“He was traumatised”: the single biggest humiliation of Quentin Tarantino’s career
As one of modern Hollywood’s brashest, most outspoken, and self-confident auteurs, Quentin Tarantino doesn’t jump out as someone who would embarrass easily.
For the last 30 years, he’s been voicing his full-throated opinions on everyone and everything to anyone who’ll listen, and even some folks who won’t. Even if you don’t give a single shit what Tarantino has to say, he’s become such a ubiquitous cultural presence that you won’t be able to escape it.
Even when he was a novice filmmaker taking Reservoir Dogs on the road, he carried himself like a veteran. In his mind, he was, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the medium, ensuring that he could answer any question by referencing a dozen obscure films, which comes with a certain amount of smug self-satisfaction.
People would line up around the block to slap that smug look off his face, but since he’s an incredibly rich and successful writer and director with two Academy Awards who’s also one of the industry’s most influential and widely imitated auteurs, not even Will Smith would be able to get rid of it.
However, there’s one way to kick Tarantino while he’s down, even if it’s not so much a personal attack as a matter of fact. For inexplicable reasons, he seems convinced that he’s not a shit actor, despite having repeatedly proven himself to be a shit actor, and the shittiest actor to have ever appeared in a Tarantino flick, no less.
When he flew too close to the sun, he was reduced to a withered husk. Having stank up the joint in both his own pictures and those helmed by other people, it felt like someone was playing a practical joke when it was announced that Tarantino would be taking his non-existent talents to Broadway to play one of the leading roles in a 1998 revival of Frederick Knott’s Wait Until Dark.
To the surprise of absolutely nobody other than Quentin Tarantino, his performance was savaged, and the production was mothballed after 16 weeks. “That was really horrible,” a friend informed Vanity Fair. “He was like fodder, thrown up there to get the shit kicked out of him,” even suggesting that he’d been sabotaged.
“You don’t go from acting in little bit parts in your own movies to all of a sudden somebody taking advantage of you, although he was game for it, by making you the lead of a Broadway play, they reasoned. It was a severe kick in the teeth, and one that brought him crashing back down to earth after the ill-judged belief that he wasn’t crap at acting led to a public humiliation.
“He was traumatised by that resounding slam that was delivered to him by the New York critics,” the friend added. “He went into a tailspin. It scared him.” Scared him? What about those poor punters who paid good money to watch a Broadway show and had to suffer through Quentin Tarantino pretending that he was a real actor? They should have asked for a refund.
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