A Gigantic Mistake

by Mickey Z., Howard Zinn (Introduction)

From the Author’s In 1968, Peter Bogdanovich made an auspicious celluloid debut with a film called Targets, starring Boris Karloff as Byron Orlok, a veteran horror film actor who has retired because real life has become so terrifying that audiences are no longer frightened by horror movies. In the film's riveting climax, a sniper, Bobby, chooses as his targets the patrons of a drive-in theater showing the real life Karloff in The Terror. ... 'The scenes in which Orlok complains that real life is so horrifying that horror films have lost their ability to scare anyone remind us that we are watching a movie/' writes Peary. "While Bogdanovich places the sniper in a screen where The Terror (1963), a not-very-scary Roger Corman horror film starring the real Boris Karloff, is being projected, to prove that Orlok is correct in thinking 'real' life more frightening than horror films, he is also reminding us that no matter how terrifying we find Bobby's actions in Targets, it is only a movie we are watching and doesn't compare to the real real thing." ... Unfortunately, as I hope you agree by the end of this book, discerning the real real thing from imagined evils is not just the stuff of ambitious directorial debuts.

204 pages, Hardcover

First published May 28, 2004

About the author

Mickey Z. is probably the only person on the planet to have appeared in both a karate flick with Billy Blanks and a political book with Noam Chomsky.