"Cinema Speculation," by Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino is above all else an enter­tain­er, so one expects his “first work of non-fiction,” per the jack­et copy, to be enter­tain­ing. And so it is. Brash and unin­hib­itedly opin­ion­ated, writ­ten in a con­ver­sa­tion­al style that’s hard to pull off suc­cess­fully (and indeed he often doesn’t do that, but he does do it often enough that you stay with him through the awk­ward­ness), Cinema Speculation, which mostly focuses on Hollywood pic­tures (and picture-makers) Tarantino dis­covered in his unusu­al youth, serves up vivid read­ing for hours on end.

Tarantino is also, like many of us, sub­ject to mar­ket forces. And while I’d nev­er argue that Cinema Speculation isn’t exactly the book he wanted to write (for bet­ter or worse), this read­er was mildly let down at how fre­quently he was told some­thing he already knew, at least in terms of sub­ject and theme. The Tarantino I have got­ten the biggest kick out of read­ing — and the one I’ve learned the most from, because frankly, the guy has seen and absorbed a good deal more cinema than I have — is the one who would speak at length to Tim Lucas about his “50 Best Sequels,” which he did in issue 172 (Jan.-Feb. 2013) of Video Watchdog. You know that bit in “Who Put The Bomp?” when Barry Mann sings “who was that man? / I’d like to shake his hand?” I feel that way about Tarantino just for intro­du­cing me to the spec­tac­u­larly per­verse Amityville II: The Possession. Tarantino’s appre­ci­ation for the minu­ti­ae of under­ap­pre­ci­ated cinema is fre­quently (not always) matched by remark­able insight into the mater­i­al — and he can also make con­vin­cing argu­ments as to why it’s good. As to wheth­er the chau­vin­ism that often accom­pan­ies his stated alle­gi­ances is jus­ti­fied, or ought to be tol­er­ated (what are you gonna do if you don’t wanna tol­er­ate it?), I don’t much care. I’m just always grate­ful to have new places to go digging.

But this book wasn’t writ­ten by that Tarantino. (It con­tains maybe one ref­er­ence to William Witney?) I think that may be because, like so many of us, Tarantino is obliged to coöper­ate with the mar­ket, and I sus­pect that his edit­ors at Harper (which is part of the com­pany where my own pub­lish­er, Hanover Square Press, also resides), felt that a book which inter­wove mem­oir with con­sid­er­a­tions of pic­tures star­ring the likes of Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood and dir­ec­ted by the likes of Sam Peckinpah, Don Siegel, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Schrader might have more com­mer­cial poten­tial. And that’s what we have here.

The book is a lot of fun for sev­er­al reas­ons. First, for bet­ter or worse, Tarantino seems to have almost effort­less access to his six-year-old self, stretch­ing all the way to his sixteen-or-so-year-old self. His recol­lec­tions of the movies he saw, where he saw them, his own often uncom­pre­hend­ing reac­tions to them, and the audience’s reac­tions to them, are not often exactly charm­ing, but they are com­pel­ling and cred­ible. And his raw impres­sions form child­hood meld almost seam­lessly into his, let’s call it adult ana­lys­is of the pic­tures. For as much as he is eager to pro­ject an image of cool (look at him glower­ing in his author photo on the back flap of the dust jack­et!) Tarantino’s per­son­al­ity has an awk­ward side — it’s kind of hard to describe, but it’s an insec­ur­ity and vul­ner­ab­il­ity that’s pretty com­mon among (for lack of a bet­ter term) “film nerds,” par­tic­u­larly in their adoles­cence. It’s a social liab­il­ity that also renders them unusu­ally sens­it­ive. Tarantino, here and else­where, hides this with his bluster (in this book, a lot of things he doesn’t like really “suck,” and so on) but he’s also remark­ably up front about what moves him.

