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Virtuoso Shootout. Bogdanovich labored for almost six months on Gorman's gritty motorcycle flick The Wild Angels, rewriting the script, scouting locations, casting ("Peter Fonda was sort of my idea"). Gorman, impressed with both Bogdanovich's energy and his results, agreed to put up the money for his first feature. There were a couple of strings. Bogdanovich had to use Boris Karloff, who owed producer Gorman two days' work on an old contract, and a certain amount of unused footage from an old Gorman opus entitled The Terror. The finished film, Targets, contained a virtuoso Shootout scene at a drive-in theater. Said Director Howard Hawks: "That stuff's good and it's hard to do." Says Bogdanovich: "To me, that was the ultimate compliment."
Pleased now with the acclaim that is greeting The Last Picture Show, Bogdanovich denies that he was trying to say something about American apathy and brutality. "I don't make movies to say anything," he insists. "I make them because I enjoy making that kind of picture, showing a specific emotion on the screen." Bogdanovich not only enjoys making movies, he virtually lives them. His face has the occupational pallor of long days spent on sound stages; a typical conversational aside begins "Wasn't it Orson who said . . . ?" and a favorite Bogdanovich recreation at parties is doing imitations of Jimmy Stewart and Gary Grant. He disagrees with friends who think that What's Up Doc?, a frenetic, '30s-style farce starring Barbra Streisand, may be a project too frivolous for his talents. Says he: "I want to make movies like the ones I used to like."