When Quentin Tarantino wrote a screenplay about meeting his first movie crush: “I’m embarrassed”
Everyone remembers the feeling of their first movie crush. It happened for a generation of girls when they saw a floppy-haired Leonardo DiCaprio board the Titanic. At the same time, that generation of boys will never forget when Cameron Diaz slinked into their lives in The Mask. However, it’s likely there aren’t too many of these youngsters who were so moved by their first stirrings of big-screen love that they wrote a screenplay about them meeting a fictionalised version of their crush. Only grade-A movie-loving oddballs like Quentin Tarantino would do that – although he later admitted to being a bit embarrassed by it.
On top of being one of the most acclaimed directors of his generation, Tarantino has always been an incredibly unique writer. His ear for inimitable dialogue marked him as a talent to watch in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction equally as much as his skill with a camera. In fact, Tarantino was such a scintillating writer that several of his best screenplays were also tackled by other directors in the 1990s, such as Tony Scott’s True Romance, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, and Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn.
In a 2003 interview with fellow writer/director Brian Helgeland (Payback), Tarantino spoke about his earliest creative efforts when he was only 11 or 12 years old. Helgeland asked, “What was the first thing you wrote?” to which Tarantino replied, “I was in the sixth grade – the end of my first time. I was held back; I was in the sixth grade twice.” Fittingly, the thing that prompted a young QT to pick up a pen and paper was a fateful visit to the cinema to see The Bad News Bears – because this is where he first laid eyes on the girl who changed everything.
“I fell hopelessly in love with Tatum O’Neal,” Tarantino admitted. “I mean, so much in love with Tatum O’Neal. I’m embarrassed to tell you how much in love I was with her.”
At that time, O’Neal would have been around 12 or 13 years old and was already three years removed from becoming the youngest actor to win an Academy Award. She nabbed that trophy for her stunning performance alongside her father, Ryan, in 1973’s Paper Moon, and Bad News Bears was her follow-up. As Amanda Whurlitzer, the acid-tongued pitcher of the youth baseball team managed by Walter Matthau’s alcoholic ex-player, she captured the youthful Tarantino’s imagination in a big way. In fact, he chuckled, “My crush on Tatum O’Neal was so strong that actually you could almost consider it your first love.”
As a young movie fanatic in the making, Tarantino wasn’t inclined to just let his crush exist in his mind. No, sir – he had to get it down on paper. “I started writing an ABC Afterschool Special about me meeting Tatum O’Neal,” he revealed. In real life, he couldn’t find a way to get to Hollywood to meet O’Neal in person, so he did the next best thing and wrote about meeting a young star named ‘Somerset O’Neal’ “through conniving and lying.” Naturally, the fictionalised O’Neal was charmed by the efforts of Tarantino’s not-so-fictionalised self.
Unfortunately, young Tarantino didn’t have the commitment to finish his first opus. “I never got that far in the script,” he confessed. “I wrote the first 20 pages and then abandoned it.” However, he had been well and truly bitten by the writing bug, and from that point on, he spent most of his time in school scribbling prospective movie scripts. In fact, he became so obsessed with writing scripts that his teacher called his mum to tell her that he was ignoring his schoolwork – and this led to a battle line being drawn in the sand.
“At some point, when my mom was mad at me, she said, ”Oh, and by the way, this little writing career of yours? It’s over!'” Tarantino lamented. He was outraged that his own mother would diminish his creative efforts in such a way, so he told himself, “You have no vision. I will never buy you the house that Elvis bought his mother.”
Never let it be said that Tarantino can’t hold a grudge, too. After all, the Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood director insisted, “To this day, I have not bought my mother a house. And I never will!”
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