Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I GENRE
- 1 The Future Catches Up with the Past: Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets
- 2 Surrealism and Sudden Death in the Films of Lucio Fulci
- 3 Flash Gordon and the 1930s and ’40s Science Fiction Serial
- 4 Just the Facts, Man: The Complicated Genesis of Television’s Dragnet
- 5 The Disquieting Aura of Fabián Bielinsky
- PART II HISTORY
- 6 Fast Worker: The Films of Sam Newfield
- 7 The Power of Resistance: Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
- 8 Beyond Characterization: Performance in 1960s Experimental Cinema
- 9 Vanishing Point: The Last Days of Film
- PART III INTERVIEWS
- 10 “Let the Sleepers Sleep and the Haters Hate”: An Interview with Dale “Rage” Resteghini
- 11 Margin Call: An Interview with J. C. Chandor
- 12 “All My Films Are Personal”: An Interview with Pat Jackson
- 13 Working Within the System: An Interview with Gerry O’Hara
- 14 Andrew V. McLaglen: Last of the Hollywood Professionals
- 15 Pop Star, Director, Actor: An Interview with Michael Sarne
- Works Cited and Consulted
- About the Author
- Index
1 - The Future Catches Up with the Past: Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I GENRE
- 1 The Future Catches Up with the Past: Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets
- 2 Surrealism and Sudden Death in the Films of Lucio Fulci
- 3 Flash Gordon and the 1930s and ’40s Science Fiction Serial
- 4 Just the Facts, Man: The Complicated Genesis of Television’s Dragnet
- 5 The Disquieting Aura of Fabián Bielinsky
- PART II HISTORY
- 6 Fast Worker: The Films of Sam Newfield
- 7 The Power of Resistance: Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
- 8 Beyond Characterization: Performance in 1960s Experimental Cinema
- 9 Vanishing Point: The Last Days of Film
- PART III INTERVIEWS
- 10 “Let the Sleepers Sleep and the Haters Hate”: An Interview with Dale “Rage” Resteghini
- 11 Margin Call: An Interview with J. C. Chandor
- 12 “All My Films Are Personal”: An Interview with Pat Jackson
- 13 Working Within the System: An Interview with Gerry O’Hara
- 14 Andrew V. McLaglen: Last of the Hollywood Professionals
- 15 Pop Star, Director, Actor: An Interview with Michael Sarne
- Works Cited and Consulted
- About the Author
- Index
Summary
Targets are people … and you could be one of them!
(Tagline for Targets)Peter Bogdanovich got his start as a critic and historian, conducting interviews with some of cinema's most illustrious directors in their twilight years and publishing them first in a variety of books and magazines, then as a collection in his 1998 volume Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors. Bogdanovich realized early on, however, that these interviews were not enough; he wanted to do more. So he moved to Los Angeles, fell in with the Roger Corman circle at the height of its creative brilliance and soon found himself working on such landmark exploitation vehicles as The Wild Angels (1966), doing double duty as an assistant director and an extra.
After this, the next logical step was directing a movie himself and Corman – then able to green light films with modest budgets that would actually wind up in a theater as opposed to going straight to tape, VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray or VOD – famously offered Bogdanovich a deal. The actor Boris Karloff, famous for his roles in the Frankenstein films, owed Corman two days of work on a multipicture deal and Corman offered the fledgling director these two days with Karloff, twenty minutes of footage from the recently completed film The Terror (1963, ostensibly a Corman film, but one which nearly everyone in Corman's circle – including Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill and Jack Nicholson – had a hand in directing), a minimal budget and a shooting schedule. Corman told Bogdanovich that if the finished film was any good he’d distribute it through Paramount; if not, he’d dump it in drive-ins through American International Pictures.
Absorbing this, Bogdanovich went home and, working with his then-wife, Polly Platt, and an uncredited Samuel Fuller, who contributed considerably to the final script, drafted a screenplay about the last days of an aging horror star, Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff) who wants to quit the business because he's sick of starring in one rotten horror film after another. Orlok feels that his brand of Gothicism has become outdated and that he should exit gracefully while he's still in demand.
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- Cinema at the Margins , pp. 3 - 10Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2013