MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > OT: QT on Bill Maher, Kimmel, etc

OT: QT on Bill Maher, Kimmel, etc

posted 4 years ago by swanstep (2745)
48 replies | jump to latest

QT has been out on several talk shows this week (clips available on youtube if you search on the obvious terms) promoting his new, paperback-novel version of Once Upon a Time In Hollywood. On Kimmel about the only points of note were that QT saluted Israel's covid performance (he lives in Tel Aviv for the most part these days) as 'world best' [Israel has about 600 per million death rates so far, about the same as Canada. That's 1/3 of the death rates in US, UK, Brazil and other pretty hapless countries but is miles away from world-best.], and he mentioned in passing that Jaws 'may be the greatest movie ever made'.

On Bill Maher things were more interesting. Maher chastised him for committing to make only one more movie, and QT squirmed a bit in response. Then they began discussing the current climate of culture and film production as being shadowed by ideology/virtue-signalling/political correctness/etc.. QT suggested that nowadays is just the new '80s (which itself was just the new '50s) when a certain sort of conformity of thought (and film financing) smothered the sort of culture that QT likes. QT went on to paint a simplified history of Hollywood: '40's and noir films good; '50s conformity and sentimentality and censorship bad; 1960-1966 is 'the '50s part 2'; 1967-1979 the real sixties and New Hollywood arrives and everything's wild and great; 1980s is awful corporatization and political correctness; '90s is the new '70s when QT himself saves the day; and by now we're back to the '80s model which is horrible.

This simple periodization irritated me. For one thing, I see noir and other code-skirting continuing and intensifying throughout the '50s and leaking into Westerns, general dramas, etc.. Great edgy films occur throughout the '50s and early '60s, and QT's own films show lots of their influence. E.g.,The Killing and Kiss Me Deadly were all over both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. And most of the naturalistic acting styles that people QTs films just *were* built up through the period that QT here pooh-poohs. Without Brando, Clift, Caroll Baker, et al., you don't get Sweet Smell, Face in the Crowd, Touch of Evil, Wrong Man, Psycho by the end of the '50s, let alone the Pacino/De Niro '70s.

Anyhow, QT is entertaining and worth checking out even if what he's saying is his usual mixed bag.

[–] swanstep (2745) 4 years ago

The NY Times's review of the OUATIH novelization:

Quentin Tarantino Turns His Most Recent Movie Into a Pulpy Page-Turner

By Dwight Garner

June 28, 2021

Quentin Tarantino’s first novel is, to borrow a phrase from his oeuvre, a tasty beverage.

It’s his novelization of his own 2019 film “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” (the book’s title omits the ellipsis). It’s been issued in the format of a 1970s-era mass-market paperback, the sort of book you used to find spinning in a drugstore rack.

It’s got a retro-tacky tagline: “Hollywood 1969 … You shoulda been there!” If it weren’t so plump, at 400 pages, you could slip it into the back pocket of your flared corduroys.

Tarantino isn’t trying to play here what another novelist/screenwriter, Terry Southern, liked to call the Quality Lit Game. He’s not out to impress us with the intricacy of his sentences or the nuance of his psychological insights.

He’s here to tell a story, in take-it-or-leave-it Elmore Leonard fashion, and to make room along the way to talk about some of the things he cares about — old movies, male camaraderie, revenge and redemption, music and style. He gets it: Pop culture is what America has instead of mythology. He got bitten early by this notion, and he’s stayed bitten.

The novel is loose-jointed. If it were written better, it’d be written worse. It’s a mass-market paperback that reeks of mass-market paperbacks. In my memory, it’s the smell of warm coconut oil and dust mites and puddling Mercurochrome.

“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” runs along the same tracks as the film. Some dialogue is similar, just about word for word. But the novel departs from the movie in ways small and large.

[–] swanstep (2745) 4 years ago

(cont.) The movie’s Grand Guignol ending, for example, which culminates with the aging actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) torching a member of the Manson family with a flamethrower, is dispensed with, early in the novel, in a few sentences.

The killings make Rick, whom we discover is bipolar, famous. He hated hippies anyway. Now he becomes “a folkloric hero of Nixon’s ‘silent majority’” and a regular on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” Yet, from his acting career, he remembers every misstep, every mortification, every slight.

New Manson family scenes are tucked in. Tarantino goes so deep into Manson’s once-promising music career, you may feel you’re reading a back issue of Rolling Stone or Mojo magazine. He considers Charlie’s “ooga-booga” dances.

He adds a long, sinister and cinematic scene in which Pussycat (Margaret Qualley in the film) enters a strange house, removes her clothes, inserts a red light bulb into her mouth so that her lips are “wrapping around the silver metal coil” and climbs toward the bedroom of a sleeping elderly couple.

Once up there, Pussycat screws the red bulb into a lamp, turns it on and leaps screaming into the couple’s bed, scaring them witless. The Mansons referred to these sorts of “benign” outings as “creepy crawling.”

“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is, at heart, Cliff Booth’s novel. Booth (Brad Pitt in the film) is Dalton’s gofer and stunt double. His back story gets filled in. In World War II, we learn, he killed more Japanese than any other American soldier, and earned the Medal of Valor twice.

He’s filled with macho advice, which he casually dispenses. If you want to know what killing a man feels like, without actually killing a man, Booth tells Dalton, grab a pig from behind and stick a knife into its throat. Then hold on tight until it dies. It’s as close as you can legally get.

[–] swanstep (2745) 4 years ago

(cont.)Yet Booth has a sensitive side. He’s a movie obsessive. A lot of his opinions resemble Tarantino’s own. There’s good writing here about acting, about foreign films, about B movies, about early movie sex scenes and about television action directors.

Booth is a fan of the actor Alan Ladd, for example, because: “When Ladd got mad in a movie, he didn’t act mad. He just got sore, like a real fella. As far as Cliff was concerned, Alan Ladd was the only guy in movies who knew how to comb his hair, wear a hat or smoke a cigarette.”

Some of these opinions sound perhaps too much like Tarantino’s own: “Once Fellini decided life was a circus, Cliff said arrivederci.” There’s a list of Cliff’s favorite Akira Kurosawa films. About the cinematography in the 1967 Swedish film “I Am Curious (Yellow)”: “Cliff wanted to lick the screen.”

We discover how Dalton and Booth became friends. Booth saved him from an on-set fire, telling him: “Rick, you’re standing in a puddle of water. Just fall down.” We learn how Booth got his pit bull, a star of the movie. He was given the dog, a champion fighter, to pay off a debt. Booth tags along on some of the fights.

In the movie, Booth refuses to let the dog eat until he takes the first bite of his own dinner: macaroni and cheese from a box. About that dish, Tarantino writes: “The directions say to add milk and butter, but Cliff thinks if you can afford to add milk and butter you can afford to eat something else.”

Oh, and Booth did kill his wife. In the film, that plot point is left hanging and has been much debated. Tarantino, happily, doesn’t care if you find Cliff to be lovable.

