Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino

The filmmaker as critic

I think Tarantino is a brilliant filmmaker, and I always enjoy listening to him talk about movies. His unabashed love of action, horror, kung fu and other "disreputable" genres is refreshing to someone who isn't always enamored with the sincere, slow-moving art-house films and Oscar bait that more respected critics seem to favor. If you share his tastes in that regard, you might want to check out the Video Archives podcast Tarantino co-hosts with his fellow filmmaker Roger Avary after you finish reading Cinema Speculation.

Review

In this book, Tarantino focuses on a slice of (mostly) 1970s American cinema. For some reason Cinema Speculation doesn't have a table of contents, so I'm going to provide one here: "Little Q Watching Big Movies," "Bullitt (1968)," "Dirty Harry (1971)," "Deliverance (1972)," "The Getaway (1972)," "The Outfit (1973)," "Second-String Samurai: An Appreciation of Kevin Thomas," "New Hollywood in the Seventies: The Post-Sixties Anti-Establishment Auteurs vs. The Movie Brats," "Sisters (1973)," "Daisy Miller (1974)," "Taxi Driver (1976)," "Cinema Speculation: What If Brian De Palma Directed Taxi Driver Instead of Martin Scorsese?," "Rolling Thunder (1977)," "Paradise Alley (1978)," "Escape from Alcatraz (1979)," "Hardcore (1979)," "The Funhouse (1981)," and "*Floyd Footnote." Obviously the time period covered here roughly corresponds to what is known as the New Hollywood (or American New Wave). The old studio system was dying, and Hollywood was experimenting with new directions that tended to be auteur-driven, explicitly violent, morally ambiguous, and less conventional in narrative structure.

Quentin Tarantino was born in 1963, so he was still just a kid when this ferment was beginning to take place. (He was, for instance, five years old when Bullitt came out.) But, as is revealed in the first chapter, "Little Q Watching Big Movies," by 1970 his mother and stepfather were taking little Quentin with them to enjoy the counterculture programming at the Tiffany Theater. He learned quickly that if he kept his mouth shut and his eyes open, the adults would continue to let him tag along. Because he was allowed to see movies the other kids couldn't, Quentin felt like he was the most sophisticated kid in his school class.

After the introductory chapter, the book settles into a groove of discussing -- chapter by chapter -- movies from the late sixties and early seventies that made a strong impression on young Tarantino. His analyses are often revelatory, sometimes including first-hand information that the older Tarantino got directly from the directors or screen writers. He also, amusingly, incudes his impressions as a naive kid watching these movies for the first time, explaining how scenes can work even if you don't fully understand what's going on. Tarantino's digressions can often wander far afield, which has the potential to be annoying but I find them entertaining.

"Second-String Samurai" is the first BIG digression from what we had assumed was the groove the book had settled into. In chapter seven, QT takes time out to talk about his favorite Los Angeles Times movie critic, Kevin Thomas. Tarantino begins by talking about the Times' main movie critics: Charles Champlin (basically a tool of the studios), followed by Sheila Benson (wholly unfit for the job), and finally Kenny Turan (a "real" critic but a particularly nasty one). Tarantino had little use for any of them but greatly appreciated the Times' second-string critic, Kevin Thomas, who not only went to see the art-house, foreign, and exploitation films the other critics didn't have time for, he had a deep appreciation and understanding of them which Tarantino learned from. While Tarantino didn't always agree with Thomas' opinions, he described the way Thomas approached exploitations films as being like a devoted sports writer writing about a good high school team -- always rooting for them.

In "New Hollywood in the Seventies," Tarantino breaks down what he sees as two distinct directions filmmakers took during that period. The Anti-Establishment Auteurs -- who included Altman, Rafelson, Penn, Peckinpah, Cassavetes, and others -- looked back on the old Hollywood and didn't like what they saw. They aspired to make films in the spirit of Fellini and Truffaut rather than Hawks or Wyler. These directors made movies that were often unsettling and hard for audiences to understand. Perhaps in reaction, they were soon followed by the first generation of filmmakers to have attended film school. These "Movie Brats" included Bogdanovich, Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, Lucas, and Spielberg. What set them apart from their predecessors is that they were film geeks -- they loved old movies, including genre movies, and, at least in some cases, wanted to make the best genre movies ever made.

For most of the rest of the book, Tarantino returns to his rambling, discursive discussions of specific movies as the decade wears on. "Sisters" dives into the early filmography of his favorite director, Brian De Palma. "Daisy Miller" serves in part as an excuse for remembering the largely forgotten actor Barry Brown. "Taxi Driver" illuminates how screen writer Schrader and director Scorsese conspired to remake The Searchers as a contemporary revenge thriller, while "Cinema Speculation" imagines how the film would have been different if De Palma (who was originally slated to direct) had made Taxi Driver instead. And so on. The book concludes with a fond reminiscence of Floyd Ray Wilson, a guy who dated his mother's friend and lived in their house for a while. Like Tarantino, Floyd also loved movies, and he had a profound influence on young Quentin's thinking. He also ultimately moved Tarantino, in an unexpected way I'll leave it to you to find out, to write one of his later movies.

This is an immensely entertaining and informative book for anyone who likes Tarantino or shares his movie-watching sensibilities. The one knock I have against it is that the book is poorly edited. I give it credit for distinctly retaining Tarantino's voice, but far too many typos and grammatical errors made their way into the final text. Surely HarperCollins can do better than this for their authors!