Читать книгу Quentin Tarantino - The Man, The Myths and the Movies - Wensley Clarkson - Страница 23

ELDERGLEN LANE, HARBOR CITY, LOS ANGELES, SUMMER 1981

As Quentin’s eyes panned around the tiny, one-bedroom apartment, a vast jumbo jet thundered just a few hundred feet overhead. He turned to the sweaty, smelly, fat, balding landlord and said, ‘It’s perfect. I’ll take it.’ At last, he had broken the umbilical cord. All those stop-and-search operations in his bedroom in Torrance had taken their toll.

Quentin had assured Connie he would not move a long way. He had settled for the rougher, tougher area of Harbor City, just a few miles from her home and even closer to the main runway at LA Airport. Within days of moving in, Quentin installed his own telephone – the ultimate evidence of his coming of age. He was so proud of his newfound independence he even insisted on having his full name printed in the local phone directory.

‘Quint Tarantino. 1138, Elderglen Lane, Harbor City. 530 1063,’ read the 1981 South Bay phone book. At that time, everyone knew him as Quint and he was trying to drop Zastoupil as his last name, even though he never took any legal steps to revert to Tarantino.

After two years at the James Best Acting School Quentin grew bored and quit, although he made a point of keeping in touch with all his acting friends. Then he landed a job that threatened to interfere with his long-term acting ambitions. He needed something with a decent rate of pay, especially since

Connie was nagging him to get a good job and ‘start living in the real world’. Somehow Quentin landed himself a $1,200-a-month job as a headhunter for a company that had numerous clients in the aerospace industry. When Connie heard the news she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

‘He knew nothing whatsoever about the aerospace industry, yet he had got this job picking prospective employees. It was ridiculous,’ she recalls.

In fairness to Quentin, he was equally bemused to find himself having to go to work every day in a suit and tie. He even managed to adopt a corporate air that he maintained impressively at his office each morning.

‘What d’you know about the aerospace industry, Quint?’ Connie asked him when he told her about his new, serious job.

‘Not a lot, Mom. But it’s cool. I thought you’d be pleased.’

Quentin’s slick new job did nothing to water down his enthusiasm for movies. Indeed, he could now afford to buy himself a VCR machine, something he considered more important than anything else in his apartment besides the phone. With a VCR Quentin could greatly increase his consumption of movies. Instead of seeing five or six films a week at local movie theatres, he could easily watch double that amount. It would have been difficult for girlfriends to enter the equation at this time.

This new obsession with videos led him to investigate the local video stores with great interest. The video boom had been slow in coming to the United States and in the early 1980s the number of outlets was still very limited. While Britain already had the highest per capita proportion of VCR-users in the world, Americans somehow managed to resist the temptation to watch big-screen epics in the comfort of their own homes. Going to the local drive-in or movie theatre had been a part of the American way of life for more than 40 years and there was a certain reluctance to embrace the new technology.

However, self-confessed movie addicts like Quentin Tarantino were not interested in tradition. His only priority was to see as many movies as possible and the VCR was a godsend in that respect. But Quentin faced a problem when it came to finding a well-stocked video store in Harbor City, a community made up of small mini-suburbs on the edge of the Los Angeles port area (which consisted of vast warehouses and expanses of wasteland).

Eventually he heard about a specialist store called Video Archives, on Sepulveda Boulevard in the nearby community of Hermosa Beach. By this time the proud owner of a battered Honda hatchback, Quentin was more than happy to make the twenty-minute drive from his apartment to Video Archives if they really stocked a good selection of videos. He was not disappointed.

When Quentin walked into the store, located in a 1960s mini-shopping mall close to a busy intersection, he found the place stacked high with obscure movies from all over the world. Quentin knew the only way he was going to learn about film-making was through watching movies. The good, the bad, the ugly – it didn’t matter what movies he watched. Each one would be a learning experience. This store was like a dream come true.

Over the next few months, Quentin became one of Video Archives’ most regular customers. He got to know the owners and the clerks. They were all such cool people. They didn’t hassle you if you were a day or two late returning a video and they actually seemed to know something about the films they were renting out. Some nights Quentin would hang out at the store for two or three hours, caught up in discussions about movies. He started burying himself in so many videos that he rarely left the apartment apart from going to work.

It was at Video Archives that Quentin became particularly friendly with an equally knowledgeable clerk called Roger Avary, although they seemed to be approaching the art of film-making from entirely different directions. By now dressed entirely in black, driving his clapped-out Honda Civic and dining mainly at such fast-food emporiums as Pollo Loco and Jack in the Box, Quentin fitted the role of movie geek to perfection.

