#post screening

March 3, 2000

Aaliyah attends the 'Romeo Must Die' Post-Screening dinner @ Mr. Chows iconic New York Restaurant. Mr. Chows was a popular restaurant for Beijing cuisine with dishes ranging from $14.00 to $80 USD.

I wonder what dish Aaliyah picked?

Peter Bogdanovich’s Directorial debut TARGETS (1968, Paramount) and Larry Peerce’s big budget thriller TWO-MINUTE WARNING (1976, Universal) 

Targets begins with an end credit. It is a film debut unlike many others, confident and calibrated, but still with plenty of room for play. The first of these players we meet is an old familiar face, Boris Karloff, here playing the clumsily named role of Byron Orlok, a worn-out but certainly not washed-up mirror image of himself. This flick is hyper-meta, and we not only get Karloff ruminating on his legacy as the various ‘monsters of filmland’, but also youthful director Peter Bogdanovich himself, playing a petulant upstart filmmaker with a great new script but a reluctant elder star. It’s incredible how natural Bogdanovich is in front of the camera and how frank Karloff is behind the rookie filmmaker’s poignant words. The opening of the film sets up the fascinating behind-the-scenes tale of the movie that almost wasn’t: a tired Karloff re-tread produced by Roger Corman and given new life by Bogdanovich and his then-wife/collaborator Polly Platt (also the Production Designer on the film). Karloff’s Orlok cringe-watches the film that might have been from the darkness of an executive screening room in an act of cinematic doubling that becomes a theme within the film: actors watch themselves act, and directors watch themselves direct, fully in conversation with the past as if there is no doubt of their place in film history. Despite his thespian-laden doubts, Karloff has certainly earned this level of assured introspection, but what about newcomer Bogdanovich? Where does he get off making a movie this good—and knowing it too! 

The film’s exciting Drive-In movie climax (in Reseda) is cinematic gold, and its trappings should be very familiar to fans of the New Bev’s foot-loving benefactor Mr. Tarantino, right down to the voice of the local DJ coming from the car stereo. In this terrific third act, we get Orlok at the drive-in, watching himself in a movie starring Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson. Behind the screen, firing through a tiny hole in the film image is Targets’ malicious sharpshooter, a disturbed and dissatisfied young man picking off filmgoers in the dark. That is, until Orlok’s pretty young assistant gets hit. The moments-from-retirement Orlok strides up to the shooter, fed up, ignoring all dangers. He takes a bullet-grazing shot to the side of the face like a champ, cane-whips the gun out of the sniper’s hand and proceeds to bitch slap the trigger-happy serial killer across the face until he slumps pathetically to the floor and curls up into a fetal ball. We know from his later feature What’s Up, Doc? that Bogdanovich is a big fan of Bugs Bunny tropes so the comedic nature of the gesture here feels intentional, but also earned. Somehow, Bogdanovich has managed to tie this all together, the failed gothic horror picture, the timely exposé on wonton gun violence in America, the complex angst of a typecast movie star weighing the artistic merit of a long and unchallenging career. It all somehow works, and by the end of it, we feel completely sure that Orlok is a worthy enough action hero. Better yet, Bogdanovich has made him into what contemporaries of Karloff and the actor himself always dreamed of: a leading man. This feels like Ed Wood + Bela Lugosi, Tim Burton + Vincent Price. Bogdanovich + Karloff as a duo landed on the silver screen first, and they’re definitely a thing. It’s the kind of rehabilitation of a Hollywood legend that would become the driving force behind many of Tarantino’s own future casting choices. It feels appropriate to be watching this movie here at the Bev, where these cinematic references and inspirations can come full circle and pay homage to one another. Bogdanovich and Platt really nail it with this one. Targets hits right on the mark.

Two-Minute Warning, much like Dirty Harry five years earlier, begins with a cold and calculated long-distance murder of a random innocent set to a groovy 1970s score. Just a warmup for our highly organized killer. Here, tv composer Charles Fox is no Lalo Schifrin, but he nonetheless manages to conjure up one of the coolest and creepiest musical motifs of the decade with the sniper killer’s ominous (proto Law & Order) theme set to some impressive POV steadicam shots that rival the eeriness of Halloween 1978’s infamous opening. Peerce’s oversized mainstream blockbuster of a film is a swollen, star-studded spectacle and likely a logistical nightmare. The true intentions of the soon-to-be mass murderer at the center of this picture are never fully revealed, but his plans at least involve claiming a marksman’s perch atop the scoreboard at the LA Coliseum during a Super Bowl game and towards the end of the match opening fire. Why does he wait so long? Who are his targets? These questions preoccupy the law enforcement heavies in the film played by Charlton Heston and John Cassavetes, but as an audience, you’re not prepared for the grim reality that there may be no such answers. The situation just is what it is, no one knows how it started, some may think they know how it ends. But Two-Minute Warning works on you, like a seasoned boxer going for your gut up against the ropes, knowing he’s got a helluva knockout punch waiting around for just the right moment. The directing is tight, meticulous, and explosive, carving out intimate portraits from within the endless marble of crowd shots in a straightforward style of filmmaking that is reminiscent of Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped or Pickpocket. The pacing here is methodical, literally edge-of-your-seat, making it one of the most suspenseful and thrilling of the big disaster movies I’ve ever seen. An almost unseemly amount of screen time is given to developing a bevy of ancillary characters whose importance to the plot we assume will ultimately be revealed. But this never happens. And what could be more authentic and diabolical than reminding us watching that there often are no recognizable patterns or obvious connections between killer and victims. This guy wasn’t sent here by anyone. He came here to kill, and to chew Baby Ruth candy bars (bizarrely, a confectionery predilection shared by the killers in BOTH films). The fact that we have spent so much time getting to know these characters has meant nothing extraordinary beyond the fact that they were all people and they were all killed, and that makes us feel something, precisely because of their mundanity, regardless of how we might have felt about them as individuals. 

Here, unlike Targets, there are very few attempts at humanizing the killer, who John Cassavetes’ hard-boiled SWAT character Sgt. Chris Button calls a “freak” (read: queer). More money = less nuance. And when you consider the film’s message in conversation with its other leading man, long-time champion of the NRA Heston, it becomes clear that this mainstream blockbuster, while technically exceptional, has less to say on the subject of prevention. How are people like this made? Where do they come from? When and how do they ultimately snap? The killer’s last, breathy dying––and in fact, only––words in the film offer precious little clues, but seem to validate Sgt. Button’s assumption: “Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me.”

As you may have already predicted, there was a noticeable lack of strong female characters in both of these films, but also amongst the crowd that came out to see them. To my surprise, however, the projectionist that night was indeed a young female and I was delighted to overhear her giddy experience of showing the pictures, particularly Targets, which features the brutal on-screen murder of a film projectionist. That death in particular felt so taboo in a place like the New Beverly that I expected its loyal audience to boo loudly and protest against such a ‘crime against cinema’. Well, despite her apprehension during the scene in question, the projectionist did a fantastic job and the studio prints that night looked sparkling and luminous. 

In the end, in terms of their relationship to the topic of gun control, Targets leaves you with the following impression: ‘Actors don’t retire’ and ‘guns are for cowards’. Two Minute Warning leaves you with: “Of course we’ve got a lunatic with a rifle, but why on a Sunday?!”