[–] swanstep (2745) 4 years ago

(cont.)The murder scene is absurdist in its excess, of course. Tarantino rarely lets a killing go to waste. Violence is the wax his skis ride on. He knows how to fill the screen’s rectangle — or a page in a pulp novel.

The couple are on a boat. Tired of being belittled, Booth impulsively shoots his bikini-wearing wife with a spear gun, which essentially tears her in half. He regrets this immediately. He holds the two parts of her together for seven hours while they lovingly recount their whole relationship. When the Coast Guard arrives and tries to move her, she comes apart and dies.

If I longed at that moment for her — her top half, that is — to slowly hoist an enormous handgun and shoot the disbelieving Cliff in his bronze forehead, well, that’s a different novel.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

QT has emerged from coronavirus "celebrity lockdown" to pick up where he left off -- pushing this plan of his for "just one more film" (to which I say: hey, what if it doesn't come out until 10 years from now?) and creating, I think, a rather nifty argument about directors and age which stimulates thought.

I didn't see the Kimmel, but I saw the Maher, and I noted that Maher came out swinging: "...this RIDICULOUS idea about only making one more movie. What's the MATTER with you?" It looked a little pre-planned to me, like Maher told QT in advance "Hey, I'll attack you on that -- saying you're at your peak -- and you can have fun coming back at me."

I keep rolling QT's stance around in my head. I think it is unprecedented. A few actors -- like Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy -- told the world: "This is my final film." (Tracy died two weeks after HIS was made.) But directors?

Hitchcock went the other way while promoting Family Plot:

"How could I retire? What would I do, sit in a corner and read a book? I intend to go on forever." And for me as a Hitchcock fan...I would have been fine with that..even if the movies had been no better than Family Plot.

Two new thoughts about QT's idea:

ONE: One thing that IS different for him, is that QT WRITES his own material and that's hard to do. A director who works on the writings of younger people can "go on forever" because frankly (as I understand it), movie directing isn't THAT hard. But screenwriting dialogue at QT's level is...artful. HARD. And -- unlike Billy Wilder, who was still writing 1959 scripts in 1981 -- I don't think that QT's dialogue ever ages.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

TWO: QT's theory (as I have said) applies well to guys like Hitchcock and Ford (who drank a lot and got no exercise) -- 70 was a pretty rough age back then. But Spielberg has just signed a deal with Neflix at age 74 ...just a shade younger than Hitchcock when he made the "old man's" Family Plot.

Begged question: hey, has Spielberg been all THAT good in recent years.

I've always contended that Spielberg's "glory years" were 1971 (Duel) through 1982 ("ET.") His movies started getting rather bumbled and infantile after that -- The Twilight Zone(his segment), Temple of Doom(more bad than good, and truly silly sometimes), The Last Crusade(a competent re-tread of Raiders, but little more.) Jurassic Park was a giant hit with little of the resonance of Jaws(the presence of the kids did this, but so did the script.) Schindler's List is a an achievement , as is Saving Private Ryan, but things were really hit and miss for Steve during those years.

So maybe QT's theory fits Spielberg, even.

I'm not sure if it fits Scorsese. Scorsese made "The Wolf of Wall Street" at a pretty old age. I think not only is it one of his best works(FUNNY) but...the screen is filled with young people having sex and doing wild things and it feels like a young man's movie.

---

QT and Mahler (who was a bit out of his depth) spoke over each other, but I caught this exchange:

Maher: What about Eastwood? He's directing at 101 years old!
QT: Oh, you people always bring up 2 or 3 guys to debate me...

So QT acknowledges that "two or three guys" working today beat his theory. (Ridley Scott maybe?)

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

CONT

The truth of the matter is that QT is as right (Capra, Hawks, Ford, Wilder) as he is wrong(Scorsese, Scott...maybe Spielberg) on this "late films thing." Kubrick is a special case -- spaced out his movies by decades and died promptly at 70.

And Hitchocck is a special case. Frenzy, two films from the end, got some of Hitch's best reviews, 10 Best Lists...hell some directors on his centennial named Frenzy one of Hitchcock's 10 best films -- and left Rear Window off the list! But everything AROUND Frenzy(from Marnie to Family Plot) is sub-par.

Which brings up another point: I'm glad that we HAVE everything from Marnie to Family Plot -- Hitchcock was clearly Hitchocck in these movies, they felt special, he was different from most, it was good to have him around even at half-speed.

QT is kind of acknowledging that...he has said that he might make "old man movies" that should not be considered among his "true" work. That's how it was with Hitchcock from Marnie on -- even Frenzy seemed a bit "old man," I will admit.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

QT suggested that nowadays is just the new '80s (which itself was just the new '50s) when a certain sort of conformity of thought (and film financing) smothered the sort of culture that QT likes. QT went on to paint a simplified history of Hollywood:

---

That part was funny to me. QT is more rich and famous than all of us here...but his movie opinions are pretty much like ours: HIS. Not gospel. Subject to debate. As someone said "Everybody's second business is the movie business."
--
'40's and noir films good; '50s conformity and sentimentality and censorship bad; 1960-1966 is 'the '50s part 2'; 1967-1979 the real sixties and New Hollywood arrives and everything's wild and great; 1980s is awful corporatization and political correctness; '90s is the new '70s when QT himself saves the day; and by now we're back to the '80s model which is horrible.

---

I track with some of that . 1960-66 as "50's part two" had the Hays Code still in force, but always been nibbled at, from Psycho to Virginia Woolf. This mix of restraint and rebellion gave us some really great films, I think.

My memory of the 80's is: kids movies. Lucas and Spielberg "locked up" the decade with Star Wars and Indy Jones, and surrounded those two franchises with stuff DIRECTED by Spielberg(ET) or PRODUCED by Spielberg (Back to the Future, Gremlins, InnerSpace)

I liked the 90's a lot better. QT was part of that, but a LOT of great thrillers and crime pictures emerged: Silence of the Lambs, Carlitos way, 7even, LA Confidential(my favorite of the decade), Heat, Misery -- it was in some ways The Second Coming of Hitchcock -- well crafted thrillers for adults.

---

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

This simple periodization irritated me. For one thing, I see noir and other code-skirting continuing and intensifying throughout the '50s and leaking into Westerns, general dramas, etc..

---

Yes...true. Its hard to generalize in general. The true line of demarcation is 1968 -- Hays Code gone, sex and nudity and cussing and ultra-violence in -- but in truth, the coming of Lucas(not for long) and Spielberg(forever) and their knockoffs -- and Disney...really moved AWAY from the R rating. Nolan's Batmans are perhaps more influenced from the 90's(LA Confidential, Heat) than the 80s..but he is still in a kid's world there, even if made for adults. The rest of the time -- a good, adult artist. (But QT's in a fun class by himself.)

I DO believe that the Hays Code is back today....(generalizing again) from the left rather than the right. We're back to "you can't put that on screen" again.

