With the summer at an end, we’re easing into work with two films about being a 9-to-5’er that are full of heart and countless life lessons. This week, we’re excited to show Chris Wilcha’s The Target Shoots First, a DIY-documentary about post-college doldrums at the turn of the millennium.

Wilcha, who more or less made this film on a whim after his parents gifted him a Hi-8 camera following his college graduation, is front-and-center throughout The Target Shoots First. After taking a job at a Columbia Records division in New York — once a music business giant that has since been replaced by streamers — because they were in desperate need of a hip twenty-something who could explain the post-grunge music market to them, Wilcha took to filming his new 9-to-5, eventually recording over 200 hours of footage in the span of two years. Straddling the line between diaristic reportage and anthropological filmmaking, he embodies the curiosity typical of a recent philosophy grad, balancing a natural knack for observational comedy with warm and compassionate conversations with his subjects-cum-coworkers.

“I was having this very coming-of-age post-college experience in corporate America and it very much felt like The Office before The Office. The absurdity of work culture and the 17th floor versus the 19th floor and the suits and the creatives that was at play. It felt very screenplay worthy at the time.” CHRIS WILCHA

 

The strange position Wilcha occupies as a fresh-faced addition to the company’s marketing division intersects with the greater story of alternative music that was sweeping the United States at that moment in time. His shrewd and excitable comments about Nirvana, for example, grow tired over the course of his film’s runtime; in turn, reflecting both his own burn-out and the phasing out of grunge. There’s a lightning-in-a-bottle quality to The Target Shoots First, with Wilcha proving himself prescient in his off-the-cuff analysis of an unrepeatable moment in American culture.

New Jersey native Chris Wilcha studied philosophy at New York University. After a two year stint working at the Columbia House CD and Tape Club, Wilcha pivoted to filmmaking. He earned an MFA from CalArts in 1999. The Target Shoots First was his graduate thesis film. Wilcha went on to win two Emmy Awards as well as two International Documentary Association Awards for directing the TV adaptation of Ira Glass’s acclaimed radio show This American Life. Wilcha also directed the Coen Brothers-inspired concert film Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) and Tig Notaro’s cross-country comedy special Knock Knock, It’s Tig Notaro (2015).

In 2024, Wilcha completed Flipside, a documentary in which he tries to save a beloved New Jersey record store while reflecting on his career as a filmmaker. The film was dubbed “a masterpiece” by IndieWire and is now streaming on Amazon Prime and Apple TV. In many ways, it is a sequel to The Target Shoots First, which he is currently working to restore.