Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  Beyond these turbulent moments in Quentin’s young life, he was a restless young man. As fate would have it, God handed the success-oriented, upwardly mobile Connie Zastoupil a downwardly mobile, academically averse child.

  He was restless and had a short attention span. An early grade-school teacher wanted him to be put on Ritalin; Connie resisted, fearing the consequences of medicating her son. That teacher left a painful imprint on him, once telling him, “You’re so unlovable, I don’t understand how your mother can love you.” He told the story to his mother when he became a teenager, still a painful memory. But Quentin’s aversion to school never changed. He hated to go. He hated homework. School became, and always was, a place of discomfort for him.

  From fourth grade he attended private school, Hawthorne Christian School, after his mother bought a sprawling house—thirty-five hundred square feet—in El Segundo, near Torrance, in the wake of the divorce. But things did not go better there. Quentin had sprouted into a tall kid and would get picked on for sticking out. His personal grooming was abominable, and he dressed like a slob. He didn’t want to be with upper-class kids and begged his mother to let him transfer back to public school, which she did in seventh grade. But by the ninth or tenth grade, he refused to go back to school at all.

  “I knew you couldn’t force a teenager to go to school; he’d go on the streets and get into more trouble,” Connie explained. “And with Quentin I feared it would be worse than truancy. He’s a leader. He wouldn’t be passive. At least if I let him stay home, he’d be doing relatively harmless things, writing screenplays, watching TV. He’d be off the streets.”

  So what Quentin did was watch TV and movies. All day. He was obsessively interested in movies, and he became a pop culture sponge. It was the sum total of his education. He began to write. His mother would come home from work and find Quentin’s scribbles on every available piece of paper, filling every yellow legal pad she brought from work. “He was sleeping all day, watching TV all night, and scribbling on paper. Pardon me if I didn’t recognize that as genius,” she admits. “I thought it was avoidance of responsibility and living in a dream world.”

  The division between Quentin’s take on the world and his mother’s had become painfully obvious. She wanted to send him to Europe on vacation. He wouldn’t go. She wanted to buy him designer clothes. He insisted on dressing like a slob, in torn T-shirts; he wouldn’t bathe. Connie could never understand Quentin’s slacker attitude, and for a very long time didn’t take his interest in movies seriously.

  “I’d get after Quentin about glamorizing poverty or the wrong side of the tracks, and he’d talk about Robert Blake not caring about the way he looked or dressed,” she recalled. “I was after Quentin about grooming, which was dismal. And his bedroom, and the attitude: It wasn’t important. Education wasn’t important. Nothing was important except movies. Hollywood. And at that time, although I was very entertainment-oriented, it drove me crazy.”

  She went on: “To me it was a fantasy world he lived in. I knew he liked that stuff; he said he had ambitions to be an actor, but I thought that was an escape from reality. I’d say: ‘Whatever you do, I want you to get an education.’ I wouldn’t have cared, as long as he had [an] education. It was more than about livelihood to me: it was that ‘you must be educated.’ I wasn’t calm. He was picking at the fabric that was me and all the things I thought we needed to have to stay safe in this world I created.” In retrospect, Connie grew to become guilt-ridden at imposing her values on Quentin, to whom material success clearly did not matter, and doubting his precocious film talent.

  She said: “In retrospect I wish I’d spent a whole lot more time at home. That was my baggage.”

  But at the time, not insignificantly, she worried that her son would slide back into the world of poverty and ignorance that she’d escaped. “I was worried Quentin would be one of life’s dropouts who couldn’t function outside the home with Mom,” she said. Had Quentin not become a superstar—plenty of talented people don’t—that may well have been his fate.

  BUT IT WASN’T. ONE SUMMER WHEN QUENTIN WAS FIFTEEN years old, Connie punished him for stealing a book from Kmart and getting caught by the police. Connie was mystified; she would have bought any book he wanted. Why did he steal? She confined him to the house for the entire summer. Softening, one day she let him out of the restriction, and Quentin asked to join a community theater group, which cost twenty dollars to join. “I gave it to him,” said Connie. “He came home and said he had the lead in their play.” The play was called Two and Two Make Sex, and it played at the Torrance Community Theater.

  After that Quentin, who persisted for many years in his attempt to become an actor, was set on a path, heading to the James Best Theater acting classes in Burbank. His mother grew gradually less suspicious of his entertainment aspirations.

