A Formative Meta Moment With A Teenage Quentin Tarantino
Aside from what you feel about his contribution to cinema history, which is estimable by anyone's standards, Quentin Tarantino should have already earned your undying respect for having once hocked a viscous, yellow loogey at World's Most Annoying Backstage Oscars Presence™, Chris Connelly. The LAT spends some time with the iconic filmmaker, who's currently curating the Grindhouse Film Festival at the New Beverly, while also finishing up editing "Death Proof," his chapter of the double feature Grindhouse. As he prowls the same, mean Hollywood streets from his youth, the man who's never met a topic he couldn't append the suffix "-sploitation" to recalls one deliciously meta cinematic moment from his teens:
"I was watching this blaxploitation movie called 'Death Force' at the World Theater, which used to be on Hollywood Boulevard just up from Gower. I'm there watching this movie about these two gangs fighting to take over L.A. They're pulling a 'Scarface,' just killing everyone. Well, two gang members are walking down Hollywood Boulevard and a car pulls up and guns them down right in front of the theater that I'm sitting in! I was like 16, and it remains to this day one of the great moments for me."
Tarantino has pledged to one day pay tribute to the life-altering experience in a film, consisting entirely of a shot of an adolescent boy in a movie theater enjoying a gangland slaying who realizes it's been shot at the very cinema he's seated in, only to pull out to find another boy seated in an identical theater who recognizes both cinemas on the screen to be the same one he's currently patronizing, and so on and so forth for 90 solid minutes, until one final boy gets decapitated with a chainsaw by a roving gang of motorcycle-riding vampires. Working title: Blood Rattle.
