Avary, whose long blond hair tumbled down on either side of his face like cornsilk, first met Tarantino in 1984, at the Archives. “I didn’t care for Quentin that much when I first met him,” he remembers. “He was so much better a cinéaste than I was. He had an amazing encyclopedic brain. Photographic memory. We’d have shifts together. He’d pop a movie on, I’d resist it, only to challenge him, he’d explain to me what was so good about it, and why I sucked ’cause I didn’t like it, then I’d realize I really did like it, and I would do the same to him, and after a while going back and forth like that, I realized, This guy is great.” The gang at the store one-upped one another with movie trivia, argued violently—no film was too trashy to provoke a flash of temper or end a friendship over—and played pranks. There was an adult gay section tucked away in the back, and one day Avary, who is straight, was appalled to discover that his friend had posted a photograph of him in the section with a word balloon floating over his head that said, “Hi, I’m Roger, I work here at Video Archives, and I’d like to recommend X, Y, and Z titles.” Avary remembers, “He actually talked me into leaving it up for a while. Quentin is full of snake oil, sellery, and shim-shamery.”
All the while, Tarantino, like Avary, was writing feverishly. But he still didn’t really consider himself a writer. He wrote to act, or better yet, direct. “It just seemed as an actor that I wouldn’t have control over my own destiny,” he says. “Unless I became some sort of major fucking star, I’d still be auditioning at fifty-five years of age or something, like a lot of my heroes who were character actors. And I also noticed that independent movies didn’t do a hell of a lot for the actors that were in them. It was the directors that became known, not the actors. A director did an independent movie and he would go off and do another movie.”
The Archives gang read each other’s scripts, traded scenes and bits of dialogue. “We were going to be the Coen brothers, with him in Ethan’s job and me in Joel’s job,” says Tarantino. When he asked his friend in 1987 if he could take a short script he had written called The Open Road and work on it himself, without hesitating Avary said yes. “By this time, I’d grown to love Quentin,” he says. “Months went by, and then Quentin emerged with this stack of papers, handwritten—nearly illegible, words phonetically spelled, there was no real grammar or punctuation, pages had been cut and taped together and moved around. He literally put everything he ever wanted to do into this one thing, bits and pieces of Reservoir Dogs, Natural Born Killers, Pulp Fiction. But it was written as he spoke, so his voice was there. I was weeping by the end of it. It barely contained any of my original screenplay, but he had brought an emotional soul to it that was beyond what I had written. I said, ‘You need to type it up, because no other person is going to suffer through this. And then you need to make it.’ ” It was True Romance.
In 1989, Tarantino decided, after five years of struggling, to strike out on his own. He recalls, “Every six months I would have my Quentin Detest Fest, where I would stay up all night and go through all the things that were wrong with my life, why I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to do, like you’re a fuck-up, you know? It actually always, like, helped me push forward. So I was, like, You’re judging your rate of progress by your friends at the video store, and compared to them, you’re doing a shit load, but they’re not doing anything as far as, like, a career is concerned. You have got to get the fuck out of the South Bay. Go quit Video Archives. You need to move to fucking Hollywood because that’s where it is happening. If you run with the fast crowd, you will run fast, even if you run last. By the end of the night I had decided that was what I was going to do.”
In the fall of 1990, Tarantino and Avary decided to write a short, on the theory it would be easier to get made than a feature. But they quickly realized that nobody produces shorts, so the film became a trilogy, with one section by Tarantino, one by Avary, and one by a third director who never materialized. Each eventually expanded his section into a feature-length script, Avary’s into Pandemonium Reigns, and Tarantino’s into Reservoir Dogs.
