The only movie Quentin Tarantino ripped off twice: “I didn’t really rip it off enough”
Is it even a Quentin Tarantino movie if it doesn’t feature at least one shot, needle drop, musical cue, reference, motif, or line of dialogue that references another film? Since we’ve yet to find that out, it feels safe to say no.
Cinema’s most notorious magpie has always dodged accusations that he’s a ripoff merchant by pointing out that, as a student of cinema with a voracious appetite for devouring as many pictures as possible, he doesn’t have a problem homaging those who came before because he’s still telling his own stories.
It’s a fair point, even if a lot of it reeks of self-indulgence and flexing of his cinephile muscles. Of course, anyone who knows anything about Tarantino has long since accepted that the only supply he gets higher on than his own is that of his favourite features, and since he’s been doing it since 1992, there’s no chance he’ll abandon what’s become a signature in its own right.
However, one title holds a unique place among the pantheon of movies that Tarantino has plucked from over the years, because he admitted that since he didn’t rip it off the first time, it only seemed fair to do it again. 1972’s made-for-television film The Longest Night may well have been completely forgotten if it weren’t for the two-time Academy Award winner, in particular, Sallie Shockley’s Karen Chambers being kidnapped, entombed, and buried alive inside a coffin.
“I had already ripped off The Longest Night with Kill Bill 2,” he explained to GQ, with Uma Thurman’s Beatrix Kiddo being left to her own devices and demise after being buried six feet under by Michael Madsen’s Budd. Two years later, Tarantino agreed to direct CSI‘s two-part finale, ‘Grave Danger’, and decided that enough time had passed for him to return to the well. Or coffin, in this case.
“And I go, well, I didn’t really rip off The Longest Night enough,” he said. “I ripped off the imagery, but I should just actually rip off The Longest Night and then just take the idea of somebody buried underground as part of a ransom thing.” Sure enough, that’s basically the entire ‘Grave Danger’ plot, with a character trapped in a plexiglass coffin, forcing their team to mount a rescue before time runs out.
Unlike most guest directors who come in and helm a single episode, or two in this instance, of an established TV show, especially a season finale, Tarantino was credited with the story. Anthony E. Zuiker, Carol Mendelsohn, and Naren Shankar may have written the script, but he was the one who came up with the idea, which seemed suspiciously familiar to his big-screen audience.
The funniest thing is that even though some viewers complained about Tarantino ripping off his own Kill Bill on CSI, what he’d actually done is rip off The Longest Night, the movie he’d already ripped off for Kill Bill that he was ripping off again. It’s like Inception but with rip-offs, but it still made for nail-biting TV.
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