When Quentin Tarantino severely overestimated the average cinephile
It’s hardly a secret that Quentin Tarantino is about as avid a cinephile as there can be. The filmmaker has spent great swathes of his free time devouring as many movies as humanly possible, which has given him a borderline encyclopaedic knowledge of the medium as a result.
Many of his collaborators have been left stunned by his ability to recite the ins and outs of forgotten genre films and B-tier exploitation flicks the majority of them have never even heard of before. However, the two-time Academy Award winner is firmly among the minority when it comes to those who even claim to have such a voracious cinematic appetite.
When he greatly misjudged the general public’s appreciation of the very things he grew up enthralled by, it ended up as the biggest commercial miscalculation of his entire career. Most would agree that Death Proof is his weakest feature by far, but in an ideal world, audiences would have never even gotten the chance to see it in isolation without the full Grindhouse experience.
The thinking behind the project was simple; Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez were close friends, regular creative partners on a number of titles, and had each grown up on the same steady diet of schlock. Thanks to their individual and collective standing within the industry, they were able to realise their dreams by crafting an ode to their formative big-screen experiences on a blockbuster-sized budget.
Rodriguez’s Planet Terror played before Tarantino’s Death Proof, separated by an intermission that featured fake trailers. Rob Zombie oversaw Werewolf Women of the SS with Nicolas Cage as Fu Machu, and Edgar Wright roped in a star-studded array of guest stars for his Hammer-inspired Don’t. In addition, Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving and Jason Eisener’s Hobo with a Shotgun were also thrown into the mix.
The directorial duo had painstakingly scratched, aged, wearied, and withered their respective movies to be more era-appropriate, with missing reels thrown in to heighten the desired levels of immersion. Ostensibly a fan film made on a studio scale, Grindhouse was the product of Tarantino and Rodriguez being given the chance to live out their adolescent fantasies on the silver screen.
There was admittedly a minor obstacle in that the average ticket-buying patron couldn’t care less. Put off by the idea of dedicating 191 minutes to something that was intentionally designed to look less than appealing from a visual perspective and catered to only a fractional percentage of audiences. There were even reports of viewers leaving midway through Grindhouse because they had no idea there was a second movie still to come.
It ended up failing to recoup even half of its budget, and the experiment failed so badly distributor Dimension Films was left with no other option but to split Planet Terror and Death Proof, release them individually overseas, and hope it could recoup some of the costs. The duo did, to a certain extent, but not enough to stop Grindhouse from bombing hard.
Tarantino summed up his nobly-intentioned gaffe in conversation with Empire when he admitted, “Me and Robert just felt that people had a little more of a concept of the history of double-features and exploitation flicks.” His circle of friends might, but it was obvious nine out of ten cinemagoers resolutely did not. “They had no idea what the fuck they were watching,” he succinctly put it. “It meant nothing to them, what we were doing.”
He conceded that Grindhouse “was a case of being a little too cool for school,” but that still isn’t entirely accurate. It wasn’t that people didn’t understand what he was doing. It was more that they didn’t weren’t interested. Exploitation cinema has always been niche for a reason. While Tarantino thought he could single-handedly bring it back to the mainstream, he was left looking foolish for operating under the assumption his in-depth knowledge and appreciation for the art form was a widely reciprocated feeling.
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