Читать книгу Quentin Tarantino - The Man, The Myths and the Movies - Wensley Clarkson - Страница 21

BANK OF AMERICA, TOLUCA LAKE, CALIFORNIA, DECEMBER 1980

Craig Hamann – small, dark, shy bank teller – had always wanted to act but the cost of simply surviving in Los Angeles made it impossible for him to do anything about it. He had taken a ‘normal’ job in order to pay for rent and food. Then into the bank walked attractive Jena Lucarelli, wife of the drama coach at the James Best Acting School. She had exchanged pleasantries with Craig on a number of occasions and knew he was interested in acting. ‘Why not join the school?’ she said. ‘We’d love to have you.’

So it was that three days later Craig Hamann, then the wrong side of 25 but looking considerably younger, walked into the life of Quentin Tarantino.

Hamann was an altogether different proposition from Quentin’s other friends at the school, like Rich Turner. Here was a man on the edge, constantly losing his temper, always willing to argue a point. Quentin was immediately attracted to the moody Hamann. This guy is wild, he told himself, within minutes of being introduced to him.

Quentin rapidly joined forces with Hamann and another rebel, Rick Squery, and the threesome fast managed to cause as much controversy as is possible in a sedate place like the James Best Acting School. They began borrowing scenes from controversial movies and reworking them during performances in front of their class. ‘We were always coming up with ideas. We wanted to do our own stunts, everything. Nothing fazed us,’ explains Hamann.

To Quentin these two guys were like a breath of fresh air. One day, he and his two friends decided it would be a gas to recreate a scene from John Carpenter’s Escape from New York. Quentin, Hamann and Squery had first been turned on to Carpenter thanks to his highly acclaimed but extremely low-budget Assault on Precinct 13, so it seemed only natural to perform what they considered to be a tribute to a master director.

Hamann decided that, for the sake of authenticity, he would bring in his own awesome collection of real guns to use as props. They included an M16 assault rifle, a .41 Magnum, a pump-action shotgun and a whole selection of knives. ‘That really bothered people,’ admits Hamann now. ‘They got kinda freaked out, I guess.’

The person it bothered most was acting teacher Jack Lucarelli. He stopped the trio’s performance in mid-sentence and insisted on inspecting the weapons just to make sure there were no stray bullets still in them.

Hamann was so determined to retain the authenticity that from then on he insisted on bringing in the guns each time there was a relevant scene to act out. Tension grew between him and coach Lucarelli. While others in the class were rewriting scenes from dramas like Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the threesome would be putting their own spin on the grisly shoot-out from Jimmy Cagney’s White Heat.

Quentin and Hamann were quickly acknowledged by the other students as fine writers, even though their choice of material was seen as rather too gory at times. They were often secretly asked to write scenes for other people to perform. Quentin didn’t mind because he believed that practice made perfect and the more writing he did the better.

However, when he and his friends acted out their own crime-riddled mini-plays, some of their classmates found the content quite disturbing. ‘Craig, especially, would have a mad glint in his eye and it was pretty weird stuff at times,’ recalls one student. ‘Killings, maimings, decapitation. You name it and they did it.’

Quentin would go out of his way to be as politically incorrect as possible, stoutly defending Sylvester Stallone in fierce arguments with teacher Jack Lucarelli, who tended to look down his nose at such macho performers.

Quentin and his friends did not really consider themselves rebels. They simply had a passion for gangster movies and those bleak film noirs of the 1950s.

Despite being so much younger than his two friends, Quentin could more than hold his own when it came to talking about movies. At the time, he was particularly nuts about Jim McBride’s Breathless, starring Richard Gere. The others were not so keen and took some persuading to even agree to see the movie.

Quentin had first seen Breathless at a cinema in a shopping mall near his home. He fell in love with Breathless because the movie incorporated all his obsessions – comic books, popular music, rockabilly. In particular, Richard Gere’s character was completely rockabilly. Quentin loved the way the movie was shot as if Los Angeles had been turned into a back-lot.

