Was Quentin Tarantino’s first film really lost in a fire?
Quentin Tarantino is one of cinema’s most recognisable names. Whether you’re a tremendous fan of Pulp Fiction, critical of his depiction of violence, or know him as the director who loves feet a bit too much, there’s no denying Tarantino’s legacy. His most recent film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, took home two Academy Awards, proving the director to be consistent in his success.
Most people would trace this success back to 1992 when the cinema aficionado released his debut feature, Reservoir Dogs. Starring Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, and Steve Buscemi – to name a few – the independent crime thriller is widely considered to be one of the best of its kind. But what most audiences may not know is that Reservoir Dogs was not the director’s first film. In fact, in 1987, at 25 years old, Tarantino and some of his work pals came together to make a feature-length movie.
My Best Friend’s Birthday was created in collaboration with Craig Hamann and Roger Avary, with the latter going on to win an Oscar for co-writing Pulp Fiction, as well as becoming a director himself, most notably making The Rules of Attraction. Although My Best Friend’s Birthday does not have all of the usual trademarks of a Tarantino flick – there is no heavily stylised violence here – the film still contains traces of the filmmaker’s now-iconic style, such as the use of quotable dialogue.
Discussing the film, Hamann said: “It’s a real diamond in the rough. You can see Quentin’s style starting to form… Quentin’s genius was obvious even back then…He took what should have been a bad student film and ended up with a French farce, or a very funny film noir.”
Furthermore, writer Andrew J. Rausch states that in the rough movie, you can find “the evolution of a filmmaker and a writer. You can see all the touchstones are already there, you can see so many things that would show up in later Tarantino works, particularly True Romance. It really was the precursor in a lot of ways to True Romance, which was written not long after this.”
In order to fund the project, Tarantino saved up as much money as he could from working minimum-wage jobs, which, at the time, paid around $3.35 an hour. Tarantino recalls that he “would raise up enough money until [he] had enough to shoot for a weekend”. He goes on to state that “we wouldn’t do anything for like two months, and then I’d have more money, and we’d shoot for another weekend. We pretty much shot for like forty-two hours straight on those weekends…none of us knew what we were doing.”
My Best Friend’s Birthday is not available in its full length, with Tarantino claiming the reason being that most of it was lost to a lab fire. The director has since revealed that the fire story was completely fabricated in actuality, and the real reason for the film being unfinished is that some rolls were accidentally discarded. Since he was far from satisfied with the film, he edited together that which remained and left the project unfinished. Fortunately for fans, the 36 minutes that remain can be viewed on YouTube.
By creating the film, Tarantino was able to get to grips with his style, as Hamann writes: “He was hurting himself by overwriting. I told him to trim everything. […] He came back a few days later with new pages that were very much like his lean and mean style we now see. Don’t get me wrong, I did not create Quentin’s style; I just helped him find it within his work. It was already there. He deserves credit for the talent part, that’s for sure.”
See the remaining footage of the film, below.
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