  But later in life, Tarantino was unabashedly bitter toward his mother. They rarely spoke, and when Tarantino’s fortieth birthday passed in 2003, they were not in touch. Unlike some who succeeded in Hollywood, he did not buy her mink coats or a mansion. Something irreparable had broken between them. He blamed her for the instability of his youth; Connie married yet again, another union that didn’t last. In the years to come, Connie came to actively support Quentin’s ambitions. But it didn’t seem to help; Quentin was estranged from his mother during her third marriage and again in later years. In 2003 she wrote him a sixteen-page letter, begging him to come back to her, still hoping to reconcile. He didn’t write back. Connie Zastoupil never knew—and still doesn’t know—why her only son rejected her. It broke her heart.

  TARANTINO LEFT MANY OTHER RELATIONSHIPS IN HIS wake as he made his way toward Hollywood. His early professional life follows a pattern of intense bonding with close friends and supporters, most of whom he jettisoned once he became successful.

  In the early to mid-1980s Tarantino worked at the Video Archives store in Manhattan Beach, where he hooked up with a community of movie buff oddballs who became his closest friends. Video Archives was the kind of place that has almost disappeared in the world of the Blockbuster chain, a small, dark, quirky spot in a strip mall in Manhattan Beach that had on staff young movie geeks who watched videos all day and dreamed of making it in Hollywood. Its customers were a small clientele of faithful movie lovers. Tarantino started out as one of them, then eventually got hired and worked his way up to manager. He was perfect for the job, a slacker with a voracious film appetite and an encyclopedic memory to recall them on demand. The owner, Lance Lawson, sometimes let the staff sleep in the back room if they were broke. Tarantino would leave to write a script, or to dip a toe into Hollywood, but he always returned when he ran out of cash. Video Archives was his home and where, he often said, he received his Ph.D. in film studies. What he really wanted to do, however, was act.

  In 1981 Tarantino met Craig Hamann at the James Best Theater Center in Toluca Lake, a stone’s throw from the Warner Brothers lot. They hit it off immediately.

  Eleven years Quentin’s senior, Hamann was from Detroit, the son of a Ford Motor Company executive, who had come to Hollywood to make it as a screenwriter. He was a quiet kid, but often seething with anger. Hamann had fallen into addiction as a teenager, shooting up heroin and then methamphetamine, habits that got him arrested on more than one occasion and nearly killed him from an overdose on another occasion. After his second arrest, Hamann determined to get clean, and he did, finding religion as a result and taking up martial arts as a therapeutic tool. He remained a martial arts enthusiast for decades after that, and once clean, attended and graduated with a B.A. in writing from Eastern Michigan University in Ann Arbor before heading to Hollywood to find his fortune in 1980.

  At the time he met Tarantino, Hamann was paying his bills working as a stunt actor, and—improbably, considering he had a real anger management problem—as a customer service representative at a local Bank of America. Though Hamann gives the impression of an unsteady calm, the anger issue was a real prob
lem, and he was asked to leave no fewer than four acting schools. And he was sensitive, not always in a good way. Once at a restaurant with a friend near the Paramount lot, Hamann noticed that several men at a nearby table were staring at him; he got up to go to the bathroom and the men followed him with their eyes. On his way back to the table, Hamann walked up to the men, who he figured were homosexual, and challenged them: “What are you staring at? If you keep this up I’m going to fuck you up.”

  They were casting agents.

  Tarantino also seemed to have impulse control problems himself, and the two rapidly connected. They were among the few in acting class who refused to suck up to the teacher. Both were broke. They became inseparable. In between their bit roles and day jobs, they’d meet at Hamann’s house in Burbank, or at Quentin’s place in Torrance. They’d take in double features at the Hollywood Theater: Jack Nicholson in The Border and Dr. Butcher, M.D., a cannibalism flick. They once saw the new version of Breathless at the Cinerama Dome. Quentin told his friend that his friendship was “like smack” to him.

  Tarantino’s other close friend and collaborator was Roger Avary, a fellow cinephile from Torrance who worked with him at Video Archives. Along with Hamann, they shared a visceral love for movies, martial arts, and violence of all kinds.

  Avary had been born in Flin Flon, Manitoba. His grandfather had been a Pan Am pilot based in Rio de Janeiro, where his father was born and raised. His father was itinerant, too, a mining engineer who moved frequently because of his work. When he was one year old, Avary’s family moved to Oracle, Arizona, then to Torrance, and finally to nearby Manhattan Beach when Avary turned seven. Unlike Tarantino, Avary did finish high school and went on to study film at the Art Center College of Design, though he dropped out not long after.

