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you think you're chocolate

when you're chewing gum

2006-03-26

His dreams and mine

"Tomorrow's the birthday of the filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, born in Knoxville, Tennessee (1963). He grew up with a single mother in the diverse neighborhood of South Bay, near the Los Angeles Airport. He was diagnosed as hyperactive as a kid, and didn't get along with his classmates or his teachers. The only things that calmed him down were comic books and movies. From the time he was a toddler, his mother let him go to the theater whenever he wanted. He watched everything from Kung Fu movies to French art house films.

He once scored above 150 on an IQ test in high school, but he hated school so much that he dropped out after ninth grade. He got a job as an usher at a pornographic movie theater and started taking acting classes. He taught himself screenwriting by writing from memory screenplays of movies he'd already seen. Whatever he couldn't remember he just made up. These screenplays eventually turned into his own original work, and he realized that he'd rather be a filmmaker than an actor.

Instead of going to film school, Tarantino got a job at a video rental store that had one of the largest video collections in Southern California. Several other aspiring filmmakers worked there and they would watch movies all day at work, discussing camera angles and dialogue. He spent five years working at the video store writing screenplays, but he wasn't getting anywhere in his career. He finally decided he had to move to Hollywood, and on the same day he'd made that decision he got a thirteen hundred dollar tax refund in the mail.

Tarantino got a few acting jobs in Hollywood, including a part as an Elvis impersonator on the TV show Golden Girls. He sold two of his screenplays. But what he wanted more than anything was to direct his own movie. And then he met an actor who knew another actor who knew Harvey Keitel, and Keitel agreed to look at one of his scripts. Keitel was impressed enough to volunteer to help Tarantino produce the film, and to act in it himself.

The result was Reservoir Dogs (1992) about a group of bank robbers trying to figure out who set them up after a botched robbery. It became a cult hit and made Tarantino internationally famous. His next film, Pulp Fiction, won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994 and it went on to win an Academy Award for best screenplay.

Quentin Tarantino said, "I steal from every movie ever made." "

Wait, why do I find this fascinating?

Life is a movie, and an art.

Yux chewed at 12:31 p.m.

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