And Bill Maher DID say the right thing when he praised QT for never backing down and giving in.

Its easier to do than you'd think.

[–] swanstep (2745) 4 years ago

And Bill Maher DID say the right thing when he praised QT for never backing down and giving in.
Its easier to do than you'd think.

The thing is that a lot of the time QT does attract a lot of what almost anyone can identify as truly inane 'pearl-clutching' criticisms (which now have a home on the more-woke-than-thou side of twitter). For example OUATIH was loosely criticized for not giving Margot Robbie's Sharon Tate enough lines (i.e. to satisfy some twitter-bozo's conception of optimal female character-hood). QT is right to swat that sort of criticism away because it's simultanously lame but also, as both QT and Maher appreciate, genuinely menacing *if* you don't stand up to it and immediately reassert your prerogatives as an artist, and that the twitter-bozo's a wannabe-Stalinist cultural commisar who should make their own damn movie.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

The thing is that a lot of the time QT does attract a lot of what almost anyone can identify as truly inane 'pearl-clutching' criticisms (which now have a home on the more-woke-than-thou side of twitter).

---

And you know, sometimes I wonder. There's a joke in the movie "Matinee" -- set in 1962 -- where these two guys are picketing William Castle's new horror movie in front of the theater(oh, he's not called that, but he is, played by John Goodman.)

Eventually it is revealed that Castle(?) hired the two guys to picket his movie...to drum up publicity.

In short, maybe some of the pearl clutching is ginned up. But more likely, the pearl clutching is a way to get "click bait" for ANY new movie. Or more likely still...these people really DO think this way, and QT drives them particularly nuts.

A lot of filmmakers DO have to kowtow -- those guys who got rid of Mrs. Bates' dressed to kill look for instance, on Bates Motel. They have little power, they don't want to get fired.

But QT -- like Hitchcock before him -- built up a ton of box office, a lot of hit films, and in QT's case, some serious Oscars and....doesn't have to listen to anybody. (It took some fighting on Hitchcock's part, but this is how he got to make Vertigo and Psycho and Marnie and Frenzy.)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

I neglected to note what your OP noted: QT is out and about doing interviews to promote his paperbook version of OAITH. So he has a "business reason" to be out there. But boy is he generating internet articles. He IS like Hitchcock in that he is a pop celebrity of sorts, whose appearances and interviews are their own reward. Love him or hate him, or in between, he is one of the few filmmakers today who is NEWS.

Checking his quotes in a variety of places, one finds him defending:

The beating of Daisy Domergue in The Hateful Eight. (He noted that her bigoted gang killed black people and that a man would get the same beating.)

The killing of the psycho Manson women in OAITH. (He noted how savage they were -- I'll note they stabbed a pregnant woman , almost to term, over her pleas for mercy.)

The Bruce Lee scene in OAITH ("Hey, stuntmen of the time said Bruce Lee treated them with contempt and didn't pull punches in fight scenes.")

And practically everything else he said. I got the feeling that QT has always known these things about the movies he makes, and just has nothing but contempt for the know-nothings who make their living off of their ignorance.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

For example OUATIH was loosely criticized for not giving Margot Robbie's Sharon Tate enough lines (i.e. to satisfy some twitter-bozo's conception of optimal female character-hood).

---

Side-bar: Scorsese got the same criticism -- in the same year -- over how Anna Pacquin barely got any lines in The Irishman, and the criticism was down right idiotic. Anna's character doesn't speak much because the whole movie is moving to the ONE time she did say something important to her father "Why didn't you call?" In that one line, the daughter is telling her father that she knows he is a hitman, and that he killed Hoffa, and says the father in narration "She never spoke to me again."

Plus: Pacquin's silent face all through the movie was a thousand words.

Its a different "play" with Robbie's Sharon Tate (though how odd that both movies got the same criticism about the woman not speaking) Having seen the movie, I can't say that Robbie's Tate gets all THAT much to do, but it is kind of the point: Sharon Tate was a budding movie star(maybe -- Matt Helm is no classic) married to a great director(but how long would that marriage last?) and pregnant with his child. She's a bit of an airhead, but sweet about it. She's very pretty...which gets you far without having to think much or say much. And she became famous because she was slaughtered. That outrage informs the whole movie.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

QT is right to swat that sort of criticism away because it's simultanously lame but also, as both QT and Maher appreciate, genuinely menacing *if* you don't stand up to it and immediately reassert your prerogatives as an artist, and that the twitter-bozo's a wannabe-Stalinist cultural commisar who should make their own damn movie.

---

Yep.

Here's the thing. A "newbie" screenwriter who might turn that script into a studio would be given "studio notes": take out the Bruce Lee scene, give Sharon Tate more to do, back off on so brutally killing the two women at the end. And likely that material WOULD be taken out or changed.

QT has no such constraints. Only the critics can hassle him about it,and he made that point with Maher: "You don't like it...make your own movie. YOU go to the Cannes film festival." Its that justifiable arrogance of someone who jumped all the hurdles(via his talent) to get a power that a critic will never really have. It eminds me of Bill Cosby's remarks, years ago, when people derided his high pay and that of other stars: "You don't like that? Well, YOU try to join us, and become a star. Then talk to me about it." (Mr. Cosby back in the news...)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

CONT

QT and Maher - -hardly Republican conservatives -- becried how ideology is starting to invade criticism AND studio decision making.

I will note: Roger Ebert was the most famous (and wealthiest?) film critic. He got some things wrong(about Frenzy, for example), he wrote without precision sometimes, but his writing could be pretty good and insightful too.

Well, he passed, and now his website consists of one good critic(Matt Zeitzer Sotz, or however he spells it) and a bunch of political columnists posing as critics, who write every review through a political prism and judge accordingly. This would work better if they could write , but they can't.

QT has no patience with them.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Note in passing:

QT's "book tour inteviews" got into violence and criticism and stopping at 10 movies and all that, but...Harvey Weinstein had to come up.

I buy what QT's saying , within bound: (paraphrased) "Everybody knew...but we thought it was just chasing secretaries around the desk..I heard nothing about rapes."

I suppose the irony here is that Harvey Weinstein MADE QT (QT had the talent, but Harvey bankrolled it and promoted it) and they were connected at the hip for awhile there. As was Weinstein with the lesser young hipster, that "Clerks" guy. QT couldn't deny that linkage and how his power derived from Harvey's.

So..its how the world works. And it is certainly how Hollywood works, from time immemorial. Fat producers coming on to pretty young women seeking work. Seems to me the only real way to "stop Harvey" is what Brad Pitt evidently did when Harvey harassed Gwyneth Paltrow: tell him to stop doing that or get punched. "Personal enforcement."

As it turned out, Weinstein lost his business, QT took his work to other buyers...it all worked out in the end.

Its a "non-topic" of great importance: how do you stop what men and women do in Hollywood, when sometimes it is consensual, sometimes it is not, sometimes the woman offers herself, sometimes she does not.

