Read an ExcerptCHAPTER 1 'I DIDN'T GO TO FILM SCHOOL, I WENT TO FILMS.' Video Archives Why is Quentin Quentin? The answer is both simple and telling. Late in her pregnancy, Connie Tarantino – henceforth the redoubtable 'Connie' – became hooked on the Western serial 'Gunsmoke', featuring a young Burt Reynolds as Quint Asper, the half-Comanche blacksmith who appeared for three seasons. Connie is half Cherokee, a fact which would contribute an aura of mystery to her extraordinary son. Something she dismissed as 'sensationalism'. 'Quint', however, sounded a tad too casual to her ears, and reading William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury led her to the similar but more upstanding 'Quentin', the name belonging to a smart, introspective and somewhat neurotic son of the pivotal Compson clan. So Quentin became Quentin thanks to a mix of high and low culture: the cheesy TV serial paired with a great American novel with its whirling array of charcters and voices. Connie and many of his early friends would know him better as 'Q'. Connie was only sixteen when Q came kicking and screaming into the world on 27 March 1963 in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he spent the first two years of his life. Exotic tales emerged in the wake of Reservoir Dogs' success, describing a hardscrabble infancy with a hillbilly grandfather running a moonshine business. Still in his diapers, he was already on the wrong side of the law. Connie would have to clear that up. Tarantino has no memory of Knoxville, and never knew his grandparents. That tincture of Huck Finn mentioned in early profiles was a fancy of journalists, although when Dennis Hopper later described him as the 'Mark Twain of the 90s' he wasn't so wide of the mark. They were two great American storytellers with a vivid and sometimes controversial grasp of American idiom. According to the sardonic Connie, the archetype for tough cookies like Jackie Brown and Kill Bill's Beatrix Kiddo, Tarantino was only born in Tennessee because, for want of a better reason, she decided to go to college in the state where she was born. Connie, who had led a peripatetic childhood (native of Tennessee, raised in Ohio, schooled in California), had married not for love but to become an emancipated minor (severing legal ties with her parents). It was, she said, 'a liberated thing'. Tony Tarantino, a part-time actor and law student five years her senior, wasn't around for long. In fact, at the time, he didn't even know his son was born. The marriage was over as soon as she found she was unexpectedly pregnant. 'He told me he couldn't have children,' she smarted. Finishing college, Connie fled back to the sunshine and freedom of Los Angeles, settling on the ticky-tacky urban sprawl of the South Bay area near the airport, first in El Segundo before finally putting down roots in Torrance. While multicultural, these were affluent middle-class neighbourhoods, something else she wanted to assure prospectors of the Tarantino legend. She soon established a good career for herself in the health-care industry. Bonnie, the homeward bound wife of Tarantino's prickly Jimmie in Pulp Fiction, is referred to as a nurse in another hommage à maman. In other words, the tenderfoot Tarantino did not go wanting. Nor did he have to tough it out on the streets of South Central. Connie remained the single dominant presence in Tarantino's upbringing, his moral compass and eternal combatant. She remarried several times to unreliable men. First came local musician Curtis Zastoupil, who adopted the young Quentin. Right into his twenties, Tarantino went by the name Quentin Zastoupil. Connie decided to add the middle name of Jerome, simply because she loved the image of a 'QJZ' mongram. Tarantino once contemplated taking Quentin Jerome as a stage name. The young Tarantino hung out with his stepfather Curt's coterie of musicians, listening to them banter colourfully about nothing much at all. Even as a toddler, he had picked up on the innate power of profanity. Connie would sigh at the memory of her three-year-old son defiantly retorting 'Bullshit!' to every request she made of him. She once even resorted to washing his mouth out with soap. The good it did. He just grinned. He would seldom budge from watching the television set, soaking up movies and shows like 'Kung Fu' (which, of course, featured David Carradine) and 'The Partridge Family'. With a startling facility for recall, he began amassing a treasure trove of pop cultural memories. In Pulp Fiction the young Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis' character) is first seen glued to the screen like a zombie-child watching the creepy 1950s cartoon 'Clutch Cargo' (which the director recalled watching). Connie would overhear foul-mouthed imprecations echoing through his bedroom door. Bursting in, she would find young Quentin creating scenes with his collection of G.I. Joes, claiming it wasn't his fault that they swore, it was just how his characters spoke. At fourteen he had experimented writing his first screenplay, Captain Peachfuzz and the Anchovy Bandit. It was a riff on the Burt Reynolds action-comedy Smokey and the Bandit, with car chases, an argot of CB radio terminology, and heroes who held up pizza parlours. Rather than pay for a babysitter, the liberal-minded Connie took him along to whichever film she was seeing. The American ratings system allowed a child of any age into an R-rated (the nearest equivalent to a UK 18) film as long as an adult accompanied them. 