Which is not to say that I recom­mend this book because it’ll provide a skel­et­on key to Tarantino’s per­son­al­ity. As if any­one really needs one. No, it’s because when he com­bines the film nerd with the wan­nabe crit­ic and blends in the work­ing dir­ect­or he still is today, he comes up with some really valu­able insight. And the insider stuff he gets from the likes of Niele McQueen, Walter Hill, John Flynn and oth­er film folk is fant­ast­ic, always, cut­ting through the myth­o­logy so many of us crit­ics can’t help but try to con­struct about how Hollywood films get (got?) made and why.

When he argues that Taxi Driver would not have gone into pro­duc­tion had not Death Wish made a for­tune, he’s apply­ing good crit­ic­al obser­va­tion com­bined with his own exper­i­ence as a pro­fes­sion­al film­maker whose fate often rests in the hands of those mar­keters I men­tioned earli­er. They’re everywhere.

He’s also excep­tion­ally good about con­vey­ing Ye Olde Direct Experience of Moviemaking. In his chapter on Taxi Driver, he recalls him­self, age 15, view­ing the film for the first time in 1977, on a double bill with a far less dis­tin­guished “Revengeamatic” called The Farmer, with an almost all-Black audi­ence in Scottsdale:

For the film’s first half — to us, the audi­ence in the Carson Twin Cinema — it was a com­edy about a stu­pid idi­ot who’s turn­ing into more and more of a nut­ter as the story goes on.

I doubt dur­ing its Grand Palais screen­ing at the Cannes Film Festival Taxi Driver induced as many laughs as it did that Saturday after­noon. But in a way, the black audi­ence laugh­ing at Travis Bickle’s antics in Taxi Driver wasn’t that dif­fer­ent from that hip Sunset Strip (mostly) white audi­ence at the Tiffany laugh­ing at Peter Boyle’s Joe.

Then the moment happened that made the whole theat­er burst into hys­ter­ics. That one guy walk­ing down the street, rant­ing and rav­ing that he’s going to kill his woman (“I’ll kill her! I’ll kill that bitch!”). We laughed so hard at that guy, we were a little dis­con­nec­ted from the movie for the next twenty minutes. Because we kept crack­ing each oth­er up about it. That guy was so funny, we had to make ourselves stop laughing.

What was it about the I’ll kill that bitch guy that cracked our audi­ence up so much? Simple, every­body in the theat­er had seen that guy before. I had seen that guy. And when we stepped out­side the theatre into the Scottsdale shop­ping cen­ter where the Carson Twin Cinema was loc­ated, we might see that guy again. But what really cracked us up was we had nev­er seen that guy in a Hollywood movie.

Reading that pas­sage I rather wish that Tarantino had worked with a stronger edit­or; the writing’s a little lumpy. But what he gets to here is really import­ant, and really not talked about enough in film writ­ing: how audi­ences respond and why. Who knows. Maybe they just don’t any­more. When we mourn the poten­tial passing of the the­at­ric­al exper­i­ence, we should also be think­ing about the decline of the neigh­bor­hood theat­er, and the weird ways that movies could move us in spe­cif­ic envir­on­ments. Tarantino doesn’t play his exper­i­ences with Black audi­ences for exot­ic appeal as, say, Harlan Ellison might have (and I prob­ably have). He con­siders the responses for what they were: hon­est. This becomes par­tic­u­larly clear in the book’s final chapter, a homage to a nomad­ic adult Black friend, Floyd, that details the guy’s aes­thet­ic with sober, admir­ing clarity.