You let it sort itself out, I guess. And if you are QT...you apologize for what you knew and what you should have done.

And then you sell your paperback.

Can't wait to read it.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

PS.

I do believe that Hitchcock, like QT after him, probably hid a contempt for the critics who came after him and didn't really understand him or his filmmaking.

The critic who called Vertigo "A Hitchcock-and-bull story, in which the mystery isn't so much whodunit, as who cares?"

The critic who said the killer in Psycho, "Had no human passion or motives..."

The critic who called North by Northwest "unconsciously funny" (Hitchcock's reply: I NEVER do anything unconsciously.")

Personally, I daresay Hitchcock must have been frustrated by critics who lingered on the length and style of the psychiatrist scene in Psycho -- while ignoring entirely that the scene wraps up a BIG mystery that was planted all through the film: "Who killed Mrs. Bates and her lover?" Plus telling us that Norman stuffed his own mother. Plus telling us that Norman killed two other women. Roger Ebert is among those who just seems to have ignored that, not very smart.

Then there is this POSTHUMOUS assault on Hitchcock's reputation: on the basis of one woman's ever-changing testimony(Tippi Hedren, who later made a movie that subjected her family to on-screen attacks by wild cats) against woman(Joan Fontaine) after woman (Ingrid Bergman) after woman(Grace Kelly) after woman(Janet Leigh) after woman(Doris Day) after woman(Hitchock's female movie making co-workers) who said he was great with women...today's "modern smear press" likes to make him out as some sort of predator.

QT's getting the revenge that Hitch never got to get.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

PPS.

QT told Bill Maher that he currently lives in Israel, and recently had to take his wife and 15-month old son into an underground shelter during the bombings there.

Intriguing that a man whose film canon largely consists of violence has chose to live in a land where it is real and all around him.

Rich and famous movie stars (and star directors) can today live wherever they want in the world. Its a far cry from when all of them lived in Beverly Hills and went to Palm Springs on the weekend(well, Hitchcock went to Santa Cruz.) George Clooney lives in Italy; Brad Pitt and the disgraced Johnny Depp live in France. And QT -- Israel?

Its evidently because he has a beautiful model Israeli wife .

[–] swanstep (2745) 4 years ago

And QT -- Israel?

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

QT clarifies in anther recent interview that he never intended to move to Israel full-time, rather he and his wife had intended to split each year about 4 months Tel Aviv/8 months LA. But covid hit and suddenly he's ended up spending 15 months straight in Tel Aviv.

---

Aha. Best laid plans...

...and I do rather like how with COVID easing up in most places, QT himself seems to have seen fit to release his tasty new book and make the rounds. "He's baaack."

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

The NY Times's review of the OUATIH novelization:

Quentin Tarantino’s first novel is, to borrow a phrase from his oeuvre, a tasty beverage.

It’s his novelization of his own 2019 film “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” (the book’s title omits the ellipsis). It’s been issued in the format of a 1970s-era mass-market paperback, the sort of book you used to find spinning in a drugstore rack.

-- I "embargoed" reading that review(though, thank you, swanstep, I usually can't get through the NYT paywall)...

...and then I bought the book and read it in what they call "one convulsive gulp" the way a summer paperback should be read(if not at the beach)...in the backyard on a sunny day.

SPOILERS for the novel of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood:

First of all, isn't it amazing that one would have to announce that there ARE spoilers for a "novelization" of a movie that's already been out, and that many of us know by heart.

This is a rousing success of a project...in which QT adapts his style to a new form -- the book -- in ways that are very close to his movie style.

He has created something very special here -- I expect that after it has time to sink in and circulate, this book will generate as many 'internet think pieces' as the movie did. (They are already starting -- clicks are sought.)

Where to start?

I'll pick this:

Brad Pitt won a deserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing Cliff Booth, the disgraced movie stuntman who demonstrated the ultimate in friendship to his "boss" Rick Dalton, and John Wayne level heroism fighting off the Manson killers(OK, pick Gary Cooper if you don't like Wayne)

BUT ...if Brad Pitt had been given all the deleted scenes and deleted lines that Cliff is given in this novel...he likely would NOT have been NOMINATED for the Oscar, let alone win.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Cliff is pretty grim in the book...murderous (many times over), bigoted, homophobic. I'm generally in favor of QT "taking on the cancel culture," but on the other hand, I very much like the Cliff Booth we have in the movie -- possessed of a capacity for violence, yes, but not THIS bad. QT did better by giving us this "alternative universe" Cliff in book form.

But this: in the movie, I felt that the (great) scene where Brad Pitt spent a Saturday night alone with his dog instead of "on the town' with some hot chick, felt wrong. THIS handsome guy, all alone on a Saturday night?

Well, that's remedied in the book. Cliff is a chick magnet and a "p-hound," and the center of more than a few sex scenes.

I'm reminded that the kind of 1969 paperback that QT is trying to emulate here invariably had one or more lurid sex scenes back then. There was no "Hays Code for paperbacks"(well not much of one ) and actors didn't have to be filmed...the authors just wrote it down and the reader imagined.

The Godfather novel is perhaps the peak of this, but the novel of Jaws had a hot sex scene(a studly Hooper and Chief Brody's wife) and as i recall even Leon Uris's "Topaz" (which became a staid Hitchcock film) had a sex scene -- but between Juanita de Cordoba and Rico Parra(it starts as a rape but then Juanita "consents" -- hey, why didn't Hitch film THAT?).

Anyway, QT puts one or two such scenes in this book and while I was at first taken aback , soon I "got it" -- QT's giving us the full 1969 book experience. Obligatory and graphic sex that could not be put in a movie.

---

The Manson climax is moved to the front of the book.

Brilliant: QT knows that his fans know the climax of OAITH, so he plays it early and gets into how Rick Dalton got some GOOD work, but not great work , out of killing those hippie scum(interesting: Manson evidently gets away, nothing more happens or is said about him.) A happy ending for Cliff, too: he got to keep working for Rick on the new projects.

And then, QT devises two entirely new scenes for his finale -- and there are photographs FROM the two scenes on the back of the book! He filmed them and evidently cut them and...here they are in book form. (Compare this to the famous scene of Sam and Lila talking on the way to the Bates Motel about Marion -- we know the scene was cut, but we don't know if Hitchcock filmed it. QT DID film these scenes.)

---
CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Cliff Booth knows and loves foreign films of the 50s/60s.

As critics are already pointing out, QT gives several characters HIS knowledge of movies, but none moreso that Cliff Booth, who is revealed to be a foreign movie fan(50s/60s) and clearly speaks FOR QT in like Kurosawa, not liking Truffaut, and finding Antonioni "a fraud."

In short, QT spends a lot of pages of this re-telling of OAITH turning the book into a "movie review essay book" and...that's OK. Its all part of the "stew" here. Psycho gets a few lines(in comparison to Polanski's Repulsion) as does Hitchcock in general. But only a few lines. Respectful, though.

