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CHAPTER FIVE

Crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavour’

Louis Calhern in The Asphalt Jungle, 1950

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

THE PUSSYCAT PORNO THEATRE, TORRANCE, SUMMER 1979

Looking considerably older than his 16 years, Quentin had managed to land a job as an usher in Torrance’s only surviving theatre, which had been converted into a porno palace. Surrounded by the cinema’s motley patrons, Quentin’s already dampened interest in sex now took a complete tumble when he became exposed to non-stop celluloid orgies.

Back home, Connie had absolutely no idea that her son was working in such an establishment until she found a book of matches on the kitchen counter.

‘Where’s this come from, Quint? The Pussycat Theatre?’

‘That’s my job, Mom. I told you I work at a theatre.’

Connie was flabbergasted by his matter-of-fact tone. It was as if Quentin was saying, ‘It’s only a place of work. No way am I interested in all that seedy stuff.’

Quentin later insisted to his mother that the sight of all that celluloid flesh put him off porn for life, but at least it was a regular kind of job which involved working normal hours.

In a strange way, Connie completely understood what her son meant. And she was relieved that he was no longer wandering the streets penniless and being tempted to break any more laws.

Working in the Pussycat porno theatre was tough on Quentin because it challenged his ability to cut himself off from the degrading movies on show, as well as the theatre’s extremely sleazy and aggressive clientele.

Most customers presumed Quentin was older than he was and treated him accordingly. Fights would regularly break out in the auditorium and Quentin was expected to sort out every disturbance. At six feet two inches, the management saw him as a big guy who knew how to look after himself. But Quentin was not exactly fit. He regularly drank beer, adored eating vast quantities of fast food, and had grown quite a belly in the process.

Connie was actually more worried about what her son was getting up to when he wasn’t at work. She knew he was a self-sufficient kid, but she worried about who he was hanging out with and whether he was involved with drugs.

Quentin would regularly brush off his mother’s concern, telling her not to worry. But his demeanour was becoming increasingly laid back and that bothered Connie enormously. She had been told that kids with drugs problems were lethargic and sleepy. While Quentin was still able to transfix anyone with a dose of hyperactive machine-gun conversation, the rest of the time he certainly seemed to be living in another world. He did not even wear a watch, even though he had finally bothered to learn how to tell the time when he was in fifth grade at school. And he was always oversleeping.

Connie tried to guard against any possible involvement with drugs by keeping Quentin to a fairly strict schedule. She knew there was more temptation during the evening hours so she made Quentin stick to a tight curfew.

Today, Connie believes that Quentin was a pretty good kid and not really the rebel with a cause he has been painted as since finding fame. All the same, Connie did occasionally go through her teenage son’s room just to make sure he was not hiding any alcohol or illegal substances. One time, Quentin arrived home early from his job at the porno theatre to find her searching his drawers. A classic Californian parent-child conversation followed:

‘I cannot believe you are doing this, Mom. You are invading my privacy.’

‘I know, Quint, and I feel terrible about it. It violates all the principles I have about privacy, but you are a minor and I have to know what is going on. I know I am breaching my own rules, but that is the way it is,’ came Connie’s guilt-riddled reply.

‘What are you looking for, anyhow?’

‘I’m just looking.’

‘What makes you think that if I did have anything I would have it here?’

‘Well, if you lose control then you would not have the control not to have it here. It is my responsibility to make sure you never get to the position where you lose control,’ replied Connie, verging on the psychobabble.

In Connie’s view, she was carrying out controlled parenting. To Quentin, it was a brazen attempt to remove what little privacy he retained living at home. He decided there and then that he would split and find himself an apartment sooner rather than later. He needed some space.

If Connie had looked more closely as she searched his room she would have noticed a scrappy collection of notes held together by a paper clip. It was Quentin’s first proper attempt to write a screenplay and was entitled, Captain Peachfuzz and the Anchovy Bandit. Quentin had been carefully working on the project away from the watchful eyes of his few friends. He had spent hours alone in his room trying to create a workable script. It was to be the first of many fruitless attempts over the following 12 years.

‘To this day,’ Connie admits, ‘I still don’t know what he really did in that room.’

Quentin also had a television in his room which encouraged him to hibernate even further. Sometimes – on his days off from the Pussycat Theatre – he would stay in there for days on end, zapping the remote controls until he found something that caught his interest.

One day he was flicking through one of the hundreds of movie magazines he collected when he noticed a small advertisement for the James Best Acting School, in Toluca Lake. The ad caught his eye because Best played the long-suffering Sheriff Roscoe Tanner in the TV series, Dukes of Hazzard, the show that reminded Quentin of his five-month stay with his grandmother in Tennessee.

