The infamous prank Quentin Tarantino stole from Tony Scott: “Get the biggest dildo they have”
Making a movie can be a marathon for the cast and crew, and it often falls to the director to keep everyone’s energy levels up. When Quentin Tarantino turned Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch novel into his 1997 blaxploitation classic Jackie Brown, though, he went to risque lengths to ensure the film’s night shoots didn’t send everyone to sleep. In fact, he employed a prank his old friend Tony Scott used to pull, and one that probably wouldn’t fly in today’s climate.
Jackie Brown was Tarantino’s third film and the first one in which he regularly encountered the conundrum of keeping people awake when their bodies were crying out for sleep. After all, while working through the film’s many night scenes, he noticed that actors and crew members alike quite naturally had trouble staying awake. It was almost like human beings weren’t really built to stay up all night to make movies.
Then Tarantino remembered something Scott – who directed True Romance in 1993 from one his early scripts – would do to jolt people awake on his sets after they’d drifted into the land of nod.
The Pulp Fiction icon grinned: “We found out that Tony Scott would put a rubber penis next to them while they were asleep, and take a Polaroid of them, and that would keep everyone awake.”
While this sounds like an absolute HR nightmare in 2024, it must have been fair game in ’97, as Tarantino quickly tasked one of his interns with taking a trip to Santa Monica Boulevard. He told them, “Get the biggest dildo they have.” When the intern returned with an appropriately large purple rubber appendage, Tarantino couldn’t help being impressed. He exclaimed, “It was about the size of a lamp in a living room. We called him Big Jerry.” Tarantino joked – using a delightfully terrible pun – “he became a very, very important member on the set.”
Which crew member was most taken with the idea of depositing a giant sex toy beside the sleeping faces of his long-suffering colleagues, though? Amusingly, the main culprit was producer Lawrence Bender, the man who first took a gamble on Tarantino in 1990 when he was blown away by the Reservoir Dogs script. Tarantino chuckled: “Lawrence was the one who got into it the most; he would sneak up on people. We kept a big collection of the pictures, but we decided for safety we’d burn them at the wrap party, the whole Big Jerry Gallery.”
Hilariously, Tarantino was so thrilled with Big Jerry’s work that he kept bringing him back on future sets. Uma Thurman once revealed that Jerry “would be brought out like Jaws” on the Kill Bill set, where he would be delicately positioned “in some ungodly horrific angle next to the face of the offending sleeper.” Brad Pitt also fell afoul of Jerry while shooting Inglourious Basterds and suffered the indignity of having his picture posted on the “Board of Shame” for everyone to gawp at.
While most people seemed to take Jerry’s presence in good humour, Tarantino did run into something of a revolt while making Django Unchained. According to Tim Roth, an unnamed crew member was so incensed by their picture making the Board of Shame that they printed it on T-shirts for the entire crew to wear.
Ultimately, Tarantino carried on his friend and cinematic mentor Scott’s dildo prank for as long as he could. But perhaps the rebellion on the set of Django led Tarantino to re-think his continued indulgence of Big Jerry. When he was interviewed by Empire in 2020, he revealed that Jerry now lived in a big purple sack in his office and confirmed, “He’s not coming out again“.
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