How the one movie Quentin Tarantino disowned ruined the career of his “favourite imitator”
Once Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction had seeped into the cultural and cinematic consciousness in the early 1990s, it felt like every aspiring filmmaker wanted to be Quentin Tarantino, for better or worse.
For the rest of the decade, American independent cinema was inundated with movies that were either subconsciously or brazenly influenced by Tarantino’s seminal opening salvos. Pitch-black crime thrillers with eccentric characters and pop culture references became the default option, and there was one that stuck in the writer and director’s memory the most.
In reality, CM Talkington was the closest thing to a clone that anyone could hope to find, because he’d also worked at a video store before making his feature-length debut. When he did, Love and a .45 was inevitably compared to Tarantino’s work, to such a degree that he called it the best ripoff he’d ever seen.
However, the reality is a lot more complicated. “I had not seen anything he had done or read anything he had written, but I realised I was writing on his coattails,” Talkington explained to Money Into Light. “I knew that I was getting a wonderful opportunity because of Quentin, but that it was also going to hurt me.”
They met at the 1994 Stockholm Film Festival, hung out, and developed a friendship that ultimately saw Talkington invited to the set of From Dusk till Dawn at Tarantino’s request. Between those two points, and in a cruelly ironic twist of fate, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers was released, which its screenwriter distanced himself from as a “bastardisation” of his original screenplay.
“Maybe I’m Quentin’s favourite imitator because I didn’t imitate him?” Talkington pondered. “I just take it as a great compliment that he remembers my film and likes it.” However, as far as Stone’s controversial thriller was concerned, the Love and a .45 writer and director doesn’t wear the same rose-tinted glasses.
While Talkington maintains that he was writing his film at the same time as Tarantino was scribbling Pulp Fiction, he’s a lot more suspicious when it comes to Natural Born Killers. “Oliver Stone was interested in buying,” he said of the script. “Instead, he just ripped it off. Quentin didn’t rip me off, I didn’t rip him off, but Oliver Stone definitely ripped me off.”
The script for Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis’ cross-country rampage was credited to Stone, Richard Rutowski, and David Veloz. Talkington revealed that the latter was working at a production company before he landed the Natural Born Killers gig, and “he was the first person to give coverage to review my script.”
He didn’t think it was a coincidence that not only did Veloz read an early draft of Love and a .45 and end up being hired for a film that bore a number of similarities, but Stone even reached out to him demanding to see Talkington’s cut of his first movie “because clearly he had said, ‘You should look at this script.'”
Understandably, his picture being compared to Natural Born Killers when Talkington was convinced he’d been ripped off “really hurt me bad for a while, because people thought the reverse.” Coupled with the accusations that he’d been ripping off Tarantino, it had a massively detrimental effect on his confidence and career.
“It was a brutal, brutal beating for me,” he confessed. “I mean, for over ten years.” The buzz from Love and a .45 quickly evaporated, and Talkington has only helmed two films in the 30 years since, and none since 2014. He might be Tarantino’s favourite imitator, but the movie the two-time Academy Award winner wrote and disowned is the one that derailed his career.
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