All of this pent-up resentment came pouring out in Spanking the Monkey, and surprisingly enough the sentiment connected with a very unlikely movie executive. “I read the script. I quite liked it,” recalled Bob Shaye. “It was difficult and arguably dangerous.”
New Line bought an option for a few thousand dollars, saying they’d make it for a budget of $1 million if Russell could get a movie star who could help guarantee an audience to the risky subject matter. Unfortunately, casting the role of the mother was almost impossible. Any actress over forty years old who was famous enough to help win an audience for the movie was not about to risk her career playing an incestuous mother with a first-time filmmaker. Russell finally got Faye Dunaway to consider the role and flew out to Hollywood to meet her at her mansion to pitch the project. It was his first time in Tinseltown. Dunaway served the wide-eyed Russell cappuccino in her guesthouse and told him about all her adventures with Warren Beatty during the filming of Bonnie and Clyde. Then Russell told her about Spanking, trying to convince Dunaway that taking the role would improve her relationship with her own thirteen-year-old son.
“She laughed in his face,” recalled Grillo, who greeted the disappointed Russell on his return to New York. After several months of championing the film without success, Shaye finally passed. Instead it took the next two years for Grillo and Russell, with producer Dean Silvers, to get the film made independently, scraping together about $80,000, half from a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a New York State Council on the Arts grant. The other half was raised from investments of up to $1,000 that Grillo and Silvers sold off as shares to friends and family. But even that wasn’t enough to finish the film, and with half of the script in the can in 1993, they had to turn to a film completion fund for the rest of the money.
To save money, Russell had made a deal with a motel in upstate New York to make a promotional video for them in exchange for letting the crew live there during the shoot. The crew was grumpy and suspicious. Russell recalled, “They’ve all made more movies than you. You’re like, ‘How do we light that?’ And they’re like, ‘Grumble, grumble …incest guy …he’s making us pay attention to this disgusting piece of shit.’ So that was really arduous.”
For the filmmaker, the experience felt dangerous and thrilling. “There was something in me that compelled me to do it. It was autobiographical, except the extremeness of it, and the literalness of it was not. I remember feeling very liberated when I wrote it,” Russell said. “And there were still great feelings of liberation in making the movie, reclaiming something that she appropriated, by making your own point.”
Fine Line executive Ira Deutchman and a few colleagues saw an early screening of Spanking the Monkey at the DuArt Film Laboratories’ office on Fifty-fifth Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan.
He didn’t get it. Neither did Bob Shaye, who wasn’t happy with the way the film turned out. “I expected a twisted drama,” Shaye said. “It turned out to be a black comedy. I was disappointed. Dismayed.” Deutchman passed. “We didn’t see what the hook was,” said Deutchman. “We didn’t know what it was. Would this subject matter attract an audience?”
They thought not. But then the film was accepted at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, and Deutchman went to see it again in Park City, this time in a room with an audience. At the much-anticipated first screening, with most of the major distribution executives present, Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein got up and left after the first few minutes of the film. You could count him out of the running for any bid on the film—and anyone who happened to see him leave. But the audience laughed, rather than recoiled. They cheered, they hollered. At a party at the River Horse Café later that night along Main Street, Deutchman told New Line chief Bob Shaye that he wanted to buy Spanking the Monkey.
Shaye replied, “Over my dead body.” Deutchman bought it anyway, though he knew that if the movie failed Shaye would use it as a chit against him.
Shaye wasn’t happy about the deal, but neither, it turned out, was Russell. Deutchman had made a low-ball offer (it just covered the cost of the negative, $155,000), the day before the film festival was to end, and told Russell the offer would expire by the end of the award ceremony the next day. Russell and producer Dean Silvers knew that if the film won an award—as was buzzed at the festival—the asking price would automatically rise. But if it didn’t, they’d run the risk of losing the New Line offer altogether. Russell decided not to risk losing the deal and shook hands with the executive backstage before the awards started. Minutes later Spanking the Monkey won the audience award. Russell felt like New Line had held him up. (Russell does not remember being anything but happy with the Spanking deal.)
