Today’s
topic of discussion revolves around my fascination towards the film director
Quentin Tarantino. I first became interested in Tarantino (both his life and
work) sometime in the first half of 1997. Why? I’m not entirely sure. I know I
had the hots for Uma Thurman at the time and I remember that back in the 90s
her image on the famous Pulp Fiction movie
poster was very ubiquitous (for example, the local video rental store we went
to back in the day had a Pulp Fiction poster
on display). And I remember some of my classmates talking about the movie in
high school every now and then, which further stoked my interest. The thing
was, at the time our parents were very strict about what kind of films my
brothers and I could watch, the rule being that we could start watching more
adult films when we were 18 . . . and I was around 16-17 when I became interested
in Tarantino. In fact, I purchased the Pulp
Fiction screenplay from a Waldenbooks at Lincoln Mall in June of ’97,
around the time I had my 17th birthday, the summer before I started
senior year in high school. It seems weird to me now, but I was so obsessed
with this director whose work I had never even seen that I actually read the
screenplay some months before I saw the actual film, though in November of that
same year (even though neither of us were yet 18) our parents relented and let
me and one of my younger brothers finally watch the movie (fun fact: around the
same time we also saw the well-cast Tarantino rip-off 2 Days in the Valley). That kind of opened the floodgates: soon
enough I had also seen Reservoir Dogs,
and in January 1998 my mom took one of my brothers and me to see Jackie Brown at the cinema (as it was
still in theaters at that point, having only been released the previous December). I also began collecting some of his other
screenplays, along with buying the CD soundtracks, and any book I could find
dealing with Tarantino.
Earlier I mentioned how it was strange that my first exposure to Pulp Fiction was via the written word, but in one sense it was also appropriate, what with the literary flourishes that Tarantino brings to his films (indeed, I know a fair amount of fellow writers who admire Tarantino, and I suspect it might be for those aforementioned literary flourishes: the way his films are often divided into chapters like most novels do, his at times non-linear structures and use of flashbacks, things like that). I can’t say Tarantino was the first film director I idolized: as a typical 80s kid, at an early age I gravitated towards George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and in truth (as I've noted in the past on this blog) my earliest ambition was to be a film director. But with Tarantino, not only was there the added bonus that he also wrote his own films (which the writer in me admired), but he also had a cool/hip factor that, to me at least, was a new thing (I also think that, like Bret Easton Ellis, he’s far more intelligent/erudite than his inarticulate public image often suggests). Certainly he had a big impact on my life as an artist: before I read the Pulp Fiction screenplay, the books I was writing in high school up to that point were all plot, plot, plot: but with Tarantino’s films I saw that not everything you did in a work of fiction had to just advance the story forward . . . I realized that you could also have characters just hanging out and bullshittin’ with each other about pop culture. In a funny sort of way, even though my novel Harlem Smoke was conceived and marketed as my Lovecraft novel, in some regards it was also kind of a subconscious Tarantino-inspired project, in that a lot of the book is really just characters hanging out and shooting the shit (much like the first half of Jackie Brown, my favorite Tarantino movie): I even brought back the character of Iris Brant, the star of my 1998 novel Arthouse (which was one of the first of my post-Tarantino books). It was also through Tarantino that I got interested in indie films in general (and really, the 90s was a great period for indie films), which led me in turn to discover the work of the Coen Brothers and David Lynch (again, in 1998).
Today’s featured book in my ongoing Bathroom Reads series wasn’t the first book on Tarantino’s life and career I ever purchased: that would be Quentin Tarantino: Shooting From The Hip by Wensley Clarkson, which I got shortly after the Pulp Fiction screenplay, at the very same Waldenbooks. And yet, while I’ll still flip through the Clarkson book every now and then out of nostalgia, I don’t do it as an annual bathroom read like I do today’s book, which is King Pulp: The Wild World of Quentin Tarantino, by Paul A. Woods (first published in 1996, expanded in 1998: for the curious, the writer also did a book on David Lynch for the same publisher, which I can also recommend). I’m not quite sure when I got this book, but I believe it was at a Borders sometime in 1998. Bad cover art/unflattering photo of Quentin aside, it’s a decent enough summary of Tarantino’s 90s output, divided into 8 hefty chapters, with a generous selection of (mostly black & white) photographs. Chapter 1 deals with Tarantino’s early years and upbringing, his time working at Video Archives, his early screenwriting attempts, and so on. Chapter 2 deals with Reservoir Dogs, Chapter 3 revolves around True Romance, Chapter 4 concerns itself with his various movie influences (including a long and fascinating section on Italian exploitation movies), Chapter 5 is about Pulp Fiction, Chapter 6 tackles Natural Born Killers, Chapter 7 investigates some of his post-Pulp work (including Four Rooms and From Dusk Till Dawn: I confess I’ve yet to see the latter), while the final chapter is all about Jackie Brown. In other words, perhaps it is a bit outdated (though I think a third edition may have been released in 2005, covering the Kill Bill films), but still of interest to anyone interested in all things Tarantino.
