The times they were a-changin’ in the
1960s. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho did not feature a foreign monster (no
Dracula vampire with an Eastern European accent or Cold War alien creatures or
Japanese Godzilla.) The audience follows the main character (played by Janet
Leigh) to an American motel where the caretaker Norman Bates appears to be a
mild-mannered young man. Then he stabs the main character to death in a shower.
The camera slowly zooms out of the eye of the beautiful young woman’s corpse.
Norman Bates was inspired by the real-life serial killer Ed Gein, who committed
two ghastly and grisly crimes in Wisconsin in the 1950s. The assassination of
President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 traumatized the nation and the
race riots in 1964 and 1965 showed a conflict and crisis in American society
that could no longer be ignored. After midnight, on August 1, 1966 in Austin,, twenty-five
year old Charles Whitman stabbed his mother and wife and then shortly before
high noon he climbed the stairs of the clock tower at the University of Texas
campus and murdered multiple victims by firing at them with his sniper rifle
until he was shot by police officers.
Twenty-eight year old Peter Bogdanovich
had been obsessed with cinema his entire life. He wrote film criticism for
various magazines and had also been a movie programmer at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York City. He had left NYC for L.A. because he no longer wanted to
only write about films. He wanted to be a director. Yet it was his writing that
gave him his first directing job. Roger Corman had read an article Peter
Bogdanovich had written for Esquire, and the two of them discussed
filmmaking when they met at a screening. Corman gave Bogdanovich complete
creative control over his directorial debut, with one exception. He had to use
the actor Boris Karloff and footage from the film The Terror.
Bogdanovich had been deeply disturbed by Charles Whitman’s mass shooting and
felt compelled to write a screenplay based on the event. How would he
incorporate Boris Karloff into this story? Karloff had been the iconic face of
horror in Hollywood history. His foreign facial features and voice had
frightened American audiences. The 1930s - 1950s was an era when America’s
deepest fears were of foreign enemies. The 1960s altered audiences’ views. Lee
Harvey Oswald was American. Charles Whitman was American. The enemy was no
longer foreign. The enemy was within American society.
Bogdanovich named his directorial debut
with the stark title Targets. He co-wrote the screenplay with his wife
Polly Platt. He was against his directorial debut being released by American
International Pictures. Bogdanovich wanted it to be distributed by a company
with historical significance. He sold the movie to Paramount. They had Boris
Karloff for five days and a shooting schedule of twenty-three days. They juxtaposed
two plotlines. In the first plotline, Boris Karloff plays Byron Orlok (a nod to
Nosferatu), an aging horror movie star who wants to retire, which
outrages the company who want him to make more films. Karloff was seventy-nine
years old when production on Targets started in 1967. He felt
rejuvenated by the opportunity to play a character that was a deviation from his
usual appearances in the horror genre. This was a character that had nuances
and was realistic. Karloff’s performance is wistful and wry, which fits his
character who is reflecting on the course of his career. Bogdanovich’s
performance is appropriately anxious and nervous as he plays himself, a cinephile
who has suddenly been thrown into the management position of his first major
motion picture. Bogdanovich plays (Sammy Michaels), a young director who is
both optimistic about Orlok (he believes the script he has written will be
Orlok’s best and most complex character) and skeptical about the state of the
movie business (“All the good movies have been made.â€) Bogdanovich had a high
opinion of Karloff and was nostalgic for Old Hollywood. This becomes clear in
several scenes. Karloff and Bogdanovich watch a sinister scene together from The
Criminal Code and Bogdanovich praises his performance. Bogdanovich and the
hippie radio DJs (whom he satirizes as absolutely absurd in their lack of
serious questions for Karloff) gather around and listen to Karloff’s hypnotic, mesmerizing
voice as he recites the ancient fable of the Appointment in Samarra which symbolizes the inescapability of
death. This fable doubles as an epitaph for Karloff’s career (Targets was
his last major role in an American film) and as a commentary on the mass
shootings in American society. Bogdanovich also uses dialogue he wrote for
Karloff as a commentary on the changing attitude to the horror genre (“You know
what they call my films today? Camp! High camp!â€) and on Bogdanovich’s own
perspective of Hollywood and L.A. in the 1960s (“what an ugly town this has
become.â€)
In sport
people represent their countries. In
music it seems, Elvis Presley was and is still, now more than ever, everything America represents. He optimized the
‘American Dream’ but the tale of the man who changed not only music but culture
forever, plays out more like a Greek tragedy than an American classic.
