Spotlights

The Target Shoots First

Columbia House must have thought they were getting the deal of the century when they signed up eager young Nirvana fan Chris Wilcha for their marketing team. They should have read the fine print. Wilcha showed up for his first day of work armed with a Hi-8 video camera. When nobody objected, he decided to bring the camera every day, letting it run during office interviews, meetings, and business luncheons.

"I had no idea what the hell I was doing," Wilcha says. "I just knew I wanted to collect the footage and that I thought the experiences were interesting and revealing in some way about corporate culture and music marketing, all that stuff I was interested in anyway."

Even though Wilcha didn't necessarily set out to chronicle the day-to-day insanity of working for America's heavyweight mail-order CD and tape club, he clearly refused to identify with the company's corporate mentality from the beginning. Ironically, his irreverence was just what Columbia House needed to reconnect with the cynical youth market. Usually immersed in other work, Wilcha tried to be as casual as possible about his filming, making it easy for his co-workers to adjust to being on camera. "If you're a documentary filmmaker and you're going into an environment for a day and you're sticking a camera in people's faces, there's no way you're going to cultivate any kind of comfort on their part," he says. "I think the fact that I was there for the better part of two years and I always had the camera with me, people just sort of eventually became comfortable, or they just sort of forgot that it was there." The result isn't quite World's Wildest Job Surveillance Videos, yet it's still amazing what Wilcha's unobtrusive camera picks up on.

Honed from more than 200 hours of tape to a perceptive 76 minutes, The Target Shoots First cuts past the hidden conditions to answer those elusive questions we all have about Columbia House (How can they afford to give away so many CDs for a penny?) while suggesting other injustices that might have previously defied our imagination, for example: What kind of music do they play at company picnics? (Answer: Kenny G). And who hasn't wanted the inside scoop on the company that, ranked right up there with Publisher's Clearing House, could be the nation's largest source of junk mail?

Sat, Mar 11, Alamo Drafthouse; Mon, Mar 13, 6:30pm, Alamo Drafthouse; Thu, Mar 16, 4pm, Alamo Drafthouse.