The Quentin Tarantino script no one will ever see: “A surreal, wild comedy”
Quentin Tarantino is one of the biggest menaces in the film world, with a strange clutch over pre-pubescent boys who fawn over the infamous Mia Wallace poster and believe him to be a god of cinema.
With a filmography comprised of gory fight scenes, historical revisionism and women who can never seem to find any shoes, the director has become one of the most infamous from the indie scene. He rose up at a perfect time in the 1990s when arthouse cinema was booming and producers like Harvey Weinstein had enough money to funnel into low and mid-budget stories.
From the beginning of his career, Tarantino established himself as an unapologetic cinephile and creative copycat, paying homage to all his favourite films and merging many genres. Whether it be Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, there are many obvious similarities that crop up when comparing his work, but perhaps the most notable quality is his signature dialogue style and voice as a writer. Many of his fans simply absorb work and try to imitate the sprawling, fast-paced style themselves, but sadly, there is one Tarantino script that will never see the light of day.
You might assume that Tarantino would want to release anything he had written due to his staggeringly massive ego, but he revealed that there was a script of his called Open Road that nobody would ever read. When discussing this, the director said, “Yeah, no one has read that. I never finished it. That was like the first time I really wrote a script. Roger Avary had written a script called Pandemonium Reigns that was forty pages long and really funny.”
Adding, “It’s like these two characters on the road and there’s this hitchhiker and it’s a surreal, wild comedy. Then they get to this kind of crazy, surreal town. Then he ended it in this way that I didn’t like at all. Because I had never finished a script, I had just written scenes, I asked him, ‘Could I take that? Like rewrite it, just do my own version of it?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, go for it.’”
Avary and Tarantino famously worked together on the script for Pulp Fiction, both winning the Academy Award for ‘Best Original Screenplay’. However, Tarantino later paid Avary to denounce his credit on the script so he could steal all the praise for it.
The writer expanded on this abandoned early project with Avary and his struggle to find an ending, saying, “I don’t think he was going to do anything with it—I don’t think he liked his ending… but I ultimately found out that I didn’t have a good ending for it either. I saw no way to end it.”
While it might have been a great concept, perhaps he wasn’t a good enough writer at that stage of his career to crack the code to making Open Road a truly great screenplay. Writers can spend years puzzling over one scene or character only to throw the project away and pray that nobody sees it, feeling ashamed over an unfinished story with their name on it.
But ultimately, this was just a learning curve for Tarantino, and he went on to complete many other stories without the help of his old writing partner.
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