The LA hotspot that fired Quentin Tarantino’s imagination: “It’s such a great experience”
Growing up somewhere like Los Angeles seems unfathomable to those of us who lived in small towns as kids, far away from the excitement of somewhere as mythical as the home of Hollywood cinema.
But Quentin Tarantino, while born in Tennessee, spent most of his youth in California, although how much of that Californian sun shone down on him is hard to say – it seems like he spent most of his time watching movies.
Still, when Tarantino wasn’t spending all of his time in dark movie theatres, he was surely soaking up the influence of nearby Hollywood and its stars. The legends of nearby streets and studios must have sparked something within his young mind, and he subsequently set his sights on becoming a filmmaker.
The director wrote his first screenplay when he was 14, and while he’d keep writing over the coming years as he worked at various cinema-related jobs, from a video rental store to a porno theatre, it wouldn’t be until 1992 that he’d finally release his first directorial feature, Reservoir Dogs.
Los Angeles has become a popular location for Tarantino’s characters to occupy, whether it’s the city streets in his debut, the diners, apartments, and bars which can be seen in Pulp Fiction, or the ‘60s version of Tinseltown featured in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. Its influence is blindly apparent – he loves the place, and he’ll always pay tribute to his beloved city, which has long been cinema’s central hub.
But what are Tarantino’s favourite LA spots? Many parts of the region have shaped him into the person he is today, whether that be due to movie theatres, which have given him his cinematic education, bookshops selling life-changing texts, or video stores that he could spend hours in, both as a worker and a customer.
Then there’s the places which gave Tarantino somewhere to stop and write, to get in the zone of penning a new idea. One of these is a little classic gastropub called Barney’s Beanery, which has appeared on screen a few times, although never in one of Tarantino’s films.
He told the Los Angeles Times, “Whenever someone comes to town and hasn’t been to LA before, I like to take them to the Beanery. It’s such a great experience. It’s one of the few places that has been around for so long.”
The place was founded in the 1920s, which really wasn’t that long ago when you think about it, but still, it has enough historical attachment to it for Tarantino to find the place fascinating. It was featured in movies like Grease and The Doors (there’s a plaque at the restaurant to mark where the real Jim Morrison sat, too), but more importantly, Brian De Palma’s Body Double features a scene in the Beanery.
Any Tarantino fan will know just how much Tarantino loves De Palma, so to be able to sit in a location actually featured in one of his films probably gives the director a small kick of excitement every time he goes there.
In particular, though, he likes to sit in a specific place to focus on his work, adding, “There’s one booth there too that I love. It’s a little one, and there’s a post there that kind of cuts you off. It helps you concentrate a little bit too.”
So, if you’re ever at Barney’s Beanery, you might just catch a glimpse of Tarantino hard at work on his next project – although it’s uncertain what that next project will be, or if we’ll ever see it.
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