'Deliverance scared the living shit out of me,' he recalled, having seen it at the Tarzana 6 in a seminal double with The Wild Bunch. He was still only nine years old, and had no idea that Ned Beatty's character was being raped in Deliverance's most shocking moment, but the image was nevertheless filed away in that prodigious memory. Connie's third husband, Jan Bohusch, was the real movie addict. On an average Friday he would take the eager Tarantino to a three, a six, an eight and a midnight movie. Together they saw Aliens, Die Hard, The Godfather films and Brian De Palma movies like Scarface and Body Double. Typical of LA's crazy paving of city districts, while Torrance was middle-class, the notoriously ghettoized communities that encircled South Central were only a mile away across the freeway. Tarantino described with relish frequenting the area's 'ghetto theaters.' Each week they would play new kung-fu movies, or a Blaxploitation flick or horror, and he would religiously catch them all. A little further away was an arthouse cinema, where he soaked up French and Italian movies, his tastes broad and eclectic. There beneath the smoky projector beam he first saw the genre-twisting dreams of Jean-Luc Godard, which moved him so very deeply. Godard's famous aperçu that all you needed to make a film was 'a girl and a gun' was a lesson Tarantino took as gospel, even if the girl would have to wait until his second movie. He still avidly watched what he called 'the standard Hollywood movies' but his heart was with the contraband delights of J.D.'s Revenge and Lady Kung Fu. 'You could literally see stuff that you would never see in a Hollywood movie,' he enthused. To his beady eye, the exploitation films were scarcely more lurid than the art films. Sometimes it was hard to tell which one was supposed to be which. It was in that border country that Tarantino would settle as filmmaker. Later, discussing his approach, he willingly came clean. 'When I started to develop, for lack of a better word my "aesthetic" I loved exploitation movies.' Specifically, it was that jolt of the unexpected. His weren't films designed to comfort; they were meant to rouse us from our slumbers like the electrifying spasm of an adrenalin shot. It was a lonely vigil. Like Curtis before him, Jan Bohusch would split, leaving Tarantino to his own devices. 'There was nobody in school to talk about movies with,' he bemoaned. 'There was like no adults I could talk with ... I had to grow up to meet other adults like myself.' He would come to make films as a way of having that conversation with the world. His movies talked about other movies, making confidants and geeks of us all. Tarantino saw hundreds, maybe thousands, of movies from his childhood into his teen years. He was happiest in the dark, learning all he needed to know. He also read voraciously. Connie pushed the greats on him, but he gravitated to crime fiction. Some would style it pulp fiction. Symbolically, his first brush with the law came when he attempted to steal a copy of Elmore Leonard's The Switch from K-Mart. They called the cops, who were only satisfied when Connie grounded the 15-year-old for the whole summer: which meant no movies. Emerging from house arrest, having ironically caught up on his reading, Tarantino signalled his first urge to act. He asked to join a local community theatre. There was no doubt that he was a precociously smart kid; his IQ was measured at 160, but school was a prison. He was forever the outsider, dorky-looking and averse to sports. In class, he was disruptive, with a short attention span. He simply couldn't focus. For all their musicality and street smarts, the first drafts of his scripts were a traffic accident of spelling and grammar (QED: Inglourious Basterds). He spelled phonetically, and was completely self-taught. 'I was good at reading and I was good at history,' he recalled. History, he said, was like a movie. So Tarantino regularly played hooky, fuelling the image of him as a street punk drifting at the edge of the law. But he mainly snuck home to watch television, or went off to catch a movie. At sixteen he informed Connie he was dropping out. Connie bravely called his bluff, accepting his decision as long as he got a job. She wanted him to see that life without an education 'wasn't a picnic'. So began a series of odd jobs, the first of which had a Tarantinoesque ring to it. Still only sixteen, he lied his way into a job at the Pussycat Theater in Torrance – a porn cinema. Connie had no idea, he only told her he was an usher. Tarantino found he had little stomach for what was up on screen, turning his back on images he found too sleazy and an insult to his idea of what movies should be. Aside from his failed heist of the K-Mart book department, his other flirtation with the LA underworld amounted to a pile of unpaid parking tickets that landed him in county jail for ten days. His baptism into penal life came as a shock, but he left with a $7,000 backlog in fines cleared and stock of prison lingo to draw on. A deeper desire was calling. That urge to act rather than act up. In pursuit of his dreams, he moved from community theatre to classes at the James Best Theater Center. Best was celebrated for his role as the inept sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane in the teatime TV hi-jinks of 'The Dukes of Hazzard'. 