What job did Quentin Tarantino do before he was a movie director?
In January 1992, Quentin Tarantino’s debut feature film Reservoir Dogs was released, with funding from Hollywood studio executive Richard N Gladstein and one of the movie’s stars, Harvey Keitel. The film more than doubled its meagre budget in box office returns, and critical acclaim coupled with industry buzz around the picture helped secure the director’s next project. He’d never have to work in another job again.
Tarantino was almost 29 years old when he released Reservoir Dogs, but he’d already spent 12 years working various jobs to pay the bills. His last payday before he began making movies was actually as an actor. He had a minor role as an Elvis impersonator at a wedding in one episode of the sitcom The Golden Girls, the syndication of which covered his living expenses before the release of his debut film.
As a 17-year-old, he dropped out of high school in suburban Los Angeles, blagged his way into a job at a porn cinema, and then got a gig recruiting people into aircraft manufacturing. From an early age, though, his real passion was motion pictures.
And he was determined to do something about it. When asked in 1993 during an MTV interview about his dream of filmmaking, he replied, “It wasn’t a fantasy; it was a goal.” Tarantino was hellbent on making it as a director.
So, in 1985, while still just 22, he applied for a position at a Video Archives rental store in Manhattan Beach, southwestern LA. He was accepted and spent his subsequent years learning from the best directors VHS had to offer. “For five years, I was behind the counter charging people late fees, recommending movies and stuff,” he later recalled.
The Pulp Fiction director has admitted he “watched movies all the time in the store” and talked about them with his colleagues as well as local film buffs who frequented the store “ad nauseam”. His love of cinema only grew further in such an encouraging environment. He met the first love of his life outside film, too, a girlfriend named Grace Lovelace who he remembers fondly to this day.
Through working at Video Archives, Tarantino also came to understand the importance of preserving movies for future generations. Every day, he was renting out and recommending classics to kids who hadn’t been alive when they’d come out in the cinemas.
“Film preservation is our heritage. Film is the art form of the 20th century, and it’s being lost,” he later remarked, referring to the thousands of classic film reels damaged and destroyed due to the manner in which they were printed and stored. “My ideas of the ’30s are not from reading any history books; it’s about seeing movies.”
Seeing movies is most of what Tarantino did for a living in the second half of the 1980s, giving himself an education in filmmaking that no amount of money could buy. By 1990, with the help of established producer Lawrence Bender, he was ready to apply what he’d learned from all those hours in the video store to his own cinematic vision for the first time—and the education paid off.
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