THE TARGET SHOOTS FIRST (1999) co-presented by Hollywood Entertainment

This ticketed screening is the closing event of T.A.P.E.'s Home Video Day 2025 – Music Edition.

Featuring a virtual conversation with director Chris Wilcha!

As the finale to T.A.P.E.'s Home Video Day 2025 – Music Edition, PRS's 7th House screenings (in conjunction with their August SEE•SOUND series of music centric cinema) welcomes co-presenter Hollywood Entertainment for a very special screening of Christopher Wilcha’s THE TARGET SHOOTS FIRST (1999)!

Wilcha's debut film is a classic of diaristic filmmaking: an invaluably informative and hypnotically entertaining look into the secretive and strange world of corporate music. Equipped with a Hi8 camera gifted by his parents, Wilcha (director of 2024’s Flipside), a recent philosophy graduate, recorded almost 200 hours of tape at his entry-level position at Columbia House Record and Tape Club. This resulted in a compassionate yet critical and incredibly personal document that is funny, unique, and curiously relatable in its existential tale of cubicles, Casual Fridays, and CDs.

Seen through Wilcha’s “punk rock guilt” and the overstimulating rush of struggling with your identity as you enter the post-college workplace, Wilcha’s arrival into the job occurs as Nirvana’s success leads to “alternative” music being co-opted and marketed by the multinational conglomerate music machine in the most major way it ever had or would be. Where and how can ambition, pragmatism, disdain for a day job, an openhearted desire to get to know your coworkers, marketing, creativity, genuine love of art, and distrust of advertising meet? And just what does it mean to convince shoppers that they need to order the limited-time-offer combination Beavis and Butthead / Alice In Chains CD set NOW?

Join us for this rare screening of one of the great works about the analog/digital realms and the inner life of the artist in the milieu of mass production.

Dir. Christopher Wilcha, 1999, 70 mins, USA, English, Unrated, Digital.

Special thanks to Michael Edelson and the T.A.P.E. Programming Team

Please email [email protected] or phone 323-663-2167 with any questions.

Chris Wilcha is a documentary filmmaker whose work blends personal history with cultural critique. His debut film, The Target Shoots First, captured his post-college job at Columbia House during the rise of ‘90s alternative music and became a cult classic, winning festival awards and airing on HBO.His latest feature, Flipside, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. A deeply reflective excavation of abandoned projects and midlife reckoning, it was hailed as “a masterpiece” (IndieWire), “a revelatory film” (AV Club), and “a deceptively profound documentary” (The Washington Post).Wilcha won two Emmys for directing the television adaptation of This American Life and has collaborated on nonfiction projects with the Coen Brothers, directing the concert film Another Day, Another Time and with comedian Tig Notaro on Knock Knock, It’s Tig Notaro, a road-trip comedy doc that followed her performing in fans’ living rooms across the country.

ABOUT HOLLYWOOD ENTERTAINMENT

Hollywood Entertainment was created to entertain and educate filmgoers by screening and preserving eclectic, underseen, non-commercial, rare, and socially beneficial films and film-related artifacts. The non-profit organization evolved out of Moviepassed, a near-daily stream of online movie watching that began in April 2020.

T.A.P.E. is a volunteer-run 501(c)3 non-profit based out of Whammy! Analog Media. Check out our website at tapeanalog.org.

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