Later, Quentin told his friends at his favourite comic book store all about Breathless and they couldn’t get over how he seemed to know virtually all the dialogue word-for-word. The scenes Quentin liked best were the ones where the characters read comic books as a test of true love.

Back at the acting school, Quentin eventually managed to get Craig Hamman to see Breathless. Having been virtually dragged into a cinema, Hamman also fell in love with the film and realised that Quentin had incredibly good taste in movies. It also became increasingly clear to him that Quentin had educated himself through film.

Curiously, throughout Quentin’s first year at the James Best Acting School, he never once admitted he was working in a daytime job at the Pussycat porno theatre. All his fellow students just presumed he was paying for his acting tuition by doing some part-time job or other and they still had no idea how young he was.

Quentin constantly lectured his friends Hamann, Squery and Turner about his love for ‘blaxploitation’ movies, which had started with Shaft! in 1971 and led to at least a dozen poor imitations. Quentin seemed completely enamoured with the language and the music in those movies, even though the storylines were often far from satisfactory.

The big difference between Craig Hamann and Quentin’s other friends in and out of acting school was that Hamann seemed to be on a knife-edge virtually the whole time. He was the kind of guy who would lose his rag with anyone for the smallest of reasons. Quentin seemed to understand this, although there were occasions when even Quentin pushed his friend too far.

During one incident at the James Best Acting School, Quentin and Hamann were acting out a scene in which Hamann – armed with his real M16 assault rifle – was supposed to do a stick-up on Quentin, who was to instantly drop his gun: Hamann’s real .41 Magnum.

‘Drop it!’ barked Hamann at Quentin in front of the entire class.

‘Nope,’ replied Quentin, much to everyone’s amusement because this dialogue was definitely not in the script.

Then Quentin turned to their teacher Lucarelli and said, ‘Jack, he has to command me much stronger than that.’

Hamann was incensed that his friend should humiliate him in front of the other students. He paused for breath, then screamed the command again. This time Quentin dropped his weapon with a told-you-so expression on his face.

An hour later, Quentin walked into the bathroom at the school and found Hamann alone. He was still fuming about what had happened earlier.

‘Just fuck off, Quentin. Fuck you.’

Quentin was mortified and walked straight out of the bathroom. Thirty seconds later he returned, obviously close to tears.

‘Craig, I know you got a bad temper but you save your “fuck you”s for somebody who doesn’t love you.’

When Quentin said that, Hamann was overcome with remorse. He hugged his friend and apologised for his outburst. Hamann never forgot that incident because he felt it bonded the two friends together forever.

Quentin and the others made a number of video dramas at the school, the most memorable of which featured them being locked in solitary confinement during a biological war and then stumbling out into a world where everyone else appeared to have died. Quentin, Hamann and Rick Squery wore punk-type army uniforms for their roles. Hamann later described the video as ‘a piece of shit’, saying, ‘It didn’t work.’

‘We find out there is an antidote,’ he explained, ‘but supposedly there is only enough for two people and three of us are infected. The whole thing was a waste of time.’

Back in Torrance, Quentin was finding his job at the Pussycat porno theatre more and more unsavoury. He seemed to be manhandling perverts out of the auditorium almost every day. Sometimes they would still have their flies open when he kicked them into the gutter outside the deco-style theatre. He was starting to resent the entire place. It wasn’t made any easier by the fact that he was living a virtual Jekyll and Hyde existence: porno theatre usher by day and serious actor by night.

One evening at the school, Quentin found himself broke and without his usual ride home from Rich Turner. He was filled with dread at the prospect of the two-hour bus trip back to Torrance. Then teacher Jack Lucarelli offered to let Quentin sleep the night at the school and join in some of the earlier classes next day. Quentin knew he was risking losing his job, but he was far more interested in getting some free acting classes.

The teenager climbed into a sleeping bag loaned by one of the other students and decided that anything was preferable to going back to Torrance and working another day in the Pussycat. Perhaps not surprisingly he was sacked by the theatre the following week, but Quentin looked on his dismissal as a blessing in disguise.

