The movie so badly directed Quentin Tarantino called it an “insult to all other directors”
Love him or hate him, Quentin Tarantino is a good director. Great, even, and if you ask the man himself, alongside David Fincher, he’s one of the two finest filmmakers in all of Hollywood.
That’s not atypical for the two-time Academy Award winner, who’s always been confident in his own abilities. That’s one of the reasons why he grates on so many people, though, because you don’t see or hear Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, or Paul Thomas Anderson talking about how great they are.
James Cameron has been known to do it occasionally, but you’re allowed to when you’ve directed three of the four highest-grossing movies ever released and ushered in wave after wave of technological breakthroughs. Good directors can make bad films, just like bad directors can occasionally strike genius, but what happens when a bad director makes a bad film, and directs it badly?
According to Tarantino, you get Robert Kaylor’s 1980 drama, Carny, starring Gary Busey, Robbie Robertson, and Jodie Foster. The latter’s disenfranchised teenager joins the carnival where the former two ran small-time scams as an exotic dancer, before the inevitable love triangle rears its ugly head.
Carny was Kaylor’s feature-length narrative debut after previously helming a pair of documentaries, and it would also be just one of two movies that he made, with the second and last, Nobody’s Perfect, releasing a decade later. He was hardly prolific, which was probably a good thing, based on how Tarantino laid into his lack of any tangible prowess from behind the camera.
“To call Robert Kaylor’s direction of the film lousy is to de facto insult all other directors, because it implies he directed anything at all,” the two-time Oscar-winner raged. “To direct badly, you first have to direct. When you shoot a glittering, blinking carnival at night, you can’t help but come back with visually stimulating footage.”
Carny failed on that front, unfortunately, with Tarantino continuing to rail against “Kaylor’s non-existent visual scheme,” and an overabundance of “isolated head-and-shoulder close-ups of actors framed against blank walls.” There was one saving grave, but it didn’t have anything to do with the picture’s technical merits.
The Pulp Fiction figurehead noted that “if the film has an authorial voice, it isn’t due to its direction, cinematography, or script,” throwing Kaylor’s co-scribe and wife, Phoebe, under the bus alongside two-time Oscar-nominated DP Harry Stradling Jr, with only Busey emerging unscathed and with a passing grade.
The star’s “unique combination of manic energy and beyond-the-beyond enthusiasm” didn’t quite compensate for how egregiously directed the whole affair was, but it did at least provide Tarantino with a solitary enjoyable sliver among 107 minutes of otherwise wretched filmmaking.
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