“The corporate workplace reminds me a lot of high school.”

Justin’s rating: Coming of age in the music biz

Justin’s review: I really have no idea how my generation — Gen X — will be remembered when we are all good and gone. We certainly don’t get as much attention as the generations that came before and after, yet we were on the forefront of a lot of pop cultural and technological revolutions, especially when it came to movies and music. And at the intersection of these two is a little-known documentary that came out in 2000 called The Target Shoots First.

It’s May 1993, and Christopher Wilcha just graduated college and grabbed the only job his philosophy major prepared him for: assistant product manager for Columbia Music House. You know, that mail order music business where you’d order 12 CDs for “just a penny” and then be in debt with their legal department for the rest of your life? I wasn’t alone in trying to fleece this and BMG with a ton of fake names and addresses when I was a poor college student in the ’90s. Riding that dangerous edge always made me wonder what actually went on behind the door in those companies.

(No, it didn’t, but it makes for a good segue so we are going to accept this bald-face lie and move on.)

Wilcha starts work at Columbia and brings along with him a graduation gift that his parents got for him: a high-end video camera. With it, he begins to record the goings-on at the company starting with his first day on the job and orientation. Part of this is touring the actual production facility in Indiana where CDs are pressed, packaged, and shipped out in the thousands on a daily basis.

This filming goes on day after day until Wilcha starts to work his way up in the company and finds himself caught between the marketing executives on the floor above and the creative minds on the floor below. “Convincing people from marketing that our opinions are valid… I’ve given up. I gave up a long time ago,” says one creative.

Yet instead of completely selling out to The Man, Wilcha starts to rebel and push back within the system of this soulless environment, advocating for the creatives. This is due in part to his youth but also his love of the rebellious alt-rock and grunge music that he’d loved in college. It culminates in the company forcing him — against his desires — to produce an alt-rock business catalogue… and he and his co-worker seeing what they could do to make it as rebellious as possible. This includes criticizing the very company and industry in which they work, which eventually draws the ire of their bosses.

What’s really impressive about The Target Shoots First is that everyone at Columbia was totally cool with Wilcha filming them. In this pre-social media, pre-YouTube age, this was probably a novelty for most of them, and so many of the employees and higher-ups sit down for candid discussions on camera.

With a great eye for documentary making and an engaging narrative voiceover, Chris Wilcha takes a somewhat mundane subject and makes this hour-plus a captivating experience. He captures little moments of corporate silliness, simmering passive-aggressive rage, and the ridiculous scenario of a company that’s handling music it doesn’t quite understand.

I do find it interesting that while all this was filmed between 1993 and 1994, it didn’t come out until the turn of the century — long after Nirvana had ceased to be a thing, CDs were on the decline, and Columbia House wasn’t the huge force it used to be. Watching it in 2000 must’ve been a bit of a trip, but watching it in 2023 feels like Marty McFly stepping back three decades to see how his parents used to live.

I’ll tell you that this movie made me incredibly glad that I never got sucked into the corporate world. It’s a reminder of how these mega-companies tend to leech away the spunk and spirit of its employees.

The Target Shoots First could easily be put into a cinematic time capsule to capture the ennui of Gen X as it graduated from high school and college and had to enter the real world. We had a spate of these in the ’90s like Reality Bites, Party Girl, Kicking and Screaming, and (of course) Office Space. This doc and those other films all share the tension that the (ironic) apathy and rebellion experienced when it had to enter the workforce that was antithetical to a lot of the moods and messages that we were buying into at the time.

In a way, this documentary has a happy ending, as Wilcha left this corporate environment to pursue filmmaking (The Target Shoots First was his thesis project) — which was realized in the years that followed.

Intermission!

• Oh hai Nirvana!
• He gets to eat at both the Sony AND Time Warner cafeterias
• The rubbing of his nameplate
• “I don’t have files, I have piles!”
• When’s the last time you thought about CDs this much?
• Combining Alice in Chains and Beavis and Butthead together!
• “Am I going screwy? Is it ‘The Lemonheads?'”
• The 17th floor gets to wear ripped jeans
• That’s a whole lot of free CDs!
• Help me.
• “I’m in a position of power but lack the experience to make that mean anything.”
• I was shipping Marie and Chris the whole way through
• The fonts for the alternative magazine… so nostalgic!
• The angry voicemail
• Hearing about Kurt Cobain’s suicide
• David Hasslehoff AND Aerosmith!