Quentin was particularly interested in the school because it was offering three classes a week for the low price of $75 a month. The only problem was that Toluca Lake was about 30 miles away and Quentin’s weekly salary of $70 would hardly cover his bus fares, once he had paid his fees and other living expenses.

But Quentin still decided to give it a shot. He was convinced that the James Best Acting School might provide a leg up in the acting world. He reckoned if he got off work by 5.30pm on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays he could just about make it in time for the 7pm classes.

Quentin had already outgrown the Torrance Community Theatre Workshop, which he found to be filled with amateurs whose only interest in acting was appearing in local shows and discussing the merits of Olivier’s performance in Hamlet. The James Best Acting School was far more professional, and run by one of his heroes.

Quentin found himself being taught by actor Jack Lucarelli. The school itself turned out to be a room above a honey-baked ham store on busy Riverside Drive, Toluca Lake, close to the Ventura freeway in the baking hot San Fernando Valley.

Quentin found the lessons very fulfilling because he was anxious to learn. The school specialised in training would-be actors how to deal with the camera. Lucarelli’s lectures were based on the premise that most actors in Hollywood would be doing bit parts in TV series. Quentin was so happy to be amongst real actors that he threw himself into every practical exercise with great enthusiasm.

Fellow student Rich Turner became one of Quentin’s first friends at the school because he lived in the South Bay area near Quentin’s home in Torrance. He often used to give the teenager rides home after class and had no idea that Quentin was just 16 at the time. Everyone in the class presumed he was about 19 or 20. But Turner did find it a little strange that on the way home, Quentin would always insist on being dropped by an exit off the busy 405 freeway, rather than outside his actual house.

‘He’d just disappear down the side of the freeway. It was weird but it was his business, I guess,’ recalls Rich Turner. ‘I never once got to see his house.’

The James Best Acting School encouraged students to write their own mini-plays to be performed in front of the entire class. Quentin would often appear with his own scripts written on at least three different types of paper in terrible handwriting. The other actors would have difficulty deciphering them. But when he got up and acted out his own screenplays they were well above average for the class.

Quietly spoken Rich Turner and young Quentin soon began to hang out together in the South Bay area. Often at weekends they would go and see a movie and afterwards enjoy a burger and talk endlessly about music. Quentin was Turner’s only buddy who was into rockabilly and they spent hours discussing their favourite artistes. Turner even turned Quentin on to surf music king Dick Dale, as well as Robert Gordon.

Dale provided Californians with early 1960s music to drive to, including ‘Let’s Go Trippin’, ‘Surf Beat’ and ‘The Victor’. Playing his prototype Fender Stratocaster left-handed, Dale’s bass-heavy twanging and reverberated speed spawned a host of imitators, from The Beach Boys to just about every speed-punk band since The Ramones.

The two also shared a particular passion for Buster Keaton movies (although they were such movie buffs they would go and see anything at the local movie theatres just so long as it looked vaguely interesting).

In Toluca Lake, Turner, Quentin and some of the other James Best Acting school students would gather at the River Bottom Inn, just across the street from the James Best Acting School, to drink beers and eat the free taco chips that were on offer. ‘That saved any of us from having to pay for a meal,’ explains Turner.

Quentin frequently got embroiled in colourful arguments with Turner and others about movies. His obsession at that time was the recently released Blow Out with John Travolta, helmed by one of his directorial heroes, Brian de Palma. No one else even remotely rated the movie, but Quentin described it as a masterpiece.

Often Quentin ran out of cash at the River Bottom Inn and would switch to iced water because he simply enjoyed hanging out with other actors. Despite his youth, Quentin was far from shy. When he wasn’t defending the sex scenes in Blow Out he would be busy insisting that Elvis was the king. (This passion had been passed down from his mother Connie, who had filled their home with all sorts of Elvis memorabilia over the years.)

Rich Turner tried to turn Quentin on to Eddie Cochran but Elvis always won out in the end. Quentin confessed to his fellow actors that he had posters of Elvis hanging in his bedroom back home in Torrance, as well as a particularly gaudy poster of the movie, Viva Las Vegas, one of Connie’s all-time favourite films.

Quentin also admitted to Rich Turner that he had a particular fondness for Westerns, and at that time his favourites were the John Wayne classics, The Searchers and Red River.

Those nights at the River Bottom Inn were particularly important to Quentin because they represented the first time he got close to actors on a personal level. The bar also happened to be across the street from the main Warner Brothers lot and sometimes groups of stuntmen would wander in for a drink and start swapping stories that had the young Quentin riveted. This was the world he wanted to be a part of.

If he’d had any doubts about seeking a career in Hollywood then just listening to those showbiz tales would have been enough to get rid of them forever. He knew he would not give up until he had made it.