crimes. It was not a hit, but Targets was a fresh, incisive horror movie that anticipated the future of the genre in some ways even more than Rosemary’s Baby and Night of the Living Dead.
Unlike Romero, Bogdanovich refused to obey the convention to explain the monster. The reason, again, had to do with Psycho. Bogdanovich, an admirer of Hitchcock, disliked the end of Psycho so much that he revolted against it.
Bogdanovich was one of the great talkers of the movie generation. To him, you were defined not by what you said but by what movies you liked. Or more specifically, which directors you worshipped. He wrote long essays on their work for the Museum of Modern Art and film magazines. “All the great movies have been made,” he was fond of saying, a line that found its way into his first movie. As for horror movies, well, they were a way to get into the business, nothing more.
As a child, Bogdanovich was bored by Dracula and Frankenstein. After attending the first press screening of Psycho in 1960, Bogdanovich stumbled out of the midtown theater near noon thoroughly rattled. “I felt raped,” he says. Half a year later, he bumped into Alfred Hitchcock and told him that the movie was one of his worst. The master told him that he didn’t get the joke. Bogdanovich not only thought horror movies were dumb, but the way they glamorized violence bothered him. “I was convinced that violent movies do have an impact on people,” Bogdanovich says. That didn’t stop him from doing what so many hungry young exploitable men in a hurry did: he moved to Los Angeles and made a violent horror movie for Roger Corman.
Corman, a trim, perpetually youthful optimist in a business full of dour shysters, may not have been the best moviemaker of the fifties and sixties, but he was almost certainly the fastest. Along with William Castle, a frequent tennis partner, he flooded the American horror market with cheap, quick shockers that exploited the rich vein of anxiety surrounding the teenage years. Castle specialized in a camp sense of humor, and Herschell Gordon Lewis relied on a willingness to show everything. Corman, by contrast, had artistic pretensions, but he usually kept them to himself. His directors were not auteurs. They were hired help, working on a budget. So even though Bogdanovich had made no films, he let him work on a biker picture and then gave him the chance to work on his own movie—as long as he lived up to a few conditions.
First: He needed to use twenty minutes