  As they struggled to make it throughout the 1980s, Tarantino, Avary, and Hamann had a solemn pact. They’d tell each other: “If one of us makes it big, the others will, too.” No one was going to make it to the top without the others coming along. One night Tarantino, Hamann, Avary, and Al Harrell, another friend, were sitting at the home of their manager, Cathryn Jaymes, making toasts and committing again to their lifelong friendship. Tarantino repeated his vow emotionally: “I promise if I hit it big, I will help you guys,” the participants recalled.

  BUT FOR TARANTINO, THE PACT EVAPORATED AFTER SUCCESS finally hit. He dropped Hamann with no explanation after Reservoir Dogs made him a rising star. Eventually the two began talking again in the mid-nineties, only to fall out again after Tarantino threatened to sue Hamann over a film they’d made together.

  The rifts in Tarantino’s closest friendships were not just a matter of expediency or finding cooler, better-looking people to hang out with (though that wasn’t a negligible by-product; Tarantino’s earliest friends were as geeky and fashion-challenged as he was). It also had to do with Tarantino’s unwillingness to share the credit for his success. His genius was undisputed even by his friends. But he seemed to want to hide the fact that it required support and assistance.

  IN THE EIGHTIES HAMANN AND TARANTINO HAD A WORKING relationship, with Hamann smoothing and shaping Tarantino’s free-association ideas. Tarantino couldn’t spell (still can’t) to save his life, and he could barely write full sentences. Instead he jotted down bits of dialogue in fractured syntax and flashes of insights for scenes in barely legible scrawls on napkins and notebook paper, ideas that Hamann would spend hours editing and typing. Hamann recalled typing True Romance for Quentin on his Swintec electric typewriter.

  In 1984 Hamann wrote a screenplay for a short film called My Best Friend’s Birthday, which Tarantino directed. It was an homage to their friendship, made with about five thousand dollars scraped together from various sources, including Quentin’s mother, Connie, and her third husband, Jan Bohusch. The film was a ragtag effort, shot in bits and pieces over a couple of years, whenever someone came up with a bit of cash.

  The story is about a Torrance rockabilly disc jockey named Clarence and his best friend, Mickey. Clarence is the Quentin character—impetuous, off-the-cuff, a well-intentioned guy who is entirely unconscious of his tendency to trample on people. Mickey, the Craig Hamann character, is his best friend and a befuddled guy with a permanent stunned expression usually on his face. In the story, Clarence has a very bad day: he tries to surprise Mickey by planning him a birthday party, but everything goes wrong. First the hooker he hires for Mickey falls for Clarence instead, and then her pimp shows up and beats Mickey to a pulp. (The hooker character ultimately reappeared in True Romance.) In the end, however, their friendship survives.

  In the movie, that is. They shot the film in 16 mm, trashing Connie’s house in the process. She recalled: “He damaged all the light fixtures in the house. There was more to making a film than I realized.” Connie’s girlfriend loaned her restaurant-bar, where Quentin turned off the electricity and ruined all the meat. The film was never finished, and a lot of footage was lost in a lab accident, but about twenty minutes of it survives. When Tarantino became a media star, he claimed he wrote and directed the movie himself, which, as usual, wasn’t the whole story. Hamann says it was his original work, with Quentin’s inimitable overlay, and they shared the rights.

  Later in the mid-nineties producer Don Murphy bought an option on Hamann’s half of the movie. Angry, Tarantino called Hamann and asked why he hadn’t offered him the rights first. (Tarantino and Murphy famously fought over a later movie, Natural Born Killers, which Murphy coproduced. Murphy sued Tarantino over an incident in which Tarantino boasted in a television interview of having “bitch-slapped” the producer.) Hamann said he had tried, but Tarantino hadn’t replied. Tarantino’s lawyers then sent Hamann—who was penniless at the time—a letter threatening to sue because he had sold the rights. More than anything, it pained Hamann that his old friend, who had fame, fortune, and power, was taking aim at someone who was at the opposite end of the social and professional spectrum. He gave up on the friendship for good after that, but noted, “still see all his movies.” Tarantino says he would have helped Hamann, but that his old friend was trying to do the project with Murphy, Tarantino’s archenemy.