In fact, Avary and Quentin did not hit it off that well to start with, because they were constantly trying to compete with each other in the movie knowledge stakes. However, Avary eventually conceded that Quentin’s encyclopaedic memory had him beat, after which they became very good friends. Avary was a friendly, sincere person who had spent a bit of time in Europe and seemed very worldly to Quentin, who found that arguing with Avary about certain movies was in many ways more enjoyable than actually watching them.

Over the following few months they built up a strong rapport and Quentin would often stay in the store to watch whatever movie they were showing on the big-screen monitor hanging from the ceiling. Eventually, when one of the clerks left, Avary persuaded owners Lance Lawson and Dennis Humbert to offer Quentin a job at Archives. Quentin was delighted, even though he was taking a vast cut in wages, as he knew it would provide him with endless free movie rentals.

His only concern was Connie. He knew she would be bitterly disappointed that he had quit his safe, responsible position as a headhunter.

‘But, Mom, that job wasn’t me and you know it,’ he later told Connie when trying to break the news gently that he had swapped a $1,200-a-month job for one worth $4 an hour, plus unlimited free video rentals.

Connie was naturally concerned. She couldn’t really understand why Quentin was leaving his job. But then she had always encouraged him to be a free spirit, and now she was paying t he price.

Quentin saw the job at Video Archives as a golden opportunity. Most people would have gone into it half-heartedly, planning to work there for a few months and then quit. But to Quentin this was a chance to work as an unofficial movie critic, to get to see as many movies as was humanly possible and to be paid in the process. What more could he ask?

He had always kept his outgoings low because he had been nursing a secret ambition to try and make his own movie some day. Now that very attitude was going to enable him to take a job at Video Archives, a job he would relish and use to further his own knowledge and understanding of films. Other richer, more academic kids might be heading for film school, but Quentin had found his own version on his doorstep.

Quentin soon got into his stride at Video Archives. He and the other clerks, including Roger Avary, started running thematic selections of certain films each week in the store.

The first collaboration between Quentin and Avary was a package called ‘Feed Your Head’, a homage to drug pictures. Another week it would be a Sam Fuller season, swashbucklers the next, then screwball comedies and so on. The movies of Hong Kong director John Woo began to spark more interest than the latest Disney or Bond adventure, and work by New Wave masters like Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer were heavily promoted by Quentin and Avary. At one point Quentin mistakenly thought film-maker Akira Kurosawa had died and offered a package of his movies for a week. His favourite selection, however, was ‘Women in Prison’.

When the Archives clerks ran a ‘Heist’ week, one of the movies was The Killing, directed by Stanley Kubrick. Quentin loved it. He saw it as a young man’s movie and was impressed by the way it broke all the usual rules. The fractured story-line took one of the criminal’s roles in a race-track heist up to a certain stage of the raid, then turned the clock back and hooked the audience into the fortunes and misfortunes of another hoodlum. The memory of that movie would one day inspire him to write Reservoir Dogs, the film that launched his career.

The atmosphere in the store, according to customers and staff alike, was unique. Instead of a place where people quietly browsed through the shelves looking for something that took their fancy, there would be constant yells of ‘Got any Italian exploitation movies?’ or ‘Can you recommend a pre-1950 horror flick with a lot of sex in it?’ or ‘What’s the name of that movie where Kirk Douglas plays a submarine commander?’.

Gradually, owners Lawson and Humbert spent less and less time in the store. Instead they would appoint one of the clerks as manager-of-the-week and make them responsible for opening and closing the premises each day.

Although he enjoyed discussing the finer points of French New Wave, Quentin still occasionally found himself having to bust a head or two when customers got to be a pain. He developed a routine that preceded each melee. Before any punches were thrown, he’d ask his foe to wait a few seconds while he removed his dangling afraid it could be ripped clean off his ear. (This was the sort of deft touch that would be reflected in his movies years later.)

One time a customer came into Video Archives with a tape that was more than three months late. A few days were considered okay, but this was pushing it. Quentin informed the man how much it was going to cost in late fees and he retorted, ‘Oh, that’s a lot of money. I’m just going to keep the tape.’

He then started to walk out. Quentin followed. Just as the man turned round, Quentin went – boom! – into his chest and then pushed him outside the front door of the store. All the other staff watched boggled-eyed. On the sidewalk, Quentin swung into him again and then pushed him all the way up the road.

