Cinema Speculation

Seeing Kill Bill Volume 1 was a core high school memory for me. I saw it with a group of friends and it blew our minds. I’d seen great action movies before and nothing this shout-at-the screen fun.

I’ve seen nearly all of Tarantino’s movies since and while a lot of his influences are pretty obvious from his movies, I didn’t actually know much about him. So when I heard about his new book, Cinema Speculation, I jumped at the chance to take a peek inside his head.

The book is extremely good. It contains some of the most earnest writing and heartwarming stories about what it’s like to become obsessed with art at a young age and then turn it into your life’s work.

The book has an interesting structure but I think it works really well. The first long chapter is biographical, covering the circumstances of his life that had him seeing movies as a child and early adolescent. The final chapter is a touching coda where he discusses Leon, a friend of his mother’s who he learned screenwriting from but who, needless to say, did not succeed in making any of his films.

The middle section is several chapters focusing on a movie from the 70’s that was formative for him or that he just treats as a jumping off point to talk about its director. Some of these chapters are a little dry and inside-baseball-y. But they are extremely rich in insights and occasional gossip. This is because QT is the perfect person to write a book like this for three reasons:

1. He is (obviously) extremely knowledgable about how movies are made, from watching and studying them all his life ¹.
2. He’s an industry insider with direct access to the people involved in making these movies.
3. He’s reached a level of success that allows him to be very unfiltered. He just doesn’t give a shit what he says or who he might upset by saying it.

And so each contains at least a few nuggets of wisdom or hilarious tidbits such as:

• The importance of picking good films to star in: Steve McQueen’s career tanked after he and his wife split up because she read all his scripts and knew what would be hits

• On the historical context of the bad guys in Dirty Harry:

  For many older white Americans, angry black militants scared them more than the Manson “Family,” the Zodiac Killer, and the Boston Strangler combined. The hippies disgusted them. Because the hippies were their children, and they were disgusted with their children. Hippies burning the American flag in protest of the Vietnam War made them livid with anger. But black militants scared the fuck out of them.

• All the drama Paul Schrader caused and dealt with in his multiple 70’s beefs with other screenwriters directors

• A really lovely profile of the critic Kevin Thomas and the essential role he played in shining a light on independent and international film:

  The first time many of us Los Angeles residents ever read about Wertmuller, Fassbinder, and Oshima was in Kevin Thomas’ writing. But along with making foreign movies more palpable to regular L.A. moviegoers, the other big job Kevin Thomas had was reviewing most of the new exploitation movies coming into town for the LA Times. And in regard to both positions, nobody in the country did it better.

• Sylvester Stallone: underrated. Qunicy Jones: overrated (at least at making movie scores).

The biographical parts of the book are my favorite though. The first chapter alone, “Little Q Watching Big Movies” is worth the price of admission. The book mostly covers the 70’s so from when he was between 7-17, roughly.

QT grew up the child of a single mother and she and his stepfather would take him out with them when they went out to dinner or to the movies on the condition that he wasn’t annoying. The knee-jerk reaction was that it was cool that they did this, and it was. But the additional context was that they gave him the option to stay home with the babysitter if he wanted to. But he chose to go to these movies and at 7, 8 years old was willing to keep quiet and not annoy anyone enough to do so. It was cool that they let him do this but it was cooler that he actually wanted to do it. As a result, he saw The Godfather, Dirty Harry, The French Connection, and countless others, when he was 7-9 years old. On bringing this up to his mom:

At some point, when I realized I was seeing movies other parents weren’t letting their children see, I asked my mom about it. She said, “Quentin, I worry more about you watching the news. A movie’s not going to hurt you.” Right fucking on, Connie!

One of my favorite parts of this section of the book was him describing seeing Blaxsploitation films after his mom and her long-term boyfriend split up and she “exclusively dated black men for the next three years”. Tarantino describes the formative experience of seeing Jim Brown in Black Gunn in a theater with his mom’s friend and being one of — if not the only — white kid there.

He describes everyone in the theater going absolutely bananas at the shootout scene. QT doesn’t explicitly say it in the book but you get the sense that in all the movies he’s made, he wants to have at least once scene where the audience is entertained to the same degree that those audiences in 1970’s Compton were.

I’ll be thinking about little Quentin in Compton now whenever I re-watch Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves. Or John Travolta in the bathroom in Pulp Fiction. Or Leonardo DiCaprio and the flamethrower at the end of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Footnotes

1. For example, on his love of Rolling Thunder: “I loved Rolling Thunder so much that years before it became available on Vestron Home Video—for a period of ten years—I followed it all over Los Angeles, whenever and wherever it played (before home video, cinephiles used to do things like that). Which would be easy enough once I had a car and knew how to drive. But before I knew how to drive or had a car, I’d travel by bus, hours away from my home, to some really sketchy neighborhoods to see Rolling Thunder unspool in some very unique movie theatres.” ↩