  The complaint that Tarantino was selfish and disloyal in his friendships is a common theme with his former friends, even those who admire him. When Scott McGill, a sensitive young member of the Video Archive gang, committed suicide, leaving a letter and tape behind about his aspirations as a director, Tarantino did not attend the funeral. Stevo Polyi, another denizen of Video Archives, roomed with Tarantino in a ramshackle house behind the store for two years. Like many who worked at Video Archives, he looked up to Tarantino—five years his junior—and craved his company. Tarantino once gave Polyi a “favor card” for his birthday (he was broke), good for any favor, anytime; years later Polyi, still trying to break into Hollywood, tried to redeem the card; but Tarantino didn’t return his calls.

  And then there was Rand Vossler, another early friend who segued into a working relationship with Tarantino. He produced My Best Friend’s Birthday; several years later, in 1989, Vossler quit a job in feature development for a producer at MGM to help Tarantino produce Natural Born Killers. The script, about a pair of married serial killers, had a fractured narrative, intense, grisly violence, and Tarantino’s dark humor, and it was too extreme for most people in Hollywood. While that languished, Tarantino was inspired to write Reservoir Dogs, and abandoned Natural Born Killers, leaving Vossler out of a job.

  As a sop to his friend, Tarantino told Vossler he could direct Natural Born Killers guerrilla style, like they’d done My Best Friend’s Birthday. Around the same time, Don Murphy and Jane Hamsher, then two, young, eager producers, put down some money to option the script. The short version is that Vossler was fired from the movie. He filed a lawsuit, a settlement was reached, and Oliver Stone, whose style Tarantino hated, ended up making the movie over Tarantino’s objections. Tarantino, who gave Vossler written leave to direct the movie, never took a clear stand on this matter. He compl
ained bitterly about Oliver Stone, and he just stopped answering Vossler’s calls. But he believed he did nothing wrong. “It’s like I had a baby, and I killed it for him,” Tarantino said, of Vossler. “At the end of the day I can feel good in my own heart that, you know, when it came down to the test I was there for him. I now know that I would do that for a friend. But the friendship can’t be the same anymore. You can’t help but have a little bit of resentment, having killed your baby.”

  Like many former friends, Vossler is oddly forgiving. “The things he did to hurt me were out of carelessness,” he said. “I have nothing but love and respect for the man.” He recognized a Machiavellian streak in the striving Tarantino. “I’ve always known this about him,” said Vossler in the mid-nineties. “Quentin and I have always talked about the theories of success: always be the weakest link in the chain, don’t hang out with your pals from Torrance when you can hang out with John Travolta and Uma Thurman…. That’s what Quentin did. He cut as many ties as he could to isolate himself. He finally got an apartment out in Hollywood, some rattrap apartment with mounds of dirty clothes, a VCR, a bed. That’s where he chose to be. He was in Hollywood, and that was important to him, cutting ties with his go-nowhere friends to get out of a stagnant pond.”

  The flip side to Tarantino’s apparently unthinking ability to drop his friends was an unshakeable loyalty to the celluloid characters he knew so well and loved for so long. When the time came to cast his movies, Tarantino would often reach out to long forgotten, washed-up actors who he believed had talent and deserved to work. This has been true throughout his career, from casting John Travolta in Pulp Fiction over Miramax’s objections to single-handedly resuscitating the careers of seventies actors Robert Forster and Pam Grier in Jackie Brown. “Regardless of his fractured sense of loyalty at times, his determination to revive the careers of well-deserving artists and people who had been left by the wayside, trashed by the fickle Hollywood machine—he would fight to the finish,” said Cathryn Jaymes, his longtime manager. “Hollywood is fickle, but Quentin is not, when it comes to talent. He’ll continue to support it.” Not every former star was smart enough to take the chance Tarantino offered them. Early on the director offered Michael Parks, an action star from the 1960s with a brooding James Dean style, the lead role in Reservoir Dogs. Parks wanted a different role in the film, and passed on the film twice. But Tarantino persisted, and eventually Parks was cast in From Dusk Till Dawn and the sequel From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter (later he also had a role in Kill Bill). Tarantino’s friend Scott Spiegel remembered when Tarantino got a phone call from a grateful Parks one day in the mid-nineties, thanking the director for casting him in from Dusk Till Dawn. Parks had just received a residual check from the movie, which allowed him to make his mortgage payment that month.