Rebels on the Backlot (6 page)

As for whether anything was different in the two Soderberghs, she said, “Ultimately no. But it gave me closure.”

Tarantino did have one early friendship that seemed to last. His bond with Roger Avary seemed sacrosanct. For a time, they had friendship, partnership, synchronicity, a unique collaboration. In the late 1980s they starved together. Scraping around for movie jobs, Tarantino and Avary took all kinds of odd Hollywood work in addition to their gig at the video store and trying to get a movie going. In 1987 they were were hired as production assistants on such low-rent fare as the
Dolph Lundgren: Maximum Potential
exercise video. Tarantino so annoyed the producers by knocking over nightstands and constantly babbling that he nearly got fired. Avary quit after the producer recommended that he follow his dream to write and direct.

Mostly, though, they worked in tandem on movies; Avary might give Tarantino a script, and Tarantino would return with it a month later, having created his own version of it, scrawled on bits of paper. Many ideas that started in early experimental scripts would turn up in their later work, Avary’s
Killing Zoe
and Tarantino’s
Natural Born Killers.
At one point Avary and Tarantino took out an ad in the
National Enquirer.
“Invest in Motion Pictures,” complete with a profit-projecting pie chart, that failed to lure investors to
True Romance.

Often it was hard to tell where Avary started and Tarantino ended.

“When I met Roger, it was very weird; it was as if he and Quentin were twins, just one blond and one with dark hair,” said Scott Spiegel, who befriended Tarantino in the early nineties. “The same staccato way of talking, same cannonball energy, the same mannerisms. It was really strange.”

According to Avary, Tarantino’s
True Romance
is based on an eighty-page script he wrote called
The Open Road.
Tarantino took that script and synthesized it with his own material, Avary says. According to Tarantino, Avary was the first person to ever read
True Romance
, which he described as “handwritten, five hundred pages, held together by a rubber band in a folder.” When the script ran into trouble, Avary did several rewrites. Said Tarantino. “He gave me little notes on it he wrote in red pen. It was like, you know, Roger got me. He was invigorated by my writing, and I was invigorated by his. I was very excited and inspired by his writing, because we seemed to be similar. We were kind of coming from the same place.” Then there was the ending. Tony Scott, who directed the film, called Tarantino to rewrite the ending. Scott told him. “You can’t shoot a $50 million movie and have everyone die at the end.”

Tarantino told him: “Go fuck yourself, you paid for it, you rewrite it.”

Avary rewrote the ending to
True Romance
, by using the same ending of
The Open Road
, which he would do again with
Killing Zoe.
(
Open Road
has apparently been cannibalized throughout the Avary and Tarantino canon.) For his efforts, Avary got no more than a “special thanks” in the end credits of
True Romance.
This was the
beginning of tensions between the two friends that would worsen with time.

Cathryn Jaymes, manager for both Tarantino and Avary, believes Tarantino’s talent has never been in originating ideas; instead it resides in his ability to refine and synthesize the ideas of others.

“Quentin is extraordinary at homage,” she observed years later. “He pays homage to other people’s words and visions. He can retool other words, put it to his own pentameter, bring his own voice. Quentin can take the material on the page, or on the screen, and pump a whole new perspective into it. He can tell it in a new way. He doesn’t mimic people.” For Jaymes, like for critics and fans, Tarantino’s ability to synthesize the culture was entirely unique, and more than enough to be thankful for in a movie world dominated by studio pap. But it wasn’t enough for Tarantino. He didn’t want his audience to know that it didn’t all flow seamlessly from his own pen.

Cathryn Jaymes had taken Hamann on as an actor client after he worked in her office as a secretarial assistant, among his other jobs. One day in the mid-1980s he brought his friend Tarantino around to her office.

At the time, Tarantino didn’t have much to recommend him; he was an aspiring actor but not exactly a kid at age twenty-five. He had no credits, no acting reel.

But he definitely had something. He walked into Jaymes’s live-in office in a ripped T-shirt and jeans, with his hangdog shuffle, and he did the quintessential Quentin performance, spouting stream-of-consciousness movie ideas, holding forth passionately about his favorite movies, about his plans to act and make movies himself. He was funny, gregarious, charming—and engagingly manic. Jaymes, then thirty-four years old, loved him immediately and at the end of the meeting said simply: “I have no doubt you will become a major force in the industry.” She signed him.