Spanking the Monkey performed more than respectably for an indie movie, taking in $1.3 million. The investors got their money back. Russell won critical acclaim and the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay.
But his rancor toward New Line would later contribute to Deutchman’s demise at the studio, and to the end of Grillo’s career there.
TARANTINO RETURNED FROM THE 1992 CANNES FILM FFESTIVAL a changed man. He’d gone to France an unknown; he returned as the most talked-about filmmaker in America. His pal Scott Spiegel had an attic filled with articles about him from the Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and L.A. Weekly. He was rich: TriStar Pictures and Danny DeVito’s company, Jersey Films, paid him nearly $1 million to write and direct his next film, which would be Pulp Fiction. True Romance was coming out. Natural Born Killers had been sold. Overnight, Quentin Tarantino had become the voice of a new generation, a maverick upstart who was telling traditional Hollywood to watch out. The studios, he warned, were antiquated and out of step. “In the 80s the studios could predict what worked and what didn’t,” he told the New York Times in a major Sunday profile, another sign of his arrival. “And that’s what the 80s were—one movie you’d already seen after another. Suddenly that’s not working anymore.” He said: “The audience wants something different. And that’s the most exciting time to be in the business—every 20 years or so, when what worked for the studios suddenly doesn’t work anymore. When the audience is fed up with the standard stuff and crying out for something different is when exciting things happen in Hollywood.”
Tarantino happened to be precisely right: The times were changing. New, young, angry voices were emerging: John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood, a raw depiction of gang life in the inner city, had won strong critical support and unexpectedly brought in $50 million at the box office. Robert Rodriguez, an unknown young Hispanic director from San Antonio, had caused a stir with his $7,000 Spanish-language gun-slinging El Mariachi, shot in his hometown using friends and family in the cast. But if change was coming (and it was), Quentin Tarantino was its principal ambassador. Everyone wanted to meet him and shake his hand. Out at restaurants, people—important people—would stop by to interrupt and say things like. “I’ve just finished a script for Simpson and Bruckheimer, and I couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t seen Dogs,” as one did. Or producer Julia Phillips (Taxi Driver) would take a moment at his table to say that Reservoir Dogs “made me want to make movies again.” Tarantino drank it all in, then retired to Europe for four or five months, where he took Reservoir Dogs to film festivals, granted something like four hundred interviews, and worked on Pulp Fiction.
WHILE TARANTINO WAS WINNING FAME AND FORTUNE, HIS buddy was still broke. The previous year Avary had wanted to marry his girlfriend, Gretchen. Partly to help him, Tarantino had bought Avary’s script, called Pandemonium Reigned, for $25,000. The script, which Avary had used as a calling card around Hollywood, was the story of a boxer who doesn’t take a fall as he’d promised. He then has to evade gangsters while returning home for an heirloom gold watch his girlfriend accidentally left behind. The boxer finds himself in ever more perilous situations as he tries to escape the gangsters he double-crossed, and runs into a pair of sadomasochists along the way. Avary hoped that he and Tarantino would rework Pandemonium
Reigned together.
After the Cannes Festival where Reservoir Dogs made a stir, Tarantino, Avary, and Stacey Sher drove together to Amsterdam. Tarantino bought a massive notebook and a set of special pens and refined the ideas in Avary’s script, expanding and embellishing them in longhand. As they drove north, Tarantino would read his ideas aloud to Sher and Avary. They ended up in Paris in the middle of the night looking for gas, battling rush hours on their way; once in Amsterdam they partied and ate French fries with mayonnaise; perhaps some marijuana was smoked, perhaps more than some. At that point, says Sher, “All of the first story was written when I was in Amsterdam, up to the gold watch.” Sher left, while Avary stayed on. He insists that the script of Pulp Fiction was at least half his work. “What I wrote and what he wrote are almost indefinable,” he told Peter Biskind. “We essentially raided all of our files, and took out every great scene either of us had ever written, put them on the floor, started lining them up and putting them together. I had my computer, so I would combine them into sequences. Quentin was being financed by TriStar, but I didn’t have two pennies to rub together and had to make a living, so eventually I left and went to make Killing Zoe.”
