"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 cooperate 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.

Comments

[Titch]

Interesting to read your review, after I read another editor's take. David Jenkins over at Little White Lies had the same reservations as you do, re. Quentin plainly needing an editor to make the book more readable, but he really didn't like the book at all. I've enjoyed some of Tarantino and Avary's Video Archives Podcast, but it's one thing to listen to nerds go into depth about obscure grindhouse fare and another one to read one telling his readers how he could have made Taxi Driver better.

[GK]

Well, he's talking about how he thought De Palma would have made "Taxi Driver" differently, and his speculation isn't entirely without interest. And it's a relatively short chapter.

[Andrew Del Monte]

When I read Once Upon a Time in Hollywood I wondered if there was some kind of stipulation in place that Tarantino could not be edited. There were some mind-boggling grammatical errors. The dedication to his wife and child at the very front of the book goes something like "thank you for creating a great environment in which to write in." Still, the book was a lot of fun.

[george]

Andrew said: "When I read Once Upon a Time in Hollywood I wondered if there was some kind of stipulation in place that Tarantino could not be edited."

Maybe he has final cut on his books.

Glenn said: "Tarantino’s appreciation for the minutiae of underappreciated cinema ..."

Tarantino is the only person I've come across who praises the 1976 sniper-in-a-stadium movie Two Minute Warning, which I've always thought was pretty good. The fact that the sniper is given no back story or motivation makes it creepy. (Motivation was added to the clunky expanded version Universal put together for TV.)

[noir1946]

I enjoyed reading the book. QT's personality certainly comes across. But I disagree with a lot of what he says, especially his dismissal of Point Blank. I found it odd that his enthusiasm did not make me want to rewatch the films I've seen or see the ones I haven't. There's no way I, as a cranky old fart, could sit through Paradise Alley or Hardcore again. The chapter on Hardcore is especially weak, serving only as a supplement to what he says about Taxi Driver and the influence of The Searchers on pal Paul. I most enjoyed the accounts of his childhood moviegoing experiences, his background info about the making of some of the films, and the chapter about his friend Floyd. I loved Floyd's defense of Willie Best and was pleasantly shocked that Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is one of his top five. QT's writing style seems to alternate between conversational and a surprisingly formal style, suggesting that editors were on duty at times. Your readers may be interested in this chap's list of all the films mentioned in the book: https://letterboxd.com/samuryan/list/every-film-referenced-in-quentin-tarantinos-2/

[george]

I've disagreed with various QT opinions over the years, as expressed in interviews. I don't think North by Northwest is a "bad movie," and I don't think De Palma is a greater director than Hitchcock. I don't think John Ford was a KKK sympathizer because he supposedly played a Klansman in Birth of a Nation.

But I'll read this book, because Tarantino's opinions are always interesting/entertaining, even I disagree with them. I'll wait for the book to show up at the public library, though. Not spending money on it.

[pat kay]

https://www.unz.com/jfreud/once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood-or-welcome-to-tarantinopolis-some-thoughts-on-sergio-leones-once-upon-a-time-in-the-west-martin-scorsese-and-joker/

[Pedro Canhenha]

Great review. I'll definitely add this to my list, though I believe his film references may be a bit more obscure than what I'm familiar with. But definitely worth investigating.

[Martin Schneider]

It's difficult not to think of Quentin's podcast while reading this. That podcast is much more successful/enjoyable than I would have expected, given that Quentin talking is not always the best Quentin. However, teaming up with an old pal reduces the worship factor all around and he is surprisingly un-self-conscious about the things he says. It was fascinating to hear him compare the complex plotting of The Private life of Sherlock Holmes to his own Pulp Fiction and then a few moments later liken Robert Stephens to the well-known actor Christoph Waltz. Also he can do things that other podcasters can't, like give Elaine May a call to get the straight poop on Mikey and Nicky. He defends his positions and doesn't mind if people disagree, etc. Good on him.

[Martin Schneider]

Oh yeah! Forgot to mention that he picks Five Graves to Cairo as the best Billy Wilder, which was a comment only he would make.

[george]

The long, nuanced examination of Star 80 on the Video Archives podcast is must listening. It's a movie that I've struggled with -- I find it both impressive and repulsive -- for more than 30 years.