On another occasion, Quentin grabbed a customer by the back of the head and – bam! – slammed his head into the corner of the counter. There was blood everywhere. ‘It was like a Quentin movie device,’ recalls Roger Avary. ‘The blood came out of the forehead area and sort of collected in the eye socket.’

Quentin did not get into fights at the drop of a hat, but he knew how far he would go if he got into a punch-up, although he really did not want to go very far. If someone challenged him physically, he would not hesitate to retaliate. Yet there were other occasions when he would be having a massive argument but never even consider crossing that line. It was all a matter of how he felt at that particular moment.

Despite such occurrences, working at Video Archives was for the most part a highly pleasurable experience for Quentin. ‘It was like my Village Voice,’ he explained later, referring to the New York newspaper that had become a virtual bible for hundreds of thousands of young Americans. In other words, he got to review any film he liked. He adored putting a video in a customer’s hands and then explaining to them why the movie was good or bad. It was all part of his movie self-education.

Avary – who was a couple of years older than Quentin – seemed to have far more purist views on films. At one stage, he became very concerned that he and Quentin were becoming completely dominated by home-entertainment movies rather than going to cinemas. He therefore made a point of going with Quentin to see an art-house movie every fortnight so they could soak up the atmosphere and enjoy a coffee afterwards with the art-house brigade.

Whenever they could afford it, the two friends would attend the retrospectives of famous directors that were regularly shown at various movie theatres in LA. It was at one such event that Quentin discovered the films of Jean-Luc Godard. Typically, Quentin was objective about the Frenchman’s material until he had seen it for himself. He decided he would go and see Godard’s movies and then make up his own mind whether or not he liked them. If he didn’t respond to them, that would be that.

The first Godard movie Quentin saw was Little Soldier. It knocked him out. He went back the following night to see Godard’s original version of Breathless and immediately proclaimed it one of the finest movies ever made. Quentin was hooked. He went to the Godard retrospective every night for a week and the Frenchman became one of his biggest directorial and screenwriting influences.

To Quentin, the best thing about Godard’s movies was that he managed to get across the idea that if you just love movies enough, you can make great films. You don’t have to go to school and you don’t have to know a lens from a bag of sand, but if you get your hands on a camera you could make one just like Godard.

Back at Video Archives, various important customers were starting to sit up and take notice of Quentin. Film and TV producer John Langley – who created the phenomenally successful American real-life series Cops – was regularly treated to doses of Quentin and Roger Avary.

‘They had a purist appreciation for the medium,’ remembers Langley. ‘Sometimes you would have to wait to get service while they quizzed you about a movie you had done a rewrite on, but these guys knew the whole canon.’

Langley would often find himself eating popcorn – they sold it in Video Archives – and chatting with Quentin, who he now says was ‘so opinionated about everything under the sun it was brilliant’.

For Quentin and Avary, and a host of other young film-makers who came of age in the video era, VCRs had a huge impact on their movie education. Videos allowed this new wave of auteurs to absorb vintage films without going to film school. In the dark days before VCRs, top film directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg had to undertake formal film training, partly because that was where the old films were.

Interestingly, as Quentin and Avary continued working at Video Archives, more and more film geeks gravitated towards the store. They were people who loved movies passionately but did not have the contacts, or know-how, to break into the movie business.

Soon after he started work at Archives, it became apparent that, while Quentin might have an encyclopedic knowledge of movies, he was virtually illiterate when it came to ordinary paperwork. He would print everything, rather than write it longhand, and his spelling was still appalling. But he could out-talk anyone when it came to describing the camera angles in all Sergio Leone’s films.

Quentin also became friends with a Video Archives customer called Jerry Martinez, another movie geek who found it extremely difficult to relate to anything if it did not have a film connection. Tall, gangly Quentin and the short, fat Martinez initially got embroiled in a row about Gremlins.

‘I hated it. He liked it,’ explains Martinez. ‘I had been a little hard on the film because I had been expecting something else. You have to remember, we are talking heavy film-geek speak here and we were referring to it as a genre of movie and whether it actually worked.’

Quentin was obsessed by the in-jokes in Gremlins and he was a big champion of the movie’s director, Joe Dante. Martinez joked that this had something to do with the fact that Quentin and Dante shared Italian origins. The movie was a classic example of Dante’s style. Littered with cinematic allusions – to director Frank Capra and 1950s sci–fi – and it used tension and expectation to comic and thrilling effect.

Quentin would now go to movie theatres with Martinez and his brother Chris and try to see every new movie on the first day it was released. More often than not, they would get in for the cheaper matinee performance of one movie and then pay out for an evening showing of another new film. Sometimes they would stay for the late-evening screening as well.

