Rebels on the Backlot (4 page)

She went on: “To me it was a fantasy world he lived in. I knew he liked that stuff; he said he had ambitions to be an actor, but I thought that was an escape from reality. I’d say: ‘Whatever you do, I want you to get an education.’ I wouldn’t have cared, as long as he had [an] education. It was more than about livelihood to me: it was that ‘you must be educated.’ I wasn’t calm. He was picking at the fabric that was me and all the things I thought we needed to have to stay safe in this world I created.” In retrospect, Connie grew to become guilt-ridden at imposing her values on Quentin, to whom material success clearly did not matter, and doubting his precocious film talent.

She said: “In retrospect I wish I’d spent a whole lot more time at home. That was my baggage.”

But at the time, not insignificantly, she worried that her son would slide back into the world of poverty and ignorance that she’d escaped. “I was worried Quentin would be one of life’s dropouts who couldn’t function outside the home with Mom,” she
said. Had Quentin not become a superstar—plenty of talented people don’t—that may well have been his fate.

B
UT IT WASN’T.
O
NE SUMMER WHEN
Q
UENTIN WAS FIFTEEN
years old, Connie punished him for stealing a book from Kmart and getting caught by the police. Connie was mystified; she would have bought any book he wanted. Why did he steal? She confined him to the house for the entire summer. Softening, one day she let him out of the restriction, and Quentin asked to join a community theater group, which cost twenty dollars to join. “I gave it to him,” said Connie. “He came home and said he had the lead in their play.” The play was called Two
and Two Make Sex
, and it played at the Torrance Community Theater.

After that Quentin, who persisted for many years in his attempt to become an actor, was set on a path, heading to the James Best Theater acting classes in Burbank. His mother grew gradually less suspicious of his entertainment aspirations.

But later in life, Tarantino was unabashedly bitter toward his mother. They rarely spoke, and when Tarantino’s fortieth birthday passed in 2003, they were not in touch. Unlike some who succeeded in Hollywood, he did not buy her mink coats or a mansion. Something irreparable had broken between them. He blamed her for the instability of his youth; Connie married yet again, another union that didn’t last. In the years to come, Connie came to actively support Quentin’s ambitions. But it didn’t seem to help; Quentin was estranged from his mother during her third marriage and again in later years. In 2003 she wrote him a sixteen-page letter, begging him to come back to her, still hoping to reconcile. He didn’t write back. Connie Zastoupil never knew—and still doesn’t know—why her only son rejected her. It broke her heart.

T
ARANTINO LEFT MANY OTHER RELATIONSHIPS IN HIS
wake as he made his way toward Hollywood. His early professional life follows a pattern of intense bonding with close friends and supporters, most of whom he jettisoned once he became successful.

In the early to mid-1980s Tarantino worked at the Video Archives store in Manhattan Beach, where he hooked up with a community of movie buff oddballs who became his closest friends. Video Archives was the kind of place that has almost disappeared in the world of the Blockbuster chain, a small, dark, quirky spot in a strip mall in Manhattan Beach that had on staff young movie geeks who watched videos all day and dreamed of making it in Hollywood. Its customers were a small clientele of faithful movie lovers. Tarantino started out as one of them, then eventually got hired and worked his way up to manager. He was perfect for the job, a slacker with a voracious film appetite and an encyclopedic memory to recall them on demand. The owner, Lance Lawson, sometimes let the staff sleep in the back room if they were broke. Tarantino would leave to write a script, or to dip a toe into Hollywood, but he always returned when he ran out of cash. Video Archives was his home and where, he often said, he received his Ph.D. in film studies. What he really wanted to do, however, was act.

In 1981 Tarantino met Craig Hamann at the James Best Theater Center in Toluca Lake, a stone’s throw from the Warner Brothers lot. They hit it off immediately.

