The Quentin Tarantino movie that nearly became a mini-series
Quentin Tarantino burst onto the scene as the pioneering maverick of indie cinema during the 1990s. The gonzo wordsmith of ultra-violent, pulpy, gender filmmaking, seasoned with a litany of post-modern cultural references, quickly took the cinema world by storm and was loved by filmgoers.
Tarantino received his film education not from a prestigious film school but from his time working as a clerk in a video store, which he is clearly quite proud of. But it also makes perfect sense when watching his pictures. Tarantino’s dialogue is unlike any other; it exists like a Frankenstein monster, stitched together from source material from ’70s cinema and B-movie television films and parts of Tarantino’s own sharp and foul-mouthed vocabulary.
His obsession with cinema and his slightly unnerving encyclopaedic knowledge of film, TV, and music history seeps into the stories themselves. For example, Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta’s characters in Pulp Fiction have a long stretch of dialogue discussing a Dutch Burger King commercial. Meanwhile, in his action horror Death Proof, Kurt Russell plays a psychotic stuntman simply called Stuntman Mike. Characters within Tarantino’s bloodbath World War Two romp, Inglourious Basterds, go undercover masquerading as movie stars and film crew from the period, and even the final set piece of the film revolves around the premiere of a new German propaganda movie and takes place in a cinema.
As Tarantino transitioned into the later stages of his career, he fully embraced cinema and moviemaking as a theme. Once Upon a Time In Hollywood tells the tale of Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, a washed-up B-movie and TV star, and his part-time chauffeur and stuntman buddy, Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt. What lingers in the backdrop of this is the gruesome Manson murders that took place in Hollywood at the time, with Margot Robbie playing the actor Sharon Tate, who was tragically murdered by the Manson Family cult.
Tarantino’s latest project is called The Movie Critic and is rumoured to centre on the life of New Yorker film writer Pauline Kael, so it seems he’s not through with the movie business any time soon. With all this in mind, it proves that Tarantino has a vast knowledge of cinema references, and shoehorning them into his scripts must be difficult, with I’m sure many storylines and tangents being cut from the films entirely.
It’s a problem Tarantino has been outspoken about and even mentioned that there was a time when he considered making his film Inglourious Basterds into a television miniseries. Sitting down with Robert Rodriguez for his series, The Director’s Chair, Tarantino went into detail on the process by saying, “After Jackie Brown, I put Kill Bill off to the side, and I started writing Inglourious Basterds, and that became this never-ending process because people thought I was going through writer’s block, you know, I was going through the opposite.”
Tarantino then revealed that for a time he had another plan for Inglourious Basterds, saying, “I couldn’t stop writing. I’d have a 100-page script and no end in sight. So I was trying to keep taming it, and I couldn’t,” the legendary director continued, adding: “My idea at the time, because it was just so big and so unwieldy, was to do it as a miniseries, and that really was what I was planning on doing.”
It’s hard to imagine any of Tarantino’s work not being for cinema; his new movies are still such an event when they hit theatres. However, recently, Tarantino has written his first novel, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, an expanded story on the film version, so maybe a TV series spin-off in the future is still on the cards one day.
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