Back at Video Archives, Quentin helped Martinez get a job in the same way Roger Avary had helped him, and the family atmosphere grew even stronger. The staff there were beginning to get quite a reputation throughout the area for their knowledge and stock of obscure films. They even started to get phone calls from customers in different parts of the country armed with bizarre descriptions of little-known movies. Quentin, Martinez or Avary would then try and work out what they were referring to.

‘The difference with us was that we felt it was our duty to turn them on to as many of those less famous films as possible and expand their horizons,’ explains Martinez.

Quentin and his new friend also had a particular penchant for he Japanese TV action series Kage No Gundo, starring martial arts legend Sonny Chiba. In True Romance, Clarence (Christian Slater) attends a Chiba triple bill on his birthday. Quentin also showed just how deeply affected he was by certain movies when, after watching Chow Yun-Fat in John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow Part II, he turned up at Archives wearing a long coat and dark glasses and walked around with a toothpick in his mouth.

The store was open from 10am to 10pm and staff worked two shifts, although Quentin and his friends would often come early and leave late, hanging out at the shop. They would all congregate around one big-screen TV that hung from the ceiling, dominating the entire store. The staff would watch whatever movie took their fancy, regardless of the taste or sensibilities of their customers. If that movie caught the attention of customers and they looked vaguely interesting, Quentin, Avary or Martinez would start up a debate about some point or other to test that customer’s knowledge. If they turned out to be fellow movie geeks then they might even be offered a job at the store, after consultation with one of the owners.

Martinez got into trouble with some of the customers by holding his own private German season during which he screened some highly erotic movies in the middle of the day, sparking complaints from outraged parents of young children.

Nevertheless the Video Archives staff continued their system of having a separate shelf to place at least half a dozen movies centred on specific subjects. These topics, however, became increasingly esoteric, as Jerry Martinez’s brother Chris explains.

‘One time we ran a theme week that revolved around movies connected to water. They included The Poseidon Adventure, Water with Billy Connolly and Michael Caine, and Raise the Titanic.’

But on other occasions the subjects were far more intriguing. For instance, the staff once managed to get away with filling the shelf with films that only featured women beating men. ‘They went down very well with local neglected housewives,’ adds Martinez.

Sometimes customers would come in and suggest other movies that might qualify for that week’s particular theme. It all added to the unique atmosphere inside the store. The owners never really enforced any restrictions on their staff because they were rarely there, although Lance Lawson did manage to rival Quentin in his knowledge of certain types of movies. Lawson believed that as long as his staff were enthusiastic and interested in movies then anything went, within reason.

However, customers were up in arms when one staff member devised a Charles Manson section to coincide with the anniversary of the death of Sharon Tate. The films featured included Helter Skelter and a selection of cheesy Sharon Tate films. A number of regulars got upset and told Video Archives staff.

Lawson did get a bit peeved on that occasion, but both Quentin and Martinez insisted that the idea was so interesting that this outweighed the fact it might offend some customers.

Lawson was secretly very impressed by Quentin because ‘he could tell you who the DP [director of photography] was, who wrote the screenplay and probably do a couple of scenes including verbatim dialogue’.

Quentin was also responsible for tripling the number of ‘women in prison’ movies that were rented. One customer he made a convert out of was Gene Moore, whom he introduced to the likes of Caged Heat and The Big Bird Cage. Moore even got into a discussion one evening with Quentin about tipping in restaurants, which Quentin eventually used in the opening scene of Reservoir Dogs.

Quentin and his pals at Archives genuinely believed that their customers wanted to be told what was good. It was very much like an extension of the Hollywood executive’s traditional stance on new scripts. They wanted reassurance from others before they would consider watching or reading something new.

Quentin was a talented observer of other people and he grew to love and hate certain customers at Video Archives. One of his biggest irritations was listening to parents getting mad with their children because they wanted to watch a movie they had already seen before. Quentin sometimes took on the psychology of the child at this point because he appreciated that what they were thinking was, ‘Why should I try something that I might not like? I know I’m gonna like that.’ It actually made him wish he could be a child again because then he could watch the same movie on at least a dozen occasions and still laugh through it every time.

Video Archives was undoubtedly the single most important influence on Quentin’s eventual success because it was one of the few places where he could be a regular guy and get a regular job and still do what he enjoyed most. But, despite his outer contentment, there was still a killer lurking within. He wanted to get out there and prove he could do it. But first he needed to write something that would make people sit up and take notice.