Forgotten at Oscar Time

For years I've been screaming at my TV set whenever the yearly crop of Oscar nominations and eventual winners are announced. For there is almost always a list of performers and artists whose work continues to go unrecognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The lack of a nomination for Tim Burton in the Best Director category at this year's awards for his critically acclaimed work on "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber or Fleet Street" comes to mind. But through the years I've also pondered how certain films and performances from the past were neglected by the Academy as well. I'm sure politics and outside forces played their parts equally in the past as they still do today, but I still find it amazing sometimes that certain performers and certain films went virtually unnoticed at Oscar-time.

One such performance and film that comes to mind, is Boris Karloff in the 1968 film "Targets." Made by Roger Corman's 1960s low-budget film company and directed by Peter Bogdanovich in his debut as a director, the story of how the film came to be is as almost as interesting as the movie itself. Bogdanovich had worked previously with Corman as a writer on two earlier films, when the producer offered the young talent a chance at directing a feature. Karloff had owed Corman two-days of work as an actor, and the producer was determined to get his money's worth. He proposed to Bogdanovich that he write a script utilizing Karloff for the two-days of filming, and then splice in unused footage of the horror star from a recent Karloff/Corman collaboration "The Terror" and then shoot an hour of new footage without Karloff and somehow find a way to tie it all together and make a new Karloff Picture! Bogdanovich jumped at the chance to direct and then went about the task of writing this puzzle of a picture with his then wife, Polly Platt. And what Bogdanovich and Platt came up with was not only brilliant considering the filming conditions just described, but also a suspenseful tension-filled 90 minutes in the dark with an understated, yet towering performance by the film's legendary star.

Karloff basically plays himself as an aging out-of-fashion horror star from the past named Byron Orlok, who has announced his retirement from movies, since the violence in the real world around him has far exceeded the horrors he is famous for portraying on screen. Bogdanovich cuts back and forth from Karloff's exit from the big-screen to a young all-American boy gone bad (based on the Charles Whitman shootings at the University of Texas) as he slowly and methodically kills his family and others for no apparent reason at all. The long slow tracking shots, the use of natural sound with no music score (all brilliantly edited by Verna Fields) gives Targets a slightly documentary feel that would later figure greatly into the films of the 1970s. The uneasiness of the shooter scenes are at time absolutely chilling as in the end, when Bogdanovich finds a way to bring Karloff and the young assassin together for the films climax. Karloff again proves his weight in gold in the final scene, as he does throughout the entire film. It is here that I found myself wondering why his performance went unnoticed by the Academy in 1968. But, as Bogdanovich would later tell that even after the film was picked-up by Paramount Pictures for release (normally all Corman produced films were distributed through the low-budget AIP), it failed at the box-office probably due to the recent assassinations of both MLK and RFK. If the film were made today, any aging actor playing the Orlock role would no doubt get a nomination out of sympathy as often older actors do these days, but back in '68 it would have been genuinely deserved. It would have been nice if the man who created one of the most enduring images in film history had been recognized by the industry for such a valedictorian exit.