The random film of the day, drawn on October 6, was Targets (1968), Peter Bogdanovich’s directorial debut, starring Boris Karloff. The listing synopsis recounts the plot: an aging horror actor decides to retire, while in parallel a quiet young man begins shooting people, and the two storylines converge in the finale.
But something else is more interesting here. In the film, Karloff does not merely play a horror actor—he plays himself, a man named Byron Orlok, who announces his retirement and goes to greet the public one last time at a drive-in theater. The question worth asking is: who exactly had an interest in seeing the old monster star leave before the eyes of an audience? The answer turned out to be accounting.
It all began with a debt.
By 1967, Boris Karloff, nearly eighty, owed producer Roger Corman two days of work—the remainder from The Terror (1963). Corman did not like writing off debts and came up with a way to use the material: he offered his assistant Peter Bogdanovich a feature film on three conditions. First: shoot Karloff, but for only two days. Second: insert roughly twenty minutes of already-shot footage from The Terror into the finished film—it cut costs. Third: stay within a budget of around $130,000 and come up with the remaining forty minutes from whatever he could find.
Bogdanovich and his wife, production designer and story co-author Polly Platt, watched the footage and found a problem. The Terror is period Gothic about a vampire baron, and no amount of editing would make it grow into a contemporary thriller. The solution came from desperation: let the film begin with Karloff watching The Terror in a screening room—and when the lights come up, he announces that it is the worst picture he has ever seen. Thus a limitation became a story about an old man leaving the movies.
Filming ran from November 27 to December 15, 1967, in Los Angeles; interiors were shot on makeshift sets in a lumber warehouse on Santa Monica Boulevard. Corman sold the completed picture to Paramount for $150,000—meaning he was already in profit before the film even reached theaters.
One storyline was not enough. At first they discussed a version in which Karloff played an actor who turns out to be a serial killer himself, but the idea went nowhere. Then Platt spoke up, and Bogdanovich later recalled her words: they needed a modern killer, and the most modern, most terrifying one was a sniper from Texas.
She meant Charles Whitman. On August 1, 1966, this twenty-five-year-old former Marine first stabbed his wife and mother to death, then climbed to the observation deck of the University of Texas Tower in Austin and spent roughly an hour and a half shooting at people below. He killed fifteen people, including an unborn child, and wounded thirty-one before two police officers shot him dead. David Gunby, who took a bullet in the stomach that day, did not die until November 2001, which is why the death toll in different accounts fluctuates between fifteen and seventeen.
One further detail: Bogdanovich had been commissioned to write an article about Whitman by an Esquire editor before he left for Los Angeles to make films. So the screenplay for Targets had a magazine draft that was never published.
In the film, the sniper is Bobby Thompson, a young insurance agent. He buys rifles with the same matter-of-factness another man might buy fishing gear, kills his wife and mother, climbs onto an oil tank above the freeway—a high-speed highway running through Los Angeles—and begins methodically shooting at passing cars. There is no motive in any scene, and, in the general view of critics, that is the most unsettling thing in the film.
The tank sequence was shot without a permit. Bogdanovich knew he would never get permission to film on the freeway or in the industrial zone, so he took only cinematographer László Kovács and actor Tim O’Kelly with him. The director relayed instructions to the extras playing passersby over a walkie-talkie. The noise and commotion brought the police out, and the shooting day had to be wrapped early.
It also worked out cheaper that way: the whole sequence was filmed without sound, and later the editor Verna Fields assembled the sound track—by some accounts, running as many as thirty tracks at once to create the sound of gunshots and crashing cars.
The final stretch was not shot on a set. It was the real Reseda Drive-In, at the intersection of Reseda Boulevard and Vanowen Street: one screen, seven hundred and forty parking spaces, opened in April 1949. There Bobby hides behind the screen and shoots through a hole in its fabric, while Orlok-Karloff stands in front of it.
Here the sources begin to diverge, and that is worth noting separately. One guide to filming locations claims the theater closed in 1985 and was later demolished. The Cinema Treasures theater catalog gives an exact date: the final screening was January 10, 1978, after which the building was soon dismantled. The second source looks more reliable because it names the films playing that day—The Choirboys and Car Wash—but both versions live side by side online, and neither cites a document.
Here is the curious thing: the real Karloff was not planning to retire. Bogdanovich repeatedly stressed that the real actor, unlike his screen double, was neither embittered by the profession nor close to retirement. He worked until his last day in the most literal sense.
His health is described almost identically in every source, and the picture is ugly: by the time of filming, roughly half of one lung was functioning; he had emphysema, arthritis, leg braces, and a cane. Between takes, he breathed oxygen through a mask while sitting in a wheelchair. On set—he straightened up and went to act.
Because of this, doctors forbade him from flying to Mexico, where four films awaited him, to be shot back-to-back in five weeks under contract with a Mexican studio. The Mexican crew had to be brought to Los Angeles instead, to a modest soundstage on the same Santa Monica Boulevard where the interiors for Targets had been shot. Karloff’s final four films—Isle of the Snake People, House of Evil, The Incredible Invasion, and Fear Chamber—were released posthumously, in 1971 and 1972. He never received his $400,000 fee: the producer died, lawsuits began. Of one of these films, the actor honestly told an interviewer that he had not the slightest idea what he was saying in it—the soundtrack had been dubbed without him.
So the film about a monster’s retirement came out a year before the monster truly left, and he did not leave the way he did in the movies. In Targets, Orlok leaves beautifully, at the top, leaving an era behind him. In reality, Karloff made four more films that almost nobody saw and that he himself thought little of.
In the middle of the film there is a scene for which Targets still makes the lists: Orlok tells the parable “Appointment in Samarra” on the radio—a hundred seconds of monologue, filmed in a single unbroken take. After the take, the crew applauded. For an actor who by then could barely breathe properly, that is perhaps a truer summation of a career than any award.
Bogdanovich did not devise the finale himself: the construction in which Bobby sees two Orloks at once—one alive at his side and one gigantic on the screen—was suggested by Samuel Fuller, who had been Bogdanovich’s mentor for many years. Fuller also heavily rewrote the screenplay and declined both payment and a screen credit: it is believed he did not want to hear people saying that he, rather than the young director, had made the film. In gratitude, Bogdanovich gave his character, the young director Sammy Michaels, Fuller’s first name and middle name—Michael. This story is known only from Bogdanovich’s own account, repeated many times over the decades, but Fuller never contradicted it: not a document, but a well-corroborated anecdote.
It is telling, too, how the scene resolves. Orlok does not kill Bobby or maim him—he strikes him in the face and disarms him with his cane, then exhales the line many consider the best in the film: “Is that what I was afraid of?” The boy with the rifle turned out to be a man who could be stopped from the outside. And in the final shot, Sammy wipes blood from a scratch on the old actor’s forehead—the same Sammy who had spent the entire film begging him for a role. That is the whole answer to the question of who let the old monster go: not the audience and not the studio, but a young man who needed the monster as a human being.