True to his movie nerd manner -- "B division" -- QT tells us more than we need to know about directors like Paul Wendkos and William Witney...and about actors like Kaz Garas and George Maharis(oops, I KNEW those names. So sue me. My era.)

He namedrops Rod Taylor a lot(whose final film was Inglorious Basterds) and Bruce Dern(who is IN OATIH.)

I think there's a weird "tactical error" in the book. The first chapter is perhaps the most boring, and it is re-staging of the opening scene in the movie: Agent Marvin Schwarz(Al Pacino) meeting with Leo to tell him he's washed up as a TV heavy and needs to get to Italy , pronto.

In the film, this scene is set at Russo and Franks during lunch. In the book, it is set in Pacino's office. Was this how the script was originally written? It makes the scene more boring though. However, as this book does often -- Pacino("Marvin Shwarrrrz") gets a lot more lines to say, a lot more detail to go into about how Hollywood careers live and die. THAT part is interesting and the book picks up.

Note in passing: in the movie, Rick and Cliff are agreeing that someone is "the greatest unsung action director" but we never hear who that was...we come in too late. The book tells us: Paul Wendkos. ???

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Indeed, in most of the scenes from the movie, the book gives us MORE. More dialogue(great dialogue) and more insight. Like how Cliff requests a "two out of three falls" fight with Bruce Lee and throws the first fall(both to give Lee overconfidence and to learn Lee's "best move" so he can use it against him.) In the movie, we don't KNOW that Cliff is throwing that first fall. Here, the book lets us in on the secret.

And oh -- the backstory of Brandy, Cliff's faithful pit bull(?) -- adds more grimness to Cliff -- he takes on the dog from a friend to purposely win dogfights with her -- a lot of dogs die bloody. More reason to fear Cliff a bit, though even there , there is a surprise ending. Involving Cliff and murder. Which he proves surprisingly adept at(hence his killings of the Manson people with ease.)

Speaking of murder, as noted in the NYT review above, yes, Cliff DOES shoot his wife with that speargun. There is some mental back and forth in his mind: accidental or on purpose. Cliff decides: on purpose, but he beats the rap anyway. BTW, I can't quite buy that a shot from a spear gun would (a) cut a woman in two and (b) allow her to live for 7 more hours with pressure on her wound from her husband.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

The weirdest thing.

In the book, when Cliff goes home to his trailer to feed Brandy and watch Mannix, QT spells out the day and date as "Friday February 9, 1969." Which was correct. But he writes that Mannix and The Hollywood Palace(with Robert Goulet, clip in the movie) were "Friday night shows." Wrong, they were SATURDAY night shows.

So I wonder: did QT make a mistake or is he messin' with us? After all , he casts Rick Dalton in real movies like Cannon for Cordoba in roles that were played by somebody else. He gives the grown up child star "Trudi" the Oscar nominated role that Meg Tilly had in "Agnes of God"(1985.) I guess if he can switch movies around, he can switch days and dates.

He makes this mistake too: saying that Cliff switches the dial from Channel 7 KABC-TV(from Hollywood Palace) to Channel 2 K-CBS TV (for Mannix)

K-ABC was right(they showed Psycho on KABC late on a Saturday night in 1967). K-CBS was wrong. That's the call letters today, but back then it was KNXT.

Sorry, QT.

I guess that's enough for now.

Great read. I suppose when QT makes his final movie...he can just write books from the other 9.

[–] swanstep (2745) 4 years ago

BTW, I can't quite buy that a shot from a spear gun would (a) cut a woman in two and (b) allow her to live for 7 more hours with pressure on her wound from her husband.

I agree with both these points of implausibility. I also find it implausible that the wife, having been at loggerheads with her husband then savagely injured by him, would, in her dying state, suddenly get all sentimental and forgiving. The whole sequence just seems ridiculous to me. But a hell of a lot of QT's showpiece sequences since at least Kill Bill 1 have been absurd in this kind of way. They're grindhouse movie scenes not anything like real life.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

BTW, I can't quite buy that a shot from a spear gun would (a) cut a woman in two and (b) allow her to live for 7 more hours with pressure on her wound from her husband.
I agree with both these points of implausibility. I also find it implausible that the wife, having been at loggerheads with her husband then savagely injured by him, would, in her dying state, suddenly get all sentimental and forgiving. The whole sequence just seems ridiculous to me. But a hell of a lot of QT's showpiece sequences since at least Kill Bill 1 have been absurd in this kind of way. They're grindhouse movie scenes not anything like real life.

---

I'm reminded -- in a kind of "day after buyer's remorse" about this book -- that QT has been more and more of a "mixed bag" in recent years in terms of where his stories go. I say that even as I find The Hateful Eight and OAITH much more entertaining and "solid" than Kill Bill and Death Proof, and somewhat better structured than Inglorious Basterds and Django.

With this book, QT is allowed to "run wild and run free" into all sorts of digressions, and its not like I support all of them. But overall the book works , and it works in a weird and special way.

THAT said, QT certainly goes overboard with his detail on Hollywood circa 1969. We get detail on Paul Wendkos and William Witney . Something that becomes transparent is that QT has either read about certain stars and movies or had tales told to him (by Burt Reynolds, by Kurt Russell, by Bruce Dern) and simply elects to regurgitate them here, as if QT was there.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Example: James Stacy, the star of "Lancer" gets a lot of pages here. We read of how he was in a very special episode of Gunsmoke, co-starring Kim Darby, and THAT got him the Lancer pilot.

Later in the book -- in a scene I very much liked that doesn't have room for it in the movie -- Stacy takes Rick and Cliff to a bar called "The Drinkers Hall of Fame" in San Gabriel, California -- one of the "regular towns" surrounding Hollywood in Los Angeles County. I lived in a few of these towns and its true: occasionally you would see TV stars in them. (I once saw James "The Virginian" Drury in the bar part of a restaurant I was at with my parents; I was too young to go in the bar, but there he was.)

The "Drinkers Hall of Fame" has the detail of Jack Rabbit Slims from Pulp Fiction, and there Jim Stacy remarks in passing that "my wife worked with Henry Hathaway last year, and he yelled at her all the time." When Stacy reveals his wife is Kim Darby, Rick lights up: "That was True Grit! Your wife is a big star."

Thus: QT had the information that James Stacy was married(briefly) to Kim Darby, because of their Gunsmoke episode. QT knows about Henry Hathaway and True Grit and Kim Darby. "Voila!" Fan fiction by the most rich fan in the world. Its "trivial," but spread out over a book, it surely does create a "mood": Hollywood -- big fish, little fish, in between fish.

The book also has a new scene for "Steve McQueen"(Damien Lewis) that was filmed, in which he talks to Rick Dalton as McQueen is about to drive up to Sharon and Roman's house for a pool party -- alas, Rick is NOT invited.