There have
been many great documentaries on Elvis but few have matched the scope of “The King†mainly because its tapestry onto
which Elvis was sewn is America itself. Both follow similar paths.
There’s a
moment when Ethan Hawke, one of the many key figures in this film says “when my
grandfather was alive, America’s greatest export was agriculture. By the time
my father grew up it was entertainmentâ€. This one line sums up the entire
film. Elvis, like America, started off with humble beginnings and worked hard
to reap the harvest that the dry soils and endless toil could produce. When the Presleys lived in Tupelo
they didn’t have a cent to pay their bills and Elvis’s father was incarcerated
for changing the value of a check in the hope of buying a few weeks extra food. The analogy
of Elvis’s life and America’s own growth in the boom during the post-WW2 world
go hand in hand; from the lean to the bloated. Elvis grew up in Memphis, a
cultural melting pot and there is good reason to say that if the Presleys
hadn’t moved here, then the world would never have heard of Elvis and Rock ‘n
Roll as we know it would never have happened. When record mogul Sam Phillips
said “If I had a white boy that sounded black I could make a million dollarsâ€
he wasn’t white-washing music as some people allude to here. What he was hoping
for was that he could find a singer who could break down barriers and introduce
the world to a new sound, based on old Delta blues, the definitive American musical heritage. In Elvis, Phillips found
the perfect mix of beauty and danger, sweat and cologne and more importantly,
black and white. The stars and indeed, the stripes, were aligned right
there in the tiny Sun studio in Memphis with Elvis simply tearing up the rule
book and playing the music he and Sam loved and admired. It changed music
forever.
Chuck D,
another key figure in the documentary does his usual “Elvis stole from the
black artists†monologue but did he really? Did he not merely celebrate it and
introduce it to others as anyone wants to do when they fall in love with
something or someone? Would the world have even heard of Little Richard or
Chuck Berry or Fats Domino, great artists in their own right, if Elvis hadn’t
kicked down the doors that taste and indeed racial boundaries had kept
segregated up to that point? Elvis took the choice
to spend his childhood in Gospel churches and his teens in predominately black
areas such as Beale Street where BB King played. Thus, I find Chuck D’s diatribe
all a bit tiresome these days and think that he will be more famous for his
line “Elvis was a hero for some but meant shit to me†from Fight The Power rather than any of his other contributions to
music. If only James Brown or Jackie Wilson, who were there first hand and knew
Elvis, were still around to clarify it all. However, it’s the link between
Memphis and Elvis that again sums up the analogy that Presley was the spark
that lit the fuse, the plunger to the dynamite that enabled the great Memphis music
explosion that followed, both culturally and racially. Memphis was, like the
country itself, a place of extremes. Not only is it the birthplace of Sun and
Stax Records, two of the studios that made some of the greatest music the world
has ever heard, it was also the place where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, the
shining light who broke down political racial barriers in the way Elvis had
done musically, was assassinated. Memphis is America in a nutshell and when
Memphis burned in the riots of the 1960’s, both Sun & Stax were left
standing. There may have been war on the streets but the places where entertainment
emanated from still stood tall and unscathed, their neon still flickering and lighting
up the night long after the flames had turned to ash.
It is the
parallels between Elvis and America that make this such a fascinating
documentary and so it’s strange that Elvis seems to have lost himself to the
entertainment industry he optimized. He was the Dr. Frankenstein who couldn’t
control or gain the respect of the monster he’d help create. In parallel
worlds, while Elvis suffered through those ‘60’s movies, American youth
suffered to a far greater extent through Vietnam. The 1970s brought the soul-draining
Vegas years for the singer while America itself took a long hard look in the
mirror when the Watergate scandal broke. Both brought artist and country to
their knees.