I found myself agree­ing with him a lot — about John Flynn’s The Outfit, which he’s com­pletely right about (“except for the freeze-frame at the end,” I thought to myself, and then I watched the end­ing again and thought, “Nah, he’s right about that too”), about Dirty Harry, you know, that sorta thing. He’s really weird about Boorman’s Point Blank, and I don’t think he makes his case against it, as I don’t think he makes his case for Deliverance going “slack.” But I decline to spec­u­late about just why he feels like dump­ing on Boorman so much. I men­tioned his bluster before — I was startled at times about how blunt and brash he can be. He’s not at all afraid of poten­tially tick­ing off film­makers one infers that he’s been friendly with in the past. “De Palma would fall on his face and nev­er really get back up again after fuck­ing up Tom Wolfe” is a weird thing to say, giv­en De Palma then went on to make Raising Cain, Carlito’s Way, Snake Eyes, Femme Fatale (maybe the ulti­mate De Palma film in my opin­ion) and Mission Impossible.

By the same token, he’s not always as per­versely con­trari­an as you might expect him to be — he actu­ally calls Clint Eastwood’s chimp movie Every Which Way But Loose “abysmal.” Eyebrows will raise at his gen­er­ous praise of Sylvester Stallone’s Paradise Alley, not by me, though, because I haven’t seen it. Although now I intend to. Partially because he ties its inspir­a­tion to the East Side Kids movies. Partially because he ties its set­ting to that of a Raoul Walsh ‘50s pic­ture, Glory Alley, that I also haven’t seen.  Also because Tarantino’s writ­ing on Stallone strongly sug­gests that the thing he val­ues most as a film­go­er and a film­maker is sur­prise: “Everything about Rocky took audi­ences by com­plete sur­prise. The unknown guy in the lead, how emo­tion­al the film ended up being, that incred­ibly stir­ring score by Bill Conti, and one of the most dynam­ic cli­maxes most of us had ever exper­i­enced in a cinema.” Arguably he’s a little over­heated when he writes “dare I say Stallone is the best dir­ect­or Stallone has ever worked with.” A very curs­ory look at Stallone’s filmo­graphy might make you tilt your head a bit — Luis Llosa and Bruce Malmuth are not ter­ribly dis­tin­guished names — but as you dig deep­er you think, wait, what about…Ted Kotcheff? John Landis? And then you’re like, OKAY, what about John Huston? Woody Allen? PAUL BARTEL? The for­mu­la­tion might work if he means Stallone is the best dir­ect­or for Stallone. But even so. The idea is finally just kind of funny. And it’s in keep­ing with the fact that his intern­al logic rel­at­ive to the cinema he grew up with is packed with con­tra­dic­tions that will nev­er, and prob­ably ought nev­er, be resolved.

The book can frus­trate in dif­fer­ent ways. In a chapter about Schrader’s Hardcore, look­ing at its open­ing scenes, he writes, “When we first meet sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Kristen at a Grand Rapids Christmas church party, she looks like a run­away even in her own home.” That’s great. He con­tin­ues: “One look at her and you can tell she’s either going to be a junkie, a child pros­ti­tute, or a sui­cide vic­tim.” Okay, show your work. A little later, he almost does, reveal­ing that Schrader recruited the sallow-looking act­ress who plays Kristen, Ilah Davis, from the world of porn. And the volume has its share of redund­an­cies and typos, which, giv­en my own exper­i­ence, I’m not inclined to get all that huffy about. (Although mix­ing up “imply” and “infer,” as he does in the chapter about The Getaway, is kind of shock­ing giv­en how much us ped­ants go on about it all the time.) (And since I first pos­ted, a cor­res­pond­ent has poin­ted out a genu­inely mor­ti­fy­ing Richard/Robert Mulligan mix-up that I did­n’t catch.)

Two more things: the “no-white-pimps” bit intro­duced in the Taxi Driver chapter has a fant­ast­ic punch­line in the Hardcore chapter. And I kind of agree with him about Willy Best in The Ghost Breakers — the char­ac­ter he plays in the film, because he’s going up against Bob Hope at his most craven, func­tions as a sort of exist­en­tial coev­al, and their work togeth­er becomes a not-quite neut­ral but def­in­itely not-as-unpalatable-as-it-might-have-been dance of comed­ic stylings.