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.”
HOWEVER PENNILESS, TARANTINO 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.
BENDER AND TARANTINO 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.
Others felt Bender’s britches grew awfully fast as he shot from failed actor to rich producer and—like Tarantino—quickly forgot about people he’d left behind. Veteran Hollywood manager Lee Daniels told of optioning the script to Monster’s Ball, an independent film that eventually won Halle Berry an Oscar in 2002. Bender believed that he had the option and called Daniels with his lawyers in tow. “Do you know who I am?” he demanded. Daniels responded dryly, “Of course I know who you are. You’re the guy who used to come to me with nickels in your pockets and holes in your pants.”
BUT SOMETHING INTANGIBLE CLICKED BETWEEN TARANTINO and Bender. Bender found what he was looking for in the budding director, a raw, irreverent attitude that came to define the early 1990s, the leitmotif of Tarantino’s films. At its most elemental, it was the anger of a poor, white kid taking aim at a society that denied him the things he wanted: money, women, fame, respect. At its most personal, it was a revenge of video geeks like Tarantino, Avary, Hamann, and anyone else who yearned for a little recognition. In Tarantino, Bender recognized an ambition parallel to his own and a flamboyant talent that a street fighter like him could leverage. Like Tarantino, Bender was a newcomer with a sense of the injured underdog about him. Like Tarantino, he wasn’t married; as success arrived he was usually seen with a different bombshell on his arm at every party. Poor or rich, either way Bender didn’t smile much, and h
e revealed little about his inner self.
Once success started to arrive, Bender always made sure that his name was inextricably linked with Tarantino’s. At the Cannes Film Festival in 1992, he was furious when the Hollywood Reporter ran a story announcing that Tarantino would produce an upcoming movie, Killing Zoe, by Roger Avary; the headline neglected to mention Bender, who was also a coproducer. He stormed into the financier’s office and demanded to see the press release, counting the number of times his name appeared to be sure it was equal to Tarantino’s.
It was 1991, and Bender and Tarantino still took the bus everywhere. Connie had invited Quentin to move home, to her house in Glendale, and gave him the master bedroom. She recalled: “He needed a quasi-apartment, a place to trash, so I wouldn’t have it all over the house. There were days he didn’t come out of that room at all. He was writing Reservoir Dogs and working on True Romance. I picked up a tape one day and put it in the car. I heard Quentin’s voice making a speech about Madonna and about “Like a Virgin,” about it being about a penis. I freaked out—what was this? I didn’t realize it was dialogue.” Quentin showed Natural Born Killers to his new friend Bender, but that script was going nowhere, and Tarantino mentioned a story he had been thinking about: A group of strangers team up to pull off a jewelry heist.
Tarantino wrote the script for Reservoir Dogs feverishly, in three weeks. This was one film that Avary never claimed to have coauthored. On the other hand, Tarantino later got tangled in accusations that the film closely paralleled a 1987 Ringo Lam film called City on Fire, starring Chow Yun-Fat. One erstwhile fan went so far as to make an underground documentary showing the parallels between the two films called, Who Do You Think You’re Fooling?, which made the rounds at short-film festivals. As to the intriguing title, it came from Tarantino’s mangled pronunciation of Louis Malle’s French classic, Au Revoir les Enfants. Whenever Tarantino attempted to refer to the film it came out more like “Aresvoir lezenf …” Avary says he joked to his friends, “That sounds like ‘reservoir dogs.’ In fact, you should name your movie that.” And Tarantino did.
ELSEWHERE IN TARANTINO’S LIFE THERE WAS FINALLY SOME good news on the horizon. His scripts were getting some buzz around town and Jaymes began fielding calls from agents interested in representing Tarantino. John Lesher, an ambitious, young, Harvard-educated agent at the newly created United Talent Agency, was one of those vying for the chance to represent him. He remembered Tarantino’s telling him that if he hired Lesher to represent him, he couldn’t allow low-level employees to read his scripts, since the coverage was always terrible. Michael Ovitz’s Creative Artists Agency was hot on the trail. Tarantino was interested in signing with Bill Block at InterTalent (who later left the agency business to become a studio executive). But Jaymes liked the pitch of Lee Stollman, a junior agent at the William Morris Agency. At the time the William Morris Agency was going through a crisis; one of its key agents, Stan Kamen, had died; others had left, taking their clients with them. At Creative Artists Agency Ovitz had begun his rapid ascent to ruling Hollywood with the art of packaging stars, directors, and screenplays. But two new agents at William Morris, John Burnham and Mike Simpson, looked to counter CAA by beginning to court young directors working with independent producers, like John Woo and Gus Van Sant.
For the agents, independent film wasn’t a very lucrative slot of the entertainment niche at first, but that was to change dramatically over time. The Morris agents were energetic and insisted they were looking at their clients’ long-term careers. When Tarantino ultimately went with Lee Stollman, Jaymes insists it was because the agent was unfailingly polite to her, and she was able to talk Tarantino out of signing with Bill Block. Stollman “was always so courteous when he called me,” she recalled. “I’m old-fashioned that way.” For her efforts, the William Morris agents were probably very polite when they later called to fire her after Pulp Fiction came out.
