TARGET AUDIENCE: A PERSONAL BOOK REVIEW
by David Guglielmo
Let’s get one thing out of the way: I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Tarantino fanatic. When PULP FICTION hit theaters in 1994, the noise was loud enough to reach even my seven-year-old ears. Tarantino was a punk rock provocateur who blurred the lines between low and high art, comedy and violence, and had a predilection for cheekily breaking the rules. While I had no idea which conventions needed subverting, I desperately wanted to see the movie. But as permissive as my parents were, they weren’t ready to take me to the theater to see it, even though I had just watched my first R-rated movie, SPEED. This one felt edgier—dangerous, even. By the time it arrived on home video, my mom had loosened up and used it as a bargaining chip to get me to do something I didn’t want to do. From the first scene, there was no tearing me away, and whatever went over an eight-year-old’s head didn’t matter. I felt the anarchic power of it. A bomb had exploded.
I told everyone at school about it, and I made friends with a boy one year my senior who had also seen it. Not only that—he owned it! His parents were divorced, and I would go to his father’s house after school, where he had not only PULP FICTION on VHS but an array of horror movie tapes purchased by his dad, along with a stack of Playboys handed down to him as his very own. He didn’t need to hide them! I had no interest in the world of kids. I wanted in on the adult one.
We’d watch PULP for years, to the point where it became a shared language, a secret club. When we’d go to his mom’s house, we’d take the tape with us so we could watch it there. In the bathroom, we’d leave out lines of baby powder masquerading as cocaine, along with a rolled-up dollar bill, for her to find, playfully poking at her fears that the movie might be too adult for our impressionable minds. “I said goddamn!”
She was right about the impressionable part, because no movie or work of art proved to be as formative for the rest of my life.
She was right about the impressionable part, because no movie or work of art proved to be as formative for the rest of my life.
In 2009, I was working at World of Video—a long-since-gone video store in Greenwich Village, New York—after graduating from film school. It was the year INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS was to be released. It was also the year I met Tarantino. I knew he lived within blocks of the store, but he had not yet visited while I was working. Then, one day, I saw him out of the corner of my eye as he passed the store on his way to the nearby Starbucks. This was my chance. I brazenly grabbed a copy of my college thesis film on DVD, which I kept handy—a spaghetti Western-style short heavily influenced by KILL BILL—and ran to the coffee shop, where I found him waiting on line.
“Mr. Tarantino,” I said, my heart pounding in my throat. “I’m such a big fan of yours… I made this movie, and I thought… maybe you’d like to watch it.” Then, in a moment of self-awareness: “You’ll see yourself all over it.”
He replied favorably, saying something to the effect of “Ah, cool, man!” He turned the cover over in his hand, looking at the front, then the back, then the front again. “Where’s your name?” I pointed to the bottom of the billing block. “Right on,” he acknowledged.
I checked all the nearby garbage cans later that day. He didn’t throw it into any of them.
I was determined to make a career for myself in film and felt New York City was too far away from the industry, so I booked a ticket to visit LA, with the intention of scoping it out and imagining myself living there. The trip would coincide with the release of BASTERDS. I was going to see it at the famous ArcLight Cinerama Dome. I had skipped high school to see KILL BILL, gotten in trouble, and then done it again for Vol. 2. Seeing a Quentin Tarantino movie on opening day, in the best possible theater, in the best possible seats, with only people who understand the gravity of the event, has always taken precedence over anything else happening in my life at the time.
As the lights dimmed in the dome, I saw Tarantino’s handwriting on screen. It was the first time I’d seen it, but of course I knew it was his. And how appropriate. When you truly love an artist, it is not because they make perfect works of art, or because their technical skill is superior to that of all other artists, or because their work is necessarily the most profound. It’s the way they make the art. It’s their voice, their brushstrokes, their handwriting. And INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, of all Tarantino’s movies, has his handwriting all over it.
For all his trendsetting and staying power, I’ve found the bookstore shelves surprisingly unsatisfying. The books I’ve encountered haven’t offered the depth I’ve wanted about his work, and I have yet to find a biography that feels definitive. But maybe his life is best approached through the movies themselves. In the introduction to For Keeps, Pauline Kael wrote, “I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.” Tarantino did something similar with Cinema Speculation, its film analysis driven by personal recollection, often through the eyes of his childhood self. We learn about him through the movies he’s seen, and now, with a new authorized series by Jay Glennie, through the movies he makes.
Last year, Glennie released the first volume, THE MAKING OF QUENTIN TARANTINO’S ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD. Now that I’ve shared my own personal recollection, let’s take a look at his second entry (in Tarantino fashion, they’re nonlinear), due to hit shelves November 10:
THE MAKING OF QUENTIN TARANTINO’S INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS.
