Quentin Tarantino worked at a porn movie theatre when he was a teenager
We all know that Quentin Tarantino is the absolute definition of a cinephile, and his excellent, encyclopaedia-like knowledge of the history of film has informed a number of his own works. For instance, we should look no further than the novelisation of his most recent movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, along with his recent book, Cinema Speculation.
That knowledge comes from a youthful obsession with the movie world, and during a 2012 interview with Howard Stern, Tarantino opened up on how the early jobs he took as a teenager inspired his passion for cinema. Stern noted the fact that Tarantino worked in a video store when he was a kid and suggested that was the reason that the director became a film “aficionado”.
However, Tarantino claimed that he was already a “film expert”, and that was why the video store hired him in the first place. “Well, I got hired because I was a film expert,” he said. “And then I had five years to just do nothing but watch films instead of getting a job for a life”. Stern then asked whether it was through being able to watch films while he was at work that Tarantino was able to pick up the techniques that he would later employ in his own films.
Responding, Tarantino explained that he had quit education in middle school, in the ninth grade, to which Stern butted in with another question, asking if it was because Tarantino quit school that his mother said that he had to go and get a job to support himself. It was at this point that Tarantino revealed another job that he had in his youth. “You know where I eventually got a job at? Lying about my age because I was tall enough to get away with it,” Tarantino said. “At sixteen, I got a job at a porno movie theatre as an usher. Here’s the thing about that, though, because I worked for the Pussycat Theatre chain out in California.”
Tarantino then claimed that the Pussycat Theatre he worked at was one of the lowest of its kind. “It was the Torrence Pussycat, so it was the last rung of the Pussycat chain. Just before Super 8, you went and played at the Torrence theatre,” he said. Finally, Tarantino noted how accurate Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights film was at portraying the anxiety of the changing of the porn industry, as he saw working in the adult movie theatre.
“The thing about it was, you know, that moment in Boogie Nights where it’s a big moment, where they stop shooting on film and start shooting on video, and they make a big deal about it as though it’s the end of an era?” Tarantino said. “This was literally like it was in 1979; it was the last bastion of the early part of Boogie Nights; literally the last year before video would take over everything.”
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