Eventually he got a dead-end job earning a few bucks a week plus commission doing market research at a shopping mall near his home. Quentin rarely made more than $40 a week, but at least it didn’t matter if he failed to show up some days and he must have been relieved he would never have to watch seedy porn films again. Quentin now frequently slept over at the acting school and in many ways he became part of the furniture. Teachers and students looked on the awkward teenager as an eccentric, if somewhat erratic personality. All he ever talked about was the movies.

At 16, Quentin was the same age his mother was when she’d had him. He had quit school, virtually left home and seemed to be living a Walter Mitty life. It was all remarkably similar to what Connie had gone through, except that there was no baby on the way.

Quentin’s shyness with women was noticed by some individuals at the James Best School, although he did become good friends with a number of the female students on a brother/sister level. One of his best pals was Brenda Hillhouse, who went on to get a role in Pulp Fiction as Butch’s mother. There was also Brenda Peters and Jack Lucarelli’s wife Jena. But once class ended, Quentin tended to hang out only with Craig Hamann, Rick Squery and, when he wanted a quieter evening, Rich Turner.

Hamann took Quentin on all sorts of eye-opening adventures. One time they decided to visit the so-called Boy’s Town gay district on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, where many of the bars served very cheap drinks and featured big-screen TVs. Quentin had just had both ears pierced and tended to alternate the ear he wore a ring in. At that time, it was believed by many that gay men wore a ring in the right ear as a low-key signal. (Current fashion has since completely overtaken this.) Quentin made a point of wearing his earring in the heterosexual left ear.

Quentin was terrified when he first got to the edge of Boy’s Town. Craig had one or two gay friends and they had taken him to the bars before, so he talked him through what it would be like.

Both Hamann and Quentin are devout heterosexuals, but at such establishments they could sip cut-price booze and watch continuous MTV music videos, featuring innovative camera techniques that fascinated both would-be film makers.

The two friends wandered into one hostelry called Revolver, settled down with a beer each and started watching the big screen TV hanging from the ceiling. Inevitably, a group of men began bothering them and Quentin ‘got a bit freaked out’.

Hamann and Quentin then headed out towards Rage, on the corner of San Vincente and Santa Monica. Rage was an even more sexually heated establishment where another group of guys came on so strongly that the two friends abandoned their plans to have a beer and headed east on Santa Monica Boulevard for one of the straighter hostelries. But Quentin was never angry about having been taken to Boy’s Town. He simply stored a vivid picture of it in his memory, knowing that one day he might use the experience as the basis for a scene in a movie. Everything that happened to him could one day be used in his movies.

Some nights, Quentin and Hamann would go to the tatty World Movie Theatre on the gritty, eastern end of Hollywood Boulevard, near where it crossed Gower. There the two friends saw Jack Nicholson in the Tony Richardson-directed movie, The Border, an interesting film about an LA cop who joins the border patrol in El Paso and gets caught up in squalor, violence and double-dealing. Quentin was particularly impressed by one of the supporting cast, Harvey Keitel. Less than ten years later, the actor would play a very significant role in getting Quentin’s career on the road.

The World Movie Theatre was a bit like a home from home for Quentin because many of the patrons were either drunk or high on drugs, just as they had been at the Pussycat. In the back three rows, at least a dozen noisy black pimps would be discussing the previous evening’s takings.

On one occasion, Quentin – by now infected with Hamann’s short temper – boldly turned around to tell one of the noisier clientele, ‘Would you please keep it down?’

The reply was somewhat predictable. ‘Fuck you, asshole.’

Quentin exploded and leapt over the rickety seat and was about to take a swing at the man when a voice backed down.

‘Sorry, man. No problem.’

All that training at the Pussycat porno theatre was at last coming in useful.

Meanwhile Hamann and Quentin were continuing to build up reputations as troublemaking know-alls at the James Best Acting School. They both felt they knew more than their teachers, but it was Hamann who regularly got up and told people like Jack Lucarelli exactly what he thought of them. Quentin, more than 11 years younger, would smile and nod his head in agreement. But he was too bright to stand up and be counted.