Quentin Tarantino, now splitting his time between Israel and Los Angeles, is currently hot on the promotional circuit to hawk his new book. Cinema Speculation (out on November 1) is ostensibly a collection of essays pegged to several movies Tarantino saw at an impressionable age, but as one would expect given his own movies, it takes circuitous and amusing routes through the wider culture and the author’s own personal history.
One such tale, which he told on Real Time with Bill Maher, describes a foundational movie-going experience. In 1972, one of his mother’s boyfriends, who apparently played football for the Los Angeles Rams, wanted to get in good with her, so took the 8 or 9-year-old out to see a double-feature. “You a cool kid, Q,” Tarantino remembered the mammoth man saying at an all-Black theater in Los Angeles.
Then two important things happened. The first film, which no one particularly wanted to see, was a metaphorical drama called The Bus Is Coming, and it did not go over well. Bored moviegoers began hollering back at the screen, and it was the first time he heard a reference to the act of oral copulation. Witnessing interactivity at a theater like this radicalized him, as did a heckler’s response to the film’s climax. When a young child finally shouted the picture’s title, “the bus is coming!” someone in the crowd fired back, “yeah well get on it and go fuck yourself!!”
More importantly, though, was the main feature, a Jim Brown movie. (He didn’t say which, but two that came out that year were Slaughter and Black Gunn.) Tarantino explained how he was living with his single mother and two female roommates, and did not have a lot of experience with masculine energy. “This is way better than fuckin’ fishing,” he realized, being in that audience.
“Creating movies for an audience, that goal of a Jim Brown movie in 1972 on a Saturday night is always what I’m trying to achieve.”
To get back to Quentin’s mother, Connie Zastoupil, the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood… director dished some unexpected news on Jimmy Kimmel Live! earlier. Apparently, she dated not just this unnamed Rams player, but numerous professional athletes, including the L.A. Lakers’s Happy Hairston (who also had a small role in The Concorde … Airport ’79, which may just be the most Tarantino thing ever) and Wilt Chamberlain. When Kimmel joked that surely many people’s moms dated the 13x NBA All-Star, Tarantino somewhat proudly boasted that, while the two were never exclusive, they were together for about three years, and for a time, she was the basketball star’s “number one lady.”
Tarantino also explained to Bill Maher how he puts his all into crafting a screenplay, comparing it to climbing Mount Everest. With a book, once the writing is done, it is done, but with a movie, you then have to go out and shoot the damn thing. But realizing he sounded whiney, he was quick to reverse himself, gloating, “my sets are known for being the funniest sets in Hollywood. The people in IATSE want to work on a Quentin movie, because they’re gonna’ have a ball.”