‘Maximum Potential’: the Dolph Lundgren exercise video that gave Quentin Tarantino his first film credit
History tends to remember Quentin Tarantino as enjoying a meteoric rise up the ranks after the auteur burst onto the scene and immediately made waves when his debut feature, Reservoir Dogs, took the Sundance Film Festival by storm after premiering in January 1992.
With its subversion of established tropes, razor-sharp dialogue, and innately crafted genre thrills, it was clear the writer and director had a bright future. Of course, he’d make good on that promise when his sophomore effort, Pulp Fiction, completely changed the landscape of American independent cinema.
It wasn’t as if he came out of nowhere as the wunderkind responsible for two modern crime classics and the screenplays for True Romance and Natural Born Killers, though, with Tarantino’s first credited role on a Hollywood production coming under highly unusual circumstances when he played his part in Dolph Lundgren’s home exercise video, Maximum Potential.
Capitalising on his post-Rocky IV fame, the Swedish superman sought to carve out a slice of a lucrative market, one that had worked wonders for Jane Fonda’s bank balance in particular. Sold as a “varied and comprehensive personal workout” that involved “body sculpturing, boxing, shadow, boxing, running, jumping rope, yoga, the martial arts and more,” Maximum Potential even includes “stress management” techniques for those seeking a mental workout.
Released the year before Tarantino’s unfinished 1987 amateur comedy My Best Friend’s Birthday, the first time the future two-time Academy Award winner and influential filmmaker received credit on an industry production saw him listed as a production assistant alongside Roger Avary, Ron Hayes, and Jerry Martinez.
It was a foot in the door, at least, but Tarantino wasn’t exactly exposed to the glitzier or more glamorous side of the business. “I remember going down to Venice Beach, and there’s this grassy area where Dolph Lundgren is going to do his exercises, with people behind him following along,” he told Empire. “And there’s just an acre of dogshit all over this small area of grass.”
As part of his PA duties, Tarantino was required to scoop the poop, making a vow to himself that when he was a big-time director and he was shooting on a location covered in canine excrement, he wouldn’t forget Maximum Potential and get right into the weeds alongside the people who’d been tasked to do the same job for him.
Sure enough, he was a man of his word: “I grabbed a shovel, and I did a couple of scoops,” he recalled of his promise coming back to haunt him on Pulp Fiction. “I had a debt to pay.” It’s important in any walk of life for success not to go directly to the head, and in Tarantino’s case, he was obliged to live up to his word and get his hands dirty, having been there himself on Lundgren’s workout tape.
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