Later she recalled, “I wasn’t sure what he had but he was so charming. He was this compelling oddball.”

Tarantino was determined to act, so at first Jaymes got him jobs
doing just that. She called up a friend, a casting agent over at the television show
The Golden Girls.
They needed an Elvis impersonator for one episode, and Jaymes touted her new client as “Elvis meets Charlie Manson.” He got the walk-on, his first real job in show business.

By the second half of the 1980s, Jaymes represented all three of the us-against-the-world clique—Tarantino, Avary, and Hamann—and played den mother to them all. They became like family, and even began to speak in the same stream-of-consciousness rhythm, a sort of Quentinese. Jaymes particularly took care of Tarantino, who seemed oblivious to the needs of taking care of himself. She fed him, made sure he got to his appointments, and paid his expenses when he was utterly broke. But in these same years he began churning out a number of screenplays:
True Romance, Natural Born Killers
, and
Reservoir Dogs
, all with the common vocabulary of casual, brutal violence and a raging intensity to the story line.

From the start, the combination of Jaymes and Tarantino seemed odd. Jaymes was a corn-fed Midwesterner and the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, a petite, beautiful blond who had spent years surfing off the coast of Mexico and Central America before drifting into Hollywood. She had a heart of gold and seemed to lack the killer instinct required for Hollywood. She never cared. “When I go,” she once said, “I know I’ll have done my best to be kind to people and to be fair and honest in my business.” This was not a formula for getting ahead in Hollywood. On the other hand, Jaymes was passionate about her clients and was not easily put off when she believed in someone. That was certainly the case with Tarantino, and yet it still seemed strange; Jaymes was single, took in housefuls of stray cats, and used words like “Jiminy Christmas” and “goldarn” instead of the foul language spouted by Tarantino and his friends. She found herself fighting for a client who—apart from bathing only rarely—seemed to use the word
fuck
in every other sentence. The bathing part was a real problem. Tarantino was, by all accounts, challenged in the personal hygiene department. He often smelled awful, his T-shirts were usually torn, and he’d wear the same pair of ratty jeans over and over to his business meetings. “You look like a
hobo,” Jaymes would complain. “Why?” Tarantino would reply. “This is my favorite shirt.” Others thought Tarantino believed the look made him resemble the young Marlon Brando.

These personal habits didn’t change much over time. Visitors to Tarantino’s Hollywood apartment would find trash overflowing from the garbage cans and used Q-tips and dirty underwear strewn on the floor. Sometimes the garbage would be so thick it was hard to open the door. When Tarantino sold
True Romance
for $50,000 in 1990 he finally bought a car, after years of taking the bus. But, typically, he didn’t take care of it. After he headed to Europe to work on a script, Jaymes had to redeem the car from the police impound, where it had been towed because of a parking ticket surplus. The red Geo was stuffed full of trash and tickets; Jaymes then cleaned the car, too.

But she became a true evangelist for him. Jaymes called agents, producers, and executives, dropping in on them and insisting they read Tarantino’s scripts. One day she went into the San Fernando Valley office of producers Bill Pace and Ronnie Clemmer—known for having produced the female baseball hit
A League of Their Own
—and demanded, for the second time, that they read
True Romance.

She marched past their female development executive and into Clemmer’s office, saying “Ronnie, you’ve got to read this yourself. This woman’s not going to get it. You can’t take her word for it. This guy is a genius, he’s going to be a superstar. He’s going to alter the face of cinema.” Clemmer took her gently by the arm and escorted her out the door.

Jaymes even surprised herself that she was able to represent material that normally she considered unforgiveably vulgar. But she understood the urgency of Tarantino’s voice. “Most of the material I’d seen was gratuitous, done for shock value. It didn’t bring an intelligence of its own. It didn’t have a language of its own,” she later said. Tarantino was different. He truly had a unique voice, she thought. He expressed a distinctive experience in the world that he had created. Strangely, the foul language, when expressed within that world, didn’t offend her. Instead she found it inspiring. Tarantino, she thought, gave his characters dimension and breadth, put
blood in their veins; they had good reason to use foul language and shocking violence.

