How the first public screening of ‘Reservoir Dogs’ turned into a “f*cking disaster”
The rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia make it easy to believe that Reservoir Dogs was embraced as an instant classic from the moment it was first screened to an audience, immediately establishing Quentin Tarantino as independent cinema’s newest wunderkind and reshaping the landscape of American film.
While all of the above is true, it doesn’t tell the whole story. As much as the filmmaker’s debut feature was undoubtedly the most talked-about premiere of the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, there were plenty of critics who were left equal parts disgusted and abhorred by the graphic violence and constant profanity.
Along the same lines, the word-of-mouth emerging from the festival didn’t translate into cold, hard cash. Reservoir Dogs earned a little under $3 million at the box office in the United States, which was enough to cover the production costs, but nowhere near enough to call it a hit. However, it doubled those takings in the United Kingdom, with Tarantino taking the country to his heart as the first nation to embrace his work.
The heist thriller without a heist is one of the most influential and widely imitated movies of the 1990s, but it didn’t make the same kind of instant and seismic impact that the writer and director’s sophomore effort, Pulp Fiction, did. In fact, as Tarantino remembers, the maiden showing couldn’t have gone much worse.
Buzz had slowly been building around Reservoir Dogs in the build-up to its premiere, and expectations were high. It must have been a nerve-wracking moment for the first-timer, and his nerves were hardly assuaged. “The first time we screened it was a disaster,” he recalled to The Guardian. “It was our very first public screening.”
“They didn’t have the scope lens for the projector, and it’s a scope movie, and I let them show it anyway. That would have been bad enough,” Tarantino explained. “It gets to the final climax, and all of a sudden, the lights come up. They go back down, and then, almost as if on purpose, as far as suspense is concerned, right at the height of the movie, there’s a power outage and all the power goes out.”
As a fresh-faced director showing his first movie to an audience at one of the most famous festivals on the circuit, repeated technical difficulties weren’t what he had in mind. “So, I thought, ‘OK, that’s what it’s like to watch your movie in public,'” he joked. “It was a fucking disaster.”
Still, Reservoir Dogs was good enough that the bungled screening didn’t dampen the enthusiasm among Sundance attendees, even though there were more than a few who didn’t rate the picture at all, with the two-time Academy Award winner noting that “it’s understandable that at a film festival that maybe this is not what they want to see and they have to leave,” with multiple people walking out.
The general public was equally divided, too, with Tarantino revealing that he “started counting the walkouts” every time he showed Reservoir Dogs to a new audience, and the record was set at 33. Of course, history always remembers the victor, and dozens of folks abandoning ship before the credits did nothing to stop his career from taking off.
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