Right from the start of the book, you’re reminded what a risk-taker Tarantino truly is. After GRINDHOUSE’s financial failure, studio offers to adapt existing I.P. came pouring in. But Tarantino has always understood his audience: fans will accept another director filming a Tarantino script (TRUE ROMANCE, NATURAL BORN KILLERS, and the upcoming CLIFF BOOTH movie), but when he’s in the director’s chair, they want an unadulterated original. So he dusted off a ten-year-old passion project that was more novel than screenplay and started giving it form, cutting entire storylines and streamlining INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS into something filmable. He wrote first by hand, in red and black ink, then typed with one finger on a Smith Corona from the ’80s. He doubled down on himself, and we’re all happier for it.
As a casting director, I found Glennie’s attention to the casting process refreshing, particularly Alexandra Montag’s accounts of working with Simone Bär. I can’t think of another book to compare it to. They welcomed actors with coffee, conversation, and cigarettes (!) to ease their nerves. Montag echoes something I’m always telling actors: “Actors want to be cast in the role, and we want them to be cast. It is the same!” Each major role gets its own story, culminating in an actor getting the offer. Every time I reached that part, I’d get emotional. Every single time. In my line of work, I can’t help it.
Before I was even fifty pages in, it became apparent that this is a coffee-table book in dimensions only. Sure, there are beautiful color plates—behind-the-scenes photos, concept art, and alternate poster designs aplenty—but the text is dense, with more words covering the page than pictures. At over 500 pages, the book had me wishing for a regular-sized edition I could carry around and read more easily. Taschen seemed to anticipate this desire with Lee Unkrich and J. W. Rinzler’s THE MAKING OF THE SHINING, releasing two portable companion volumes: one with the text and one with the pictures.
The financing scares (could a financially shaky Weinstein Company cash-flow the picture?) and accounts from agent Mike Simpson, lawyer Carlos Goodman, and various studio execs recall Thomas Schatz’s books on the studios’ inner workings. International co-productions, foreign sales, government subsidies, actor breakage, marketing meetings. We get to learn exactly how a movie of this magnitude comes together and gets made.
Here's the thing about Glennie: He’s not a stenographer—the man can write! While this is an oral history, his own voice and humor come through often in asides like “the fully German actor recalled with a laugh,” as Diane Kruger describes having to prove her nationality to a dubious Tarantino. His prose is particularly effective when setting a scene, or when a new character shows up, allowing them their own backstories and giving the book a lateral, novelistic quality that recalls Tarantino’s own introductions. Think HUGO STIGLITZ.
The best part of the pre-production portion—and it’s not only because I’m a casting director—comes when QT almost pulls the plug on the entire movie because he’s unable to find an actor to play its best and trickiest role, Col. Hans Landa. He’s ready to eat the money already spent out of pocket (to the tune of $100k/week) for pre-production and go back to the drawing board on an entirely new movie. As a reader, I believe him. His decision to scrap what was going to be his tenth movie, THE MOVIE CRITIC, shows that, whatever his reasons, he’s willing to walk away. Here, the compromise would have been casting the wrong Landa, and without the right Landa, BASTERDS would not work.
Of course, we know who’s coming: Christoph Waltz, whose years in German-language television hardly prepared the world for what he would do here. BASTERDS made him a star and won him an Academy Award; his next collaboration with Tarantino, DJANGO UNCHAINED, would bring him another. We eagerly await his arrival in the book, and it doesn’t disappoint. Their real-life dialogue is as delicious and crackling as a Tarantino script itself.
So the movie lives, and the book continues for another 400 pages through production, post, the mad dash to Cannes that some believed impossible, and the redemption of a much-needed box-office smash.
Ironically, but not surprisingly, Harvey Weinstein’s imposing, ticking time-bomb presence provides some of the book’s most entertaining passages, reminding me of when I rushed home from work every day to read Peter Biskind’s DOWN AND DIRTY PICTURES. At the risk of sounding provocative, it left me wanting a definitive biography of the most important producer of my moviegoing life—a welcome read, however disturbing it may be.
When the lights came back up at the Cinerama Dome on August 21, 2009, I was stunned and elated. Glennie repeatedly describes script readers’ disbelief that Tarantino could kill Hitler in a World War II period piece. Roughly one hundred years of cinema history, and this felt completely new. I felt that same shock and awe. It was brilliant. It took me back to 1995, watching PULP FICTION and seeing Vincent Vega die and then reappear later in the story, and to 2003, when I skipped school to watch KILL BILL VOL. 1 in Edgewater, New Jersey, and saw it suddenly break into an anime cartoon. There are many joys in watching a Quentin Tarantino movie, but the greatest is his daring. His choices surprise you, then feel inevitable. To film fans my age, slightly older and slightly younger, Tarantino is more than a filmmaker. He’s both our opinionated older brother and a tour guide through cinema’s past. With his encyclopedic knowledge and sometimes peculiar, eclectic taste, he sends us combing through his works, collecting influences like footnotes in a text.
The adjective Tarantino-esque goes beyond even movies and encompasses an entire personality brimming with idiosyncrasy. I have no idea what Martin Scorsese eats for breakfast, but I know Tarantino loves cereal. To enter his mind is like opening a mysterious glowing suitcase. Now Jay Glennie gets to reveal its contents. I can’t wait for the next installment.
David Guglielmo is a casting director, filmmaker, and lifelong student of film. He writes about films because he loves them.