Jaymes sent the script for
True Romance
to Chris Lee, who ran feature production at TriStar. “He sent me a form letter back, saying this is really not for me,” she recalled. Later, when Tarantino became the hot thing, Lee called and demanded to know why she hadn’t brought him to his attention. “I said, ‘You were the first person I called. You were lame enough not to take a chance,’” Jaymes recalled. “I liked Chris, but he just didn’t take chances.”

Later, Mike Medavoy, then head of Columbia, pulled Jaymes into his office while Tarantino was writing
Pulp Fiction.
“He’d stare at me, focus on me, and say, ‘Okay, Cathy, tell me this is going to be commercial.’” She responded, “I can’t tell you that, Mike. But whatever it is, it’ll be remarkable. And you better say yes.”

Not everyone to whom she showed the scripts agreed. Some agents were so offended by Tarantino’s language that they told Jaymes they would stop reading her submissions. One time she got a letter back from an agent that read, “I’m returning your fucking submission. I hope you have a fucking great day.”

H
OWEVER PENNILESS
, T
ARANTINO WAS DETERMINED TO SUCCEED
, and was creative about it. For a time he and Avary pretended to be film students at UCLA, living next to a group of undergraduates in Westwood while trying to get
True Romance
going. Tarantino would use this pretense to call up his film idols—pulp director Joe Dante, writer John Milius, director Ivan Passer—tell them he was a student writing a thesis on one of their films, and arrange for a lunch interview, hoping they’d pay the tab (which they usually did).

Then he finally caught a break. A friend who had had success in horror films
(The Evil Dead
and
The Evil Dead II)
introduced Tarantino to a special effects expert who was looking to produce a movie called
From Dusk Till Dawn.
After reading Tarantino’s
True Romance
, the producer, Bob Kurtzman, gave Tarantino $1,500 to write a script for the movie.

It was Tarantino’s first paying writing job. The friend who hooked him up was Scott Spiegel, a young screenwriter and director who’d scraped together $100,000 to make the horror film
Intruder
with another striving wannabe actor-producer, Lawrence Bender. Bender, then twenty-nine years old, was an aspiring actor who had made his way to Hollywood in the early 1980s from South Jersey via the Bronx. A former ballet dancer, he had quit classical dance because of injuries and become a tango dancer instead. But he’d heard the siren call of the movies; he was studying to be an actor, making ends meet as a production assistant on commercials, sleeping on friends’ couches, and meeting other young starving would-be wannabes. When Spiegel called him up with an offer to produce the $100,000 horror movie, he leapt at the chance.

Spiegel’s friendship with Tarantino, who had taken to sleeping at Spiegel’s Hollywood Hills apartment, would lead to his fateful meeting with Bender at the Memorial Day picnic in 1990.

B
ENDER AND
T
ARANTINO HAD CROSSED PATHS BEFORE, BUT
it was at Spiegel’s Memorial Day party that they really connected. To all appearances, they were very different. While Tarantino gabbed with his movie trivia buddies, Bender stood quietly under one of the leafy trees that cast a canopy of shade over the patio. Unlike Tarantino, Bender appeared reticent and even uncomfortable at the party, wearing a neat button-down shirt with a crewneck sweater, his hollowed cheekbones and angular face made stark by a short, neat haircut.

But Tarantino loved
Intruder
, and Bender was in sync with Tarantino’s dark, violent sensibility. In his search for producing material, Bender had tried to get
Boxing Helena
going as a film, a revenge fantasy for an unpopular white guy: The main character imprisons a beautiful girl he can’t otherwise have and cuts off her limbs (the movie was ultimately made but, mercifully, sank).

Bender wasn’t very well liked, even at this early stage. In her book about
Natural Born Killers
, producer Jane Hamsher remembers first meeting Bender at Sundance and thinking, “I had the
terrifying impression that I’d just been in the presence of a jackal.” Her partner, Don Murphy, called Bender “a barnacle attached to Quentin.” Bender was considered someone who knew little about making movies and owed his imminent success mainly to his connection with Tarantino. After
Pulp Fiction
made him a multimillionaire Bender became a Hollywood fixture and a leftie political activist. In the movies, his success never extended far beyond Tarantino, although Miramax considered him a capable producer. He was banished from the production offices of
Good Will Hunting
because Matt Damon and Ben Affleck resented his meddling on the set, and was removed again as a producer on
Anna and the King
by Twentieth Century Fox. But he always had Tarantino to fall back on, and Tarantino seemed to need him, too.