The “bitch-slap” that almost cost Quentin Tarantino $5m: “This is not about money”
Not to generalise, but you’d feel pretty embarrassed if you got into a scrap with Quentin Tarantino and came out on the losing side, because he doesn’t look like he’d be much use in a fight.
Then again, maybe the filmmaker is a secret badass, but it seems unlikely. He’d like to think he is, which is why he spent months walking around Los Angeles dressed as Chow Yun-fat’s character in A Better Tomorrow in the late 1980s, but he probably looked like a twat more than anything else.
When you’ve got as big a mouth as Tarantino, it’s inevitable that it’ll get you into trouble eventually. He’s annoyed a lot of people in the industry with his outspoken comments, which have a habit of crossing the line into needlessly personal attacks, but when he did get physical, he almost had the arse sued right off him.
It goes without saying that the two-time Academy Award winner was not, still isn’t, and never will be a fan of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, which he felt bastardised his screenplay and turned it into something he never wanted it to be. If he felt so strongly, maybe he shouldn’t have sold it in the first place, but that’s another conversation for another time.
The controversial 1994 thriller was produced by Don Murphy, who found himself getting into an altercation with Tarantino at the Los Angeles restaurant, Ago. Three years after the film’s release, and presumably still pissed off about it, the writer and director took umbrage with things Murphy had said about him in fellow producer Jane Hamsher’s book, Killer Instinct: How Two Young Producers Took on Hollywood and Made the Most Controversial Film of the Decade.
Handling it like a true grown-up, Tarantino not only pushed, punched, grabbed Murphy, and threw him into a wall, he also went on a talk show and bragged about it, telling the host and audience of The Keenan Ivory Wayans Show that he’d been “looking” for the producer for the last three years, and when he did, he “bitch-slapped” him three times to exact his revenge.
Murphy claimed that he’d been left unable to work due to the pain caused by the unprovoked assault at the hands of the Pulp Fiction creator, and after discovering that he’d gone on national television to regale people with the tale of how he bitch-slapped Murphy for his transgressions, he filed a lawsuit.
Lodging a $5 million claim, Murphy released a statement signalling that if he won the case, any compensation that he received would be awarded to LA’s Inner City Filmmakers organisation, marking one of the rare times in Hollywood where someone said, “This suit is not about money,” and actually meant it.
“If Quentin didn’t agree with what was published in my book, he should have taken his grievances to a court of law,” Hamsher weighed in, defending her Natural Born Killers colleague. “That’s the civilised recourse society has provided for disagreements.” That’s entirely true, but Tarantino evidently felt that bitch-slapping was the best option available to him at the time. In the end, the suit was dropped, he saved himself a potential $5 million headache, and he got away scot-free with his retribution.
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