Tarantino hooked up with Lawrence Bender, a former dancer and actor, to produce it. Bender got the script to Harvey Keitel, who committed, and with the help of director Monte Hellman (Two Lane Blacktop), the script eventually made its way to Richard Gladstein at Live Entertainment, the video company run by Jose Menendez until he was shot to death by his sons while he watched television in 1996. “Monte dropped the script at my house instead of my office, and as I was walking in I opened up the package and read the first page,” Gladstein recalls. “It said, ‘Reservoir Dogs, Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino.’ It was a little startling to see that. It also said, ‘Final Draft.’ As I put my keys down, I started reading it, and I didn’t stop until I was through. I was completely blown away.” In their first meeting, Tarantino made it clear he was not going to be pushed aside. He said, “I’m making the movie, whether I make it in my backyard, with my own videocamera and my five friends, whether it takes me three days or three months or three years.” That was fine with Gladstein, who had been so impressed with the script he had decided, I’m gonna do this movie with this guy unless he turns out to be a complete wacko.
In those days Live never budgeted scripts; Gladstein went to his boss and said, “For the video box, it’s a bunch of guys with guns and Harvey Keitel, how many units can we sell if it doesn’t go out theatrically?” The answer was fifty thousand units at $56 apiece. As Tarantino remembers, “Live was going to commit $2 million to make the movie with Harvey and somebody else—but we couldn’t get anybody. All we had was ‘Harvey and somebody else.’ So it fell apart. Then Live said, ‘Okay, if we can’t get somebody else, we’ll make the movie with Harvey at 1.3.’ I was shocked. There’s a big difference between ‘You have a movie if’ and ‘You have a movie.’ ”
On one level, all movies are about themselves, and reading the Dogs script in the light of Tarantino’s own history, his emergence, like an exotic butterfly, out of the Archives cocoon, it’s hard not to see it as a story about its own creation. Filled with jokes, allusions, and fragments of dialogue culled from his five-year stint there, with the gang of color-coded Mr.’s standing in for the Archives crew, the heist for the big score, for making it, Tarantino—the one who got away, who actually directed a feature—is at once Mr. Orange, who betrays them, and Mr. White, the veteran thief who loves him anyway, and forgives him. Dogs expresses Tarantino’s complex feelings of guilt toward his friends for first exploiting then leaving them behind, along with his hunger for absolution by a father figure he never had, but found in Keitel, who plays Mr. White as well as godfathering the film.
Right before he was slated to go into production, Tarantino went off to the Sundance lab for two weeks. “I thought that Sundance workshop was the greatest,” he says now. “To actually get there, and realize that all those professionals, Sydney Pollack, Ulu Grosbard, all these resource people, all this money was being spent for me and eight other people, none of whom had ever really done anything before, just so we could put our best foot forward—I was overwhelmed. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before, ever. I never had anyone really believe in me in my life.”
But there was trouble in paradise. Tarantino shot his scenes unconventionally, in long takes. Stephen Goldblatt, the cinematographer (Cotton Club), was one of the resource people. He stuck his head in the door of the editing room and Tarantino yelled, “ ‘Hey, we just got through editing the scene.’ ”
“ ‘Great, I’d love to see it.’ We loved it. He hated it, said, ‘You need to cut it up.’
“ ‘Fuck, I wanted to experiment with long takes. When Godard—’
“ ‘I like Godard too, but enough of that!’ He ripped it apart. And then said, ‘The thing that scares me the most about this, is that you actually have your money to make the movie. And this is what you’ve done. I can guarantee you, if you do this on a real movie, you will be fired.’ And that was my fear, being fired. ’Cause they don’t l
et people like me make movies.”