Tarantino insists otherwise, saying he used only the middle section of Pandemonium Reigned in what was his own adaptation. “I really thought it would work well with my three Pulp Fiction stories in one. So basically I just bought the script and said, ‘What I’m going to do, Roger, is I’m going to adapt this into my work.’ And that’s what I did. Roger wasn’t with me at the typewriter or anything like that. I never collaborated with him on Pulp Fiction. I’ve never collaborated with another writer before, ever. Ever. I don’t even know how you would do that. …To tell you the truth I did it in not too dissimilar a way that I did with Elmore Leonard, actually, even though Elmore Leonard didn’t write [Jackie Brown] with me. There’s actually more of Elmore Leonard’s writing in Jackie Brown than there’s Roger Avary’s writing in Pulp Fiction.”
Lawrence Bender, Scott Spiegel, and Stacey Sher remember Tarantino’s calling them from Amsterdam at all hours of the night to read bits of dialogue. And yet much of Avary’s original story remained in the final version, including many of the most indelible moments in Pulp Fiction: not just the entire boxer story line but the anal rape by the sadomasochists, the bizarre “gimp” on a chain scene, the gold watch, and the girlfriend who eats pie for breakfast.
Ultimately it is unclear whose handiwork Pulp Fiction truly is; it remains in dispute and will probably never be resolved. Tarantino’s distinctive voice comes through in the indelible dialogue of the script. Yet he and Avary had been working inseparably for so many years that it is hard to distinguish their voices. As could be expected, Tarantino downplayed Avary’s contribution in his interviews on the subject. In the official version of Pulp Fiction, Avary provided only a small, minor part of the story. Mike Simpson goes by Tarantino’s version. Sher says, “There’s not a catty bone in Quentin’s body,” and he would not take credit for something that wasn’t his.
The script that emerged was pure brilliance. Pulp Fiction morphed into a three-part tale that was a savvy, original melding of story lines: two small-time thieves knock over a restaurant; then the story shifts to two hit men on their way to blow away drug dealers; the hit men work for the feared gangster Marsellus, who is caught up in a boxing deal gone wrong with boxer Butch Coolidge. The movie is dark and violent yet also funny and ineffably cool. The dialogue is often bizarre, also hilarious, filled with non sequiturs and brilliant slices of pop culture. And the story is told in sections, backward.
Take the scene where Vincent, a hit man, takes his boss’s girlfriend, Mia, out for dinner to a theme restaurant with waiters dressed as Hollywood greats.
Mia: Are you a Bewitched man or a Jeannie man?
Vincent: Bewitched, all the way, though I always dug how Jeannie always called Larry Hagman “Master.”
Mia: If you were Archie, who would you fuck first, Betty or Veronica?
Vincent: Betty. I never understood Veronica attraction.
Mia: Have you ever fantasized about being beaten up by a girl?
Vincent: Sure.
Mia: Who?
Vincent: Emma Peel on The Avengers. That tough girl who used to hang out with Encyclopaedia Brown. And Arlene Motika.
Mia: Who’s Arlene Motika?
Vincent: Girl from sixth grade, you don’t know her.
Pulp Fiction has a distinctive tone, that mix of menace and humor that is thrilling and frightening at the same time, a tone that came to be known as “Tarantinoesque.”
It was not until later that the tension between the once blood brothers Avary and Tarantino exploded over the issue of credit. According to Avary, before the film came out Tarantino called and asked him to give up his screenwriting credit. In his book, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film, Peter Biskind describes Avary’s version of the story:
After Pulp had wrapped, just in 1994, Avary was at the lab, CFI, supervising the color timing on his own film, Killing Zoe, when he was called to the phone. It was Tarantino’s attorney, “frantic,” according to Avary. He was faxing over a rider to Avary’s Pulp Fiction contract according to which Avary gave up his coscreenwriting credit in exchange for a “story by” credit. He wanted Avary to sign it and fax it back immediately. Avary called his friend and with a note of disbelief in his voice, said, “Hold on a moment here, Quentin. You want me to sign a paper that essentially says that I’m forfeiting my writing credit on the film, and take a ‘story by’ credit?”