Stollman was truly enthusiastic. Newly minted as an agent, he brought scripts to staff meetings, endlessly pitching Tarantino. He went from one office to another at William Morris with Tarantino’s scripts under his arm, looking for support for the project and trying to get other William Morris clients in the movie.
GIVEN THE EDGINESS OF TARANTINO’S SCRIPTS, BENDER HAD no reason to think he could raise financing for Reservoir Dogs, but he decided to try. After some begging, Tarantino gave him a two-month option that was scrawled on a napkin. Bender took the script around to one would-be producer, who offered him $500,000 if his girlfriend could star in the film. Another financier offered $1.6 million, but he wanted the ending to be like The Sting, where everyone would be blown to smithereens but then get up and walk away, an elaborate hoax. Neither Tarantino nor Bender were interested in that. If all else failed, they planned to use the $50,000 Tarantino got from True Romance to make the film guerrilla style.
But Bender was strangely hopeful. “I had a feeling inside I didn’t dare let out, that we were about to do something really great. It’s not like I could know it from experience. But I felt it deep in my gut,” he said later.
For a moment Christopher Walken was attached to star in the film, though that evaporated when money failed to materialize. Tarantino originally wanted for himself the role that went to Steve Buscemi, Mr. Pink, but finally settled for a smaller part.
Bender gave it another shot, passing on a paid offer to join a tango dance tour to shop the script. He handed the script to his acting teacher, Lily Parker, who sent it to Harvey Keitel. It wasn’t the first time Keitel had heard of Tarantino. The actor had come close to starring in True Romance years before, when Cathryn Jaymes sent him a script. It hadn’t worked out, but Keitel was intrigued by Tarantino’s writing; so when Reservoir Dogs came his way, he jumped. Keitel’s involvement changed everything. Steven Sachs, a friend of Bender’s, recommended taking the script to Live Entertainment, previously known as a porn video company. Live stepped up as a financier, backing the budget at the not insignificant sum of $1.3 million. It turned out to be the best decision the company ever made, giving it artistic credibility and a major financial windfall: Reservoir Dogs ultimately sold ten thousand video units, worth about $4 million at the time. Meanwhile, Bender had promised Sachs that he would cut him into the deal if something came of it, but never did. (Nobody ever remunerated poor, generous Scott Spiegel, either. After some prodding, Bender finally sent a $5,000 check as a thank-you gift to his acting teacher. She sent it back.)
TARANTINO HEADED TO NEW YORK TO CAST THE PICTURE, A bright-lights-big-city experience bankrolled by Keitel (an unusual and generous gesture on his part), with the actor flying in first class and Tarantino and Bender in coach. Keitel took them to the Russian Tea Room to sip tea with the rich folks.
In casting sessions on Fifty-seventh Street, Bender spent hours tied up as the cop character in a key torture scene. About sixty actors showed up, and they took the auditions very seriously, some coming with guns as props; others brought knives. Finally they had to impose a “no weapons” rule for the audition because Bender was having a hard enough time being tipped over, strangled, and punched throughout the day. Back in Los Angeles, British actor Tim Roth wanted one of the parts but didn’t want to read for it. Tarantino took him to a bar on Sunset Boulevard, drank him under the table, and the two read through the script all night. Roth got the part.
As Quentin worked on Reservoir Dogs he stopped returning calls from his old friend Craig Hamann, as he had with others. Hamann didn’t know why. Perhaps Tarantino had gotten busy, but Hamann was deeply wounded. “I’d call him and not hear from him,” Hamann recalled. “In my view he turned around and walked away. Maybe I was embarrassing to him.”
When news of this rift and others hit the Internet in subsequent years, Tarantino’s most devoted fans—or perhaps his most fanatic devotees—used to harass those on the outs, like Hamann and Avary. Hamann would get random e-mails saying, “FUCK OFF. Tarantino is God.” Even years later, when Hamann finally got financing to write a
nd direct his own movie, Boogie Boy, bloggers sent him hate mail and deluged the review site imdb.com with negative comments about the film, which hadn’t even been in general release.
IN 1991 THE SUNDANCE INSTITUTE INVITED TARANTINO to work on Reservoir Dogs at its Filmmaker’s Lab with seasoned writers and actors. The program, founded in 1981, was run by the much-beloved Michelle Satter, who became a kind of godmother to many of the writers and directors who emerged in the 1990s, among them Paul Thomas Anderson, Allison Anders, Kim Peirce, Wes Anderson, and many others. All of them passed through the lab connected to Robert Redford’s film institute, where they were able to work through kinks in their screenplays and rehearse and shoot scenes with professional actors—a new experience for most of the participants. Seasoned directors come to the program to mentor the participants; in Tarantino’s case they were Jon Amiel, Ulu Grosbard, Terry Gilliam, and Volker Schlondorff. It was a useful prelude to shooting the film, which took thirty days.
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