WITH KAFKA a flop, and the competing projects dead and buried, Steven Soderbergh was finally ready to begin King of the Hill. He was in L.A. working on the script in late April, early May of 1992, during the South Central riots. The story, about a boy with an absent mother and intermittently present father essentially raising himself, had similarities to Soderbergh’s own upbringing. His parents had had a bad marriage, and his mother was interested in the paranormal, giving readings, holding séances, etc. As Betsy Brantley once said, Soderbergh’s mother is “the nightmare that looms in all of his sleep.” “It had to be personal,” recalls producer Barbara Maltby. “The book and what he saw in the book were two very different things. The book is a comedy about this upbeat, irrepressible kid. At our first story meeting, Steven turned it into a kind of tragedy. The kid had to be a version of himself.” King of the Hill still wasn’t a go project so far as Universal was concerned, and he needed Redford’s support. There were a lot of meetings with Redford at the studio, some with Universal chief Tom Pollock and production head Casey Silver, arranged around the actor’s schedule, that Redford nevertheless either canceled or just failed to show up for, perhaps irritated that Soderbergh had made him wait in line—or more likely, just living on Redford time. He sometimes phoned during meetings between Soderbergh and Maltby, had lengthy conversations with Maltby, telling her how he intended to call Soderbergh because he apparently felt guilty about skipping so many meetings, but he never actually phoned the director. Says Soderbergh delicately, “There were a series of decisions and actions on his part that I felt unhappy about, that I had trouble understanding.”
Universal insisted that the budget not exceed $8 million, which meant that everybody had to take deferments, “as had been the case on Kafka, as had been the case on sex, lies,” Soderbergh explains. “I was accustomed—being the filmmaker—to outlining what I felt the deferment plan ought to be. Redford wanted to defer at the same rate as everyone else. I wanted him to defer at a slightly higher rate than myself and the producers, since it was a project we brought to Wildwood. It had not been developed there, and nobody there was having to spend time working on it since it was not being physically produced through Wildwood.” Redford refused, said he considered Soderbergh’s request an insult. Days, weeks were spent on the issue, but he remained adamant. In the end, Redford being Redford, he got his way. Soderbergh registered his disappointment, and that was that.
Then one day, during pre-production, Baltimore Pictures head Mark Johnson asked Soderbergh if he would consider directing a project called Quiz Show, and sent him the script, which had been making the rounds for years with no takers. Johnson said, “I want you to read this, see if you like it.”
Quiz Show was about the notorious cheating scandals that engulfed TV game shows in the 1950s. Soderbergh read it, called Johnson and said, “It’s perfect, I would shoot this script right now, [the way it is.]” Johnson replied, “Great!” Soderbergh had conversations with Richard Goodwin, on whose book the film was based, met with Tim Robbins, who had agreed to play Charles Van Doren.
Meanwhile, Gail Mutrux, who worked for Johnson, must have shown the Quiz Show script to her husband, Tony Ganz, who happened to be head of Wildwood. Ganz must have shown the script to Redford, who decided that he, not Soderbergh, should direct it. Of course, Soderbergh was unacquainted with Redford’s penchant for plucking the occasional project from the hands of the very indie filmmakers Sundance was supposed to be nurturing. If Denise Earl is to be credited, he did so with The Giant Joshua, and he did so again with A River Runs Through It. In 1983, producer Annick Smith optioned the book by Norman MacLean, with a $15,000 loan from Sundance. She brought in writer Bill Kittredge, as well as Dick Pearce, who had directed Heartland. Smith took a treatment to the lab in 1985. Two years later, when her option was about to run out, she heard Redford was interested. Her heart sank, because she knew what that meant. “When Redford gets control of a project, it’s his project,” she says. “He took over the show.” Indeed, Redford went to MacLean and bought the rights. With Redford as director, Pearce was out. (Smith and Kittredge eventually got coproducer credit.)
“Redford works in such an Olympian fashion,” says Pearce. “I don’t know if he had any idea how much I wanted to make it. A friend told me something that helped me make sense out of it. He said Redford is like a beautiful woman who is oblivious to the chaos she creates when she moves through the world. But I will say one thing: if I had a project that one of Redford’s companies would love, I’d hesitate to send it to them, because of what happened on A River Runs Through It.
Smith is resigned: “There’s nothing sinister in it at all. He’s not obliged to keep his hands off everything that’s mentioned at Sundance. It doesn’t all have to be done by the letter of the law—there is no law here.” Adds former board member Howard Klein of the Rockefeller Foundation, “I had a rigid standard at Rockefeller when I was making grants: I never accepted a piece from an artist. But I’m not sure it was clear in Bob’s mind that he wasn’t supposed to touch the merchandise. There were so many gray areas, and he came from another world.”