BTW, just because the killing of the Mansons arrives early in the book with some "post script" -- that doesn't mean that the entire book happens AFTER that point. No, QT does his usual time travelling and we go "back in time" for things like Rick Dalton's Lancer shoot and Sharon's visit to the movie theater.

[–] swanstep (2745) 4 years ago

QT has been more and more of a "mixed bag" in recent years in terms of where his stories go.

In yet another recent interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFJBvSA8-ZM
QT describes OUATIH as his final, grand statement or testament picture and suggests that his next & last film will probably be a smaller affair, almost an 'epilogue'.

Assume that this is true. Then I think we'd have to say that QT's body of work has been almost myopically focused on recreating the film worlds of his childhood and on memorializing what we might call the urban, late-baby-boomer argot of people who were roughly 20 in LA in 1980, who grew up with '70s TV and film and reruns of selected earlier stuff, and then who experienced formatively the great shift to VHS. QT has no interest in and nothing much to say about anything beyond that.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

QT describes OUATIH as his final, grand statement or testament picture and suggests that his next & last film will probably be a smaller affair, almost an 'epilogue'.

---

I've heard him say that one before. After all, he had two of the biggest REAL movie stars in Hollywood as his leads(though I still don't quite get Leo.) And it scored 10 Oscar nominations and won two. Most reviews were very good. (Bill Maher -- the suck up -- said it was QT's best.)

Anyway, what better way to protect oneself against a future failure than to suggest that OATIH was "the big one."

Perhaps Hitchocck should have said this. Frenzy -- ugly as it was -- was a big hit that was well reviewed and looked great and professional. Family Plot DID feel like an epilogue --nice, small, PG.

Reversible: maybe EVERY big star in Hollywood will want to appear in the "final QT" -- at reduced rates. Returnees like Leo and Brad, maybe DeNiro and Pacino. Newbies like Tom Cruise and J-Law(both considered for QT films) Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts...

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Assume that this is true. Then I think we'd have to say that QT's body of work has been almost myopically focused on recreating the film worlds of his childhood and on memorializing what we might call the urban, late-baby-boomer argot of people who were roughly 20 in LA in 1980, who grew up with '70s TV and film and reruns of selected earlier stuff, and then who experienced formatively the great shift to VHS. QT has no interest in and nothing much to say about anything beyond that.

---

Maybe not. QT had a great youth following from the get-go, but I'll bet he has always had a heavy Boomer following, too(count me in, I guess.) Jackie Brown was a story of people in middle-age, and the three most recent Westerns(including the TV stuff in OAITH) plays to TV shows like Gunsmoke and Lancer and The Rebel.

What's odd about OAITH is that it captures 1969 LA...when I think QT was about 7 years old. I'll grant you, 7 is an age when you can REMEMBER(I do) but...its as if he went out of his way to re-create in great detail something he didn't LIVE. (That said, shows like The Rifleman and Wanted Dead or Alive -- the REAL Bounty Law -- were in re-runs all the time in the 70's.)

QT impressed critics early on with his recall of "Get Christie Love" and other obscure TV shows, but he did make it his bread and butter. I recall he got big money to put a few lines about the movie "Enemy Below"(Mitchum and Curt Jurgens) into the modern sub movie Crimson Tide...and he threw in some Sjlver Surfer talk, too.

This worked for awhile, but I think QT would not have come the distance he has come if his films didn't have MORE than just those references. (Pick any of his better dialogue scenes -- and the opener in Inglorious Basterds has nothing to do with pop TV.)

Still, yeah...he's probably as big with Boomers as the next generations. We matter at the box office -- or on pay TV -- still.

[–] swanstep (2745) 4 years ago

Cliff is pretty grim in the book...murderous (many times over), bigoted, homophobic.... QT did better by giving us this "alternative universe" Cliff in book form.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Once you have Brad Pitt as Cliff we can't help but like him and hope to find him heroic (certainly compared to the Manson family). I'm sure QT made the right decision to not fight his casting and, yes, to save 'bad Cliff' for the book.

---

I suppose it is possible that a lot of the "bad Cliff" stuff was in the script that Pitt signed onto -- but perhaps after some "notes" and negotations, it got cut out.

OR: QT, in some sort of bizarre, sadistic move -- elected to give us THIS version of Cliff so as to MAKE SURE that we wouldn't like him anymore, once we had some of his creepy, violent, and sexual backstory.

The whole BOOK is rather like QT turning OATIH into The Hateful Eight. The "n" word(not in the movie) makes one appearance here(perhaps as a joke by QT - "here it is folks!") and the storyline is filled with the usual QT ultraviolence(that that spear gun thing). Its almost as if having made his "nicest" movie, QT elected to turn it into a mean, grimy, gory book. (But its not THAT bad, either.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Update:

QT is offering quenching quotes to a thirty entertainment internet press corps. Lots of topics for little click bait paragraphs: lousy movie theaters deserve to close; watch movies on YouTube instead of Apple; he's buying the Vista theater in Hollywood -- but only to show 35 mm prints (alas, he is not buying the Cinerama Dome yet.)

And he's teasing movies he will never make(with only one left): a Kill Bill sequel for Uma Thurman and her daughter(who was in OAITH); a Star Trek movie.

But his most interesting topic, to me, remains that one about "10 and done." He's entitled to 10 and done(says QT: "I tell you when I stop -- YOU don't tell me when I stop") , but his comment about lousy last films for directors works more for the "old days"(Wilder, Hawks, Ford, almost Hitchcock) than today -- or does it? Is The Irishman an old man's film? Yes, I'd say -- but a damn great and entertaing one, and "old age" is a theme of the actors on screen, too. And how about Spielberg? Is "Ready Player One" really a relevant movie?

I'm not sure QT realizes what's he's bit off here.

And this: I'm reminded that many of the directors OTHER than Hitchcock(who had a cozy Universal deal "forever") got fired or lost work in their old age. Capra was fired off of two movies The Best Man with Henry Fonda and Circus World with John Wayne -- and "retired."

John Ford's final film (7 Women) went out as a second feature. No more after that.

After The Front Page, Billy Wilder was cut from a contract with Universal(where Hitchcock was fine, ouch) and after Buddy, Buddy, he got no offers ever again.

In short, THOSE old directors weren't even given the chance to continue.

Meanwhile, I think QT's "one more and out" proposal is more fascinating for the proposal itself. How long will we have to wait for that movie? 10 years? How good must it be? How big must it be?

What a bunch of self-imposed pressure!