'He had a class in Toluca Lake, right next to the HoneyBaked Ham,'__ recalled Tarantino, with a flash of piquant LA detail. He was a big fan. Not necessarily for 'The Dukes of Hazzard', but his earlier work in Samuel Fuller films like Shock Corridor and Verboten!. Fuller, through his gripping, antiheroic World War II movies, would have a big influence on Inglourious Basterds. Best was less Method in his approach than methodological, providing sound practical training in how to act for the camera. He helped jobbing actors to pick up five-minute bit parts in TV shows and actually make a living. Advice homaged in True Romance (the most nakedly autobiographical of all Tarantino's scripts) where Michael Rapaport's struggling LA actor auditions for real-life TV cop show 'The Return of T.J. Hooker' as a getaway driver. For one class Tarantino was asked to perform a scene from the 1955 Oscar-winning film Marty. Directed by Delbert Mann, Tarantino would emphasize, and written by the revered poet of the streets Paddy Chayefsky. A classmate by the name of Ronnie, who had a paperback of the original play, was impressed, not only with Tarantino's recall, but the fact he had added an entire monologue about a fountain. 'It's the best thing in there,' he told his friend. It was the first time someone had complimented his writing. Through Best, he also got a grounding in camera terminology: what was a rack focus or a whip pan. He began to stage and perform long, unbroken monologues he had written, testing them out for the films wandering though his imagination like ghosts. He began thinking more expansively, more like a storyteller. In any case, his acting career was getting nowhere fast. In fact, prior to Reservoir Dogs, his only professional role in ten disheartening years of classes was as an Elvis impersonator in an episode of the TV sitcom 'The Golden Girls'. With his jutting cartoon-hero jawline and high forehead and a likeable but clumsy bearing, Tarantino was never cut out to be a leading man. He knew that. But he dreamed there were roles out there for him: villains and getaway drivers that might earn him a dollar. A sea change was happening. Tarantino was awakening to the idea that he wanted to become a director. He knew so much more about film than his fellow pupils. More to the point, he cared so much more. 'My idols weren't other actors,' he said. 'My idols were directors like Brian De Palma. I decided I didn't want to be in movies. I wanted to make movies.' Next to De Palma, Tarantino's biggest influences were genre-hopping masters like Howard Hawks and Sergio Leone, the flamboyant maestro of Spaghetti Westerns. His top three films might change depending on his mood, but his founding fathers were carved in stone. On the day he decided to become a director, like a sign from movie heaven, Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West was on television. 'It was like a book on how to direct,' marvelled Tarantino, 'a film so well designed. I watched to see how the characters entered the frame and exited the frame.' Such was Tarantino's obsession with De Palma, the 1970s icon who mixed outrageous, kinetic camera moves with an exploitative, genre-busting kick in films like Carrie and the John Travolta thriller Blow Out (one of Tarantino's top three), he would keep scrapbooks of all the promotional interviews the director did for his latest film. On the day of its release, he would ritually go twice: first on his own to the earliest screening, then to the midnight showing with a friend. Video interviews exist of the two directors together – Tarantino melts back into the fan boy while the senior director smiles sheepishly at the adulation. Tarantino even had the nerve to write to a succession of his favourite directors requesting an interview for a book he was putting together. He wasn't lying exactly; he genuinely intended to write it someday. The likes of Joe Dante and John Milius agreed to meet, and he pressed them for details on how they built a career, thrilled simply to be able to talk movies with real directors. Meanwhile, Tarantino switched acting classes. Allen Garfield, his new teacher, had worked with Francis Ford Coppola in The Conversation and Wim Wenders in The State of Things. Moreover, he was located in Beverly Hills. It felt as if he was getting closer to the fountainhead. During all of this, the dormant acting career, the yearning to direct, and the daily grind of a succession of minimum-wage jobs, his sanctuary was Video Archives, an eccentric video outlet that occupied a former bicycle shop in a slab-like strip mall on North Sepulveda Boulevard in Manhattan Beach. From 1983 until 1994, when it slipped quietly out of business, the Archives was a daring repository of art films, exploitation flicks and back-catalogue obscurities. It was almost like the shabby, wood-shelved embodiment of Tarantino's cerebral cortex. Here the French New Wave prevailed over Schwarzenegger. In retrospect, as the Tarantino story has been told and retold in restaurants and bars and boardrooms, it became the hippest video joint in America. In truth, it barely broke even, but for Tarantino it was as close to heaven as you could find in the South Bay. The personnel would ebb and flow, hired, fired and rehired as they fell in and out of favour with the generally absentee manager Lance Lawson. On $4 an hour, the likes of Rand Vossler, Jerry Martinez, Stevo Polyi and Rowland Wafford could be found slouched behind the counter. Then there was Roger Avary, the hippyish art-school dropout with Tom Petty-like tresses who had got as far as messing around with Super-8 cameras, stop-motion and writing scripts. But the loudest know-all with the biggest brain, the unkempt sun around which they all orbited, was Tarantino. He had wandered in one day and got into an argument over De Palma with Lance, and was still fuming four hours later. The next day he returned to debate Leone. So effusive was he about movies, and so good at dissuading a customer from renting Top Gun and instead risking their night's entertainment on a Godard classic, that Lance had no option but to offer him a job. (Continues…)
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