Redford, pacing the floor of his New York office in 1990, dismissed these charges. “This issue has been haunting us for ten years,” he said. “There’s been a lot of rumors about things we’ve done that I don’t think are right or fair. They say, ‘Well, Redford is taking the projects for himself.’ I bend over backward not to try to get any of these projects for my own use.” But it’s less clear that he really hears the accusations. “I wasn’t aware of moving anybody out,” he says about A River Runs Through It. “We all joined forces. Now, in truth, I don’t have a lot of success working with a lot of people. So I said I’d just like to develop this myself. So am I going to be able to do that or not? Annick was very good about it and said, ‘Yeah.’ ” Redford could not afford to be perceived as someone who would elbow aside a promising independent, especially not the director of a film he was producing, who was also busy flakking his festival. Nobody ever says what he means in Hollywood, especially when what he means is ugly, and therefore the message Johnson delivered to Soderbergh was something like, “We’re sorry, but TriStar, which is financing Quiz Show, is ready to go. You aren’t available because you’re in production. We’re submitting the project to other directors. We have a list.” Beat. “Nobody on the list is available—but surprise, Bob Redford’s interested. He can start right away.” None of this made any sense at all to Soderbergh. He thought, That’s a ruse. If you wanted to make a film right away and have it done quickly, you’d get Sidney Lumet, who moves fast, not Redford, who works at a crawl. Soderbergh said, “Oh.” He was angry that Redford had not called him himself to tell him the bad news. After all, he thought they had a “relationship.” He said, “It’s a call I would have made; it’s a call most people, I think, would have made.” But there was nothing he could do. (Redford subsequently explained that he didn’t phone Soderbergh because Johnson said that he would take care of it. But at the time, when several people called him on it, he acted surprised, said, “Well, if I’d known that Steven really wanted me to do it . . .” and promised to call him. He just never did.)
Soderbergh completed the King of the Hill shoot and had almost finished with post as well, when the phone rang one Saturday in February 1993, in the dreadful, three-room apartment on Elmer Avenue in North Hollywood Soderbergh was sharing with friends. He was still editing the film, tweaking and fine-tuning his cut. There were a couple of things he wasn’t happy with, and he was planning some reshoots, mainly the ending. It was Redford on the phone. Referring to the awkwardness between them, he said, “Look, I know that we have a lot to discuss, and I want to have that discussion, but first is it possible for me to see King of the Hill, whatever state you have it in?” Soderbergh, somewhat at a loss, said, “Yeah. When do you want to see it?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Lemme get on that, I’ll see what I can do.”
> “Great, I’ll look at the film, and then we’ll talk.” Tomorrow was Sunday, and Soderbergh had to do some scrambling to find a projectionist, but he managed to set up a screening at Skywalker Sound at Lantana over on West Olympic, near Bundy. Says the director, “That Saturday conversation was the last conversation I ever had with him.” Redford never did talk to him about Quiz Show, never even got back to him about King of the Hill.
Later, word filtered back to the young director that Redford had not liked his film. “It’s not my kind of movie,” he is reported to have said. “It’s not the way I would have shot it.” This seemed to make sense, because according to Soderbergh he suddenly announced, “I’m gonna take my name off, I didn’t do anything, I had one lunch with Hotchner, so I don’t think it’s a project for me to have my name on.”
“Fine. But if you didn’t do anything, do you feel it’s really appropriate to take the remainder of your deferment? You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say you did nothing and get the rest of your fee. So which one is it?”
“Then I’ll leave my name on and I’ll take the money.”
By that time, King of the Hill had been accepted to Cannes. “I was pissed off, and wasn’t in the mood to be accommodating,” Soderbergh recalls. He told Redford, “We’re going to leave it the way it is, take your name off. And if my hand is forced, I’m going to be a fucking blabbermouth.” He threatened to go public, and the issue went away. (Redford put the blame on Soderbergh. He claimed that by the time the production finally got started, he was off working on other projects. He said, “It took so long, I ran out of time for any involvement.”)
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