[–] swanstep (2745) 4 years ago

But his most interesting topic, to me, remains that one about "10 and done."...but his comment about lousy last films for directors works more for the "old days"(Wilder, Hawks, Ford, almost Hitchcock) than today

The thing for me is that QT seems obsessed with the idea of having a *perfect* filmography, one where all ones films are good, or at least one where there's no drop-off at the end (i.e., so allowing for some training period/juvenilia, all the films are great after that). But for me that's just dopey. Rather I accept that in a long career (in a *very* collaborative medium) there are going to be ups and downs and even a few complete disasters where too many risks were taken (or not enough because bills had to be paid). In the real world, people just ignore/forget about anything poor like that, all that matters for history (unless you're a complete record/video store geek) is the *good* stuff. It just doesn't matter for Hawks' or Hitchcock's or Wilder's reputations that they faded a little at the end (unless perhaps you're a record/video store geek type). And look, honestly, it seems like QT doesn't really know his directors when he opines that almost all past-60 directed films are sad. Bunuel was the same age as Hitchcock but he directed *most* of his best films when he was in his 60s and '70s! Altman's second wind beginning with The Player started when he was 67. Paul Verhoeven was born in 1938, so if he'd stopped at 60 Starship Troopers would have been his last film. But he's had at least two more excellent films Black Book (2006) and Elle (2016) since, and he's got an entry in Cannes this year, Benedetta:
https://www.vulture.com/2021/07/the-wildest-moments-from-the-nunsploitation-movie-benedetta.html
Rock on Mr Verhoeven. And on and on. Even QT favorites like Siegel (b. 1912) directed Charley Varrick, Shootist, Escape from Alcatraz after 60. You've won the lottery if you have a long, indefinitely extendible career in film. You're already an exception to every rule. Embrace that I say. Only quit if it so happens that you've got nothing left to say or no energy left to say it with. Altman had PTA ghost him on his genial/Family Plot-level last film, Prairie Home Companion, i.e., PTA contracted to be on set and complete PHC if Altman died or fell ill. That's awesome. QT's buddies with PTA, so I wonder why *that's* not his aspirational model?

[–] jay440 (107) 3 years ago

In the real world, people just ignore/forget about anything poor like that, all that matters for history (unless you're a complete record/video store geek) is the *good* stuff. It just doesn't matter for Hawks' or Hitchcock's or Wilder's reputations that they faded a little at the end (unless perhaps you're a record/video store geek type).

Tarantino agreed with this, at least in 2010: "I remember how I came across Howard Hawks; I saw His Girl Friday and I thought that it was the best movie I ever saw. Then I saw To Have and Have Not and didn't like it as much, but I could tell it was a Howard Hawks movie. My aim is that some kid in 50 years time has the same experience with me and my films. At the end of a director's career you don't look at just one movie - you look at all of them." https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/jan/12/quentin-tarantino-bafta

A recent profile in Deadline might give a clue about his future direction:

As part of his research [for his Once Upon A Time In Hollywood novelization], Tarantino wrote half a dozen episodes of Dalton’s series, Bounty Law, and has expressed a desire to direct them as a limited series.

https://deadline.com/2020/11/quentin-tarantino-two-book-deal-harpercollins-novel-once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood-cinema-speculation-70s-movie-deep-dive-1234616927/

[–] swanstep (2745) 3 years ago

Case Study: John Huston (b.1906)
After turning 60, Huston made (often writing as well as directing) the following very interesting, very good films: Reflections in a Golden Eye, Kremlin Letter, Fat City, ife and Times of Judge Roy Bean, Man Who Would be King, Wise Blood, Under The Volcano, Prizzi's Honor, The Dead. That lot is better than most director's whole careers! Of course post-1966 Huston also made a whole bunch of undistinguished films (which nonetheless have their fans): Annie, Victory, Phobia, Mackintosh Man, Casino Royale.

But pre-1967 Huston *also* made undistinguished or not generally successful films. E.g., the top domestic grosser of 1966, Huston's The Bible:In the beginning..., The Unforgiven, The Barbarian and the Geisha, The Roots of Heaven.

My view, then, is that no one cares about Huston's duds. For the most part they've simply been forgotten whether or not he directed them past age 60. On the other hand, had Huston stopped at 60 (making The Bible his last film) then it would have been a huge waste of his remaining talent and an enormous hit to his reputation. Huston's run from Maltese Falcon to Treasure of the Sierra Madre to Asphalt Jungle and The African Queen would still make him one of the most important American directors in that case. In the real world, however, Huston's late successes are a crucial part of his legacy and elevate him to real immortal status.

I wonder why QT doesn't find Huston's career and experience (as a writer-actor-director) relevant to his own?

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

I wonder why QT doesn't find Huston's career and experience (as a writer-actor-director) relevant to his own?

---

QT said to Bill Maher that the reason he was intending to quit at 10 was that "I know film history."

It turns out...maybe he doesn't. Oh, he knows obscure video store Kung Fu and blaxploitation titles, and he knows "Freebie and the Bean"(and loves it; so do I) but as he travels about with this "10 and done" theory professing how "old man films" aren't any good...John Huston is Exhibit A..some of his final films were great, if not necessarily among his most famous.

Interesting about John Huston: he made his big reputation in the 40s and early 50s: The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo, The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The African Queen, The Asphalt Jungle.

There followed several decades of "up and down, great and mediocre," and slumps. I think that two of Huston's films that were poorly reviewed at the time -- Reflections in a Golden Eye, and The Kremlin Letter -- are very good. Eye for the Brando/Taylor combo and The Kremlin Letter for being at once utterly merciless about its mean characters and incredibly entertaining, principally because of Richard Boone, George Sanders and Nigel Green.

There's one solid commercial hit near the end -- Prizzi's Honor(Huston finally directs honorary son-in-law Jack Nicholson, his foe from Chinatown) and some art stuff(The Dead, Under the Volcano.)

Under QT's rule, PERHAPS Huston was best in his 40s-50s run, but he kept making interesting films -- among the duds -- all the way to the end.

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

Rock on Mr Verhoeven. And on and on. Even QT favorites like Siegel (b. 1912) directed Charley Varrick, Shootist, Escape from Alcatraz after 60.

---

More difficulty for QT's theory. If "old directors" make/made poor films...what's "old" ? What age? I recall when my one/two favorite films of 1976 were released -- Siegel's the Shootist(John Wayne's final film) and Hitchcock's Family Plot(HiTCHCOCK'S final film) -- one reason I thought that The Shootist was better was it was made by a "younger" man ...SIEGEL! John Wayne(an older man) benefitted from a "young" director(SIEGEL!) while the young stars of Family Plot(Dern, Black, Harris, Devane) struggled under the slower direction of a man who could barely move(Hitchcock.)

QT's case works for one man only: himself. He is "special" in some ways. He has made very few films, with some long gaps in there -- 6 YEARS between Jackie Brown and Kill Bill 1; almost 4 between The Hateful Eight and OAITH. QT himself says that he has now worked for almost 30 years(since Reservoir Dogs in 1992) but has that all been WORK (what about the 6 to Kill Bill?) If QT feels that is long enough -- and he told Maher that at 58 "I'm not retired YET" -- so be it.
And he's a writer -- honestly how many great plays did Tennessee Williams write? Arthur Miller?

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

CONT

The biggest problem I find with QT trotting out his "old directors made lousy films" theory is that no one is really challenging him on it.