According to Avary, Tarantino explained that it was because he wanted to be able to say “Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino” at the end of the movie. “When you’re positioning yourself to become a media star, you don’t want people to be confused as to who the star is,” he reportedly told Avary.
When Tarantino called Avary in early 1994 to get him to give up his writing credit, he tried to convince his partner that a “story by” credit was even better, since “that middle story is yours, but this one attributes the whole story to you,” according to Avary. He replied, “No, I’m not going to sign it.” Avary felt he’d made contributions throughout the script. Says Avary, “Quentin flew into a rage,” threatening to rewrite the script and write out all his contributions so he’d get no credit at all.
Ultimately Avary signed the agreement when Quentin promised him a sum of money that would equal Writers Guild residuals and increased his back end participation in the profits. Avary had maxed out his credit cards making Killing Zoe and needed the financial security.
According to one person close to the deal, the agreement had a confidentiality clause in which Avary, along with the money, agreed not to talk about the deal. If so, it was an agreement that Avary finally breached in Biskind’s book. Not that it was exactly a secret; he whined frequently about being cheated out of the credit on his Web site, as if he didn’t know that he’d actively given it up.
THE QUESTION OF TARANTINO’S ABILITY TO WRITE WITHOUT the support of a partner became a real question over the years. When Tarantino first gave his manager, Cathyrn Jaymes, the script to From Dusk Till Dawn, she thought it was so bad she didn’t want to send it out. When she finally did, angry producers and agents called back and said, “What is this piece of crap? Quentin didn’t write this, did he?” After the success of Reservoir Dogs veteran movie and television director Barry Levinson invited Tarantino to write a couple of episodes of his acclaimed drama Homicide. Tarantino agreed but never came through. He’d call his various representatives and plead, “Get me out of it. I can’t do it.”
This is not to say Tarantino’s is not a towering talent, only that his gift is more in synthesis and adaptation rather than in creating stories from nothing. His staunchest defenders, like Lawrence Bender, would continue to insist he was “an originator.” He isn’t. But he is a brilliant adapter indeed.
The Pulp Fiction incident put a permanent chill on Taran
tino and Avary’s relationship. Tarantino, who claimed that Avary hadn’t repaid a $5,000 debt, believed his pal was honing in on his shining moment. Avary thought Tarantino was hogging the limelight. He complained to Tarantino: “You’re gonna be Martin Scorsese, and I’m [only] gonna be Paul Schrader.” To which Tarantino thought, “What’s so bad about being Paul Schrader?”
After Pulp Fiction was done, the two former best friends did not speak for years. Avary told Biskind, “For me, that was the moment when the fun of being two young guys coming up together, and writing for each other, completely vanished. I love Quentin, but things were never really the same between us after that. In that moment I realized that the 90s were no different from the 80s or 70s. This business has a way of taking friendship and love and passion and excitement for just creating, taking that idealism, and just shattering it.”
IN THE WAKE OF RESERVOIR DOGS, TARANTINO’S AGENT, Mike Simpson, had his client write a list of everything he wanted on his next movie deal. There were five things. He wanted to be well paid. This should’ve been obvious, since Tarantino was terminally broke. He wanted (and would get) $400,000. He also wanted a percentage of the box office gross. Tarantino wanted final cut—the power to determine the final version of the film. He wanted to have a running time of three hours. And he wanted to choose the cast.
These were fairly impossible demands, even for a buzzed-about young ingenue. Asking for gross points was significant, because most movie studios would only grant percentage points of the box office net profits, calculated after the studio had deducted all its own expenses. (Usually there are no profits left after the calculations were done; this is known as “Hollywood accounting.”) Final cut was something studios increasingly just didn’t grant. The provision boxed them into the artistic whims of the director, and studios couldn’t afford that sort of luxury, not when the cost of movies averaged $34 million per film for production and another $16 million for advertising, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.
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