The soft, sycophantic entertainment press reporters don't dare challenge his ideas(one guy did, on another topic, and QT tore him up and quit the interview.)

And again, Bill Maher "argued" with QT by fawning over him: why quit now when you are at your best? Maher thinks OATIH is QT's best film. Well -- its his most RECENT film. (Its a good one.)

I suppose QT is telling those of us who read and follow him: YOU decide. Here's my theory, what do you think?

Thanks, QT !

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

The thing for me is that QT seems obsessed with the idea of having a *perfect* filmography, one where all ones films are good, or at least one where there's no drop-off at the end (i.e., so allowing for some training period/juvenilia, all the films are great after that). But for me that's just dopey. Rather I accept that in a long career (in a *very* collaborative medium) there are going to be ups and downs and even a few complete disasters where too many risks were taken (or not enough because bills had to be paid).

---

I agree with that, but there are some exceptions to that.

Two of them(to my mind) are Hitchcock and QT.

With Hitchcock, who made scores of movies, one critic said "he made some great ones, some mediocre ones, and some bad ones." No. That doesn't really fit the Hitchcock career. The "bad" ones (Torn Curtain and Topaz near the end, perhaps The Paradine Case earlier on) were much better than what many other directors were turning out, and always LOOKED and MOVED and SOUNDED like Hitchcock movies -- a very unique quantity. And also , one persons "bad" Hitchcock(I've seen Stage Fright, Lifeboat and The Trouble With Harry listed) is another person's "small classic."

With QT its different. He's only given us 9 films but he's made sure that the wait for and build-up to each one is full of that "old time showman excitement" and I think they all have something entertaining to offer, if usually with something brutal or offensive as part of the bargain. (QT has declared himself "heavy metal.")

QT knows this: he says that Death Proof is his "worst" movie of the 9, but that it is still pretty good. He's right. (The car chase; all of Kurt Russell's dialogue.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

CONT

People forget that QT directed a VERY direct homage to Hitchcock: his part of "Four Rooms." The idea was to homage/spoof the TV episode where if Steve McQueen could make his lighter light for ten times, Peter Lorre would give him a car...but if McQueen missed ONCE...Lorre would chop off his finger with a meat cleaver.

In the QT version, QT himself and Bruce Willis are among the drunken Hollywood types who decide to re-stage the Hitchcock episode -- with bellboy Tim Roth wielding the cleaver.

Willis clicks the lighter. It fails on the FIRST try. Roth quickly chops off Willis' finger. The end.

Pretty funny when you think about it...and the movie ends with the characters chasing the finger around the hotel room as it keeps sliding away.

[–] jay440 (107) 3 years ago

Pretty funny when you think about it...and the movie ends with the characters chasing the finger around the hotel room as it keeps sliding away.

John Wayne didn't think it was very funny. According to Howard Hawks, he pitched this very scene to Wayne for Red River, and Wayne was grossed out by the idea and passed on it. Hawks inserted the scene in a much lesser Western, The Big Sky, where a drunken Kirk Douglas has his finger amputated, then insists on getting it back, and the scene ends with the men crawling around the dirt on their hands and knees, butts to the camera, with Douglas bawling "Find my finger, find my finger!" Hawks bragged that Wayne regretted not doing the scene after seeing this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRJXB6ezRwY

Tarantino is a fan of Hawks and I don't doubt this is his homage to him, along with Hitchcock.

I also bet that Tarantino has read Hawks on Hawks, by Joseph McBride, a book of interviews with the director conducted late in his life, where the above anecdote comes from. Francois Truffaut praised the book, and it stands up very well alongside Truffaut's own interview book on Hitchcock.

[–] ElizabethJoestar (946) 3 years ago

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

To add my two cents, I find that some filmmakers seem to have better filmographies only when they make a few movies. I think of Kubrick, whose run from THE KILLING to EYES WIDE SHUT is considered a pretty impressive series of films. Maybe QT feels the smaller the filmography, the less room there is for failure.

--

I've been thinking that, too. A very short "filmography," with a lot of years for really PREPARING the film in mind before production...Kubrick's group are all the work of "a great director" even if one doesn't like every film.

Hitchcock was a "long distance runner" with 53 films, but I daresay the "guts" of his great period was 1951(Strangers on a Train) through 1963(The Birds.) Fans of Rebecca and Notorious and The 39 Steps will say "WHAT??" but that 50s/60's run was incredible and incredibly exciting to watch on screen(and to listen to, courtesy of Bernard Herrmann.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

At any rate, plenty of filmmakers made some of their best work in their late period, after long careers, so I hope QT doesn't cheat himself or the audience if he does have a few more film ideas in him.

--

Well, its his game to play.

First of all, he might make us wait YEARS for the "10th and final film."

Second, he's made MORE than 9 films already(count Four Rooms; his part.)

But he has already couched his bet by saying something like: "Well, these will be my OFFICIAL 10. I might make a few more that we all acknowledge are my old man's films, after my main career."

Ha...you mean like Hitchcock, Quentin?

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

A recent profile in Deadline might give a clue about his future direction:
As part of his research [for his Once Upon A Time In Hollywood novelization], Tarantino wrote half a dozen episodes of Dalton’s series, Bounty Law, and has expressed a desire to direct them as a limited series.

---

I've read this elsewhere, and of course, it is a PERFECT way to get around the "10 films and out" idea.

On the OAITH DVD extras, we get a much longer version of the opening scene of a Bounty Law where sheriff Michael Madsen questions "bounty killer" Leo. The set-up is juicy: Leo is delivering to Madsen the body of the son of the town boss who will be coming into town "right after the commercial."

I want to SEE that episode.

But this: The actor who looks wrong on Bounty Law is...Leo De Caprio. He doesn't look like a 50's Western star at all. They will have to cast someone else for the streaming series. A good thing in this case.

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

John Wayne didn't think it was very funny. According to Howard Hawks, he pitched this very scene to Wayne for Red River, and Wayne was grossed out by the idea and passed on it. Hawks inserted the scene in a much lesser Western, The Big Sky, where a drunken Kirk Douglas has his finger amputated, then insists on getting it back, and the scene ends with the men crawling around the dirt on their hands and knees, butts to the camera, with Douglas bawling "Find my finger, find my finger!" Hawks bragged that Wayne regretted not doing the scene after seeing this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRJXB6ezRwY

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Hmm. Well, The Big Sky was made when the finger could NOT be shown but..."the mind is a great theater."

Severed digits are quite the way to gross out -- or amuse -- audiences.

In the Coens' The Ladykillers(I love it, everybody else hates it), a character blows his finger off with explosives...there is a similar frenzied chase to retrieve it...and the fate of that finger provides the final shot of the movie. (The kitty cat...)

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Tarantino is a fan of Hawks and I don't doubt this is his homage to him, along with Hitchcock.

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Hah..a two-fer. Actually a three-fer: QT is IN the story.