Eleven years Quentin’s senior, Hamann was from Detroit, the son of a Ford Motor Company executive, who had come to Hollywood to make it as a screenwriter. He was a quiet kid, but often seething with anger. Hamann had fallen into addiction as a teenager, shooting up heroin and then methamphetamine, habits that got him arrested on more than one occasion and nearly killed him from an overdose on another occasion. After his second arrest, Hamann determined to get clean, and he did, finding religion as a result and taking up martial arts as a therapeutic tool. He remained a martial arts enthusiast for decades after that, and once clean, attended and graduated with a B.A. in writing from Eastern Michigan University in Ann Arbor before heading to Hollywood to find his fortune in 1980.

At the time he met Tarantino, Hamann was paying his bills working as a stunt actor, and—improbably, considering he had a real anger management problem—as a customer service representative at a local Bank of America. Though Hamann gives the impression
of an unsteady calm, the anger issue was a real problem, and he was asked to leave no fewer than four acting schools. And he was sensitive, not always in a good way. Once at a restaurant with a friend near the Paramount lot, Hamann noticed that several men at a nearby table were staring at him; he got up to go to the bathroom and the men followed him with their eyes. On his way back to the table, Hamann walked up to the men, who he figured were homosexual, and challenged them: “What are you staring at? If you keep this up I’m going to fuck you up.”

They were casting agents.

Tarantino also seemed to have impulse control problems himself, and the two rapidly connected. They were among the few in acting class who refused to suck up to the teacher. Both were broke. They became inseparable. In between their bit roles and day jobs, they’d meet at Hamann’s house in Burbank, or at Quentin’s place in Torrance. They’d take in double features at the Hollywood Theater: Jack Nicholson in
The Border
and
Dr. Butcher, M.D.
, a cannibalism flick. They once saw the new version of
Breathless
at the Cinerama Dome. Quentin told his friend that his friendship was “like smack” to him.

Tarantino’s other close friend and collaborator was Roger Avary, a fellow cinephile from Torrance who worked with him at Video Archives. Along with Hamann, they shared a visceral love for movies, martial arts, and violence of all kinds.

Avary had been born in Flin Flon, Manitoba. His grandfather had been a Pan Am pilot based in Rio de Janeiro, where his father was born and raised. His father was itinerant, too, a mining engineer who moved frequently because of his work. When he was one year old, Avary’s family moved to Oracle, Arizona, then to Torrance, and finally to nearby Manhattan Beach when Avary turned seven. Unlike Tarantino, Avary did finish high school and went on to study film at the Art Center College of Design, though he dropped out not long after.

As they struggled to make it throughout the 1980s, Tarantino, Avary, and Hamann had a solemn pact. They’d tell each other: “If one of us makes it big, the others will, too.” No one was going to
make it to the top without the others coming along. One night Tarantino, Hamann, Avary, and Al Harrell, another friend, were sitting at the home of their manager, Cathryn Jaymes, making toasts and committing again to their lifelong friendship. Tarantino repeated his vow emotionally: “I promise if I hit it big, I will help you guys,” the participants recalled.

B
UT FOR
T
ARANTINO, THE PACT EVAPORATED AFTER SUCCESS
finally hit. He dropped Hamann with no explanation after
Reservoir Dogs
made him a rising star. Eventually the two began talking again in the mid-nineties, only to fall out again after Tarantino threatened to sue Hamann over a film they’d made together.

The rifts in Tarantino’s closest friendships were not just a matter of expediency or finding cooler, better-looking people to hang out with (though that wasn’t a negligible by-product; Tarantino’s earliest friends were as geeky and fashion-challenged as he was). It also had to do with Tarantino’s unwillingness to share the credit for his success. His genius was undisputed even by his friends. But he seemed to want to hide the fact that it required support and assistance.

I
N THE EIGHTIES
H
AMANN AND
T
ARANTINO HAD A WORKING
relationship, with Hamann smoothing and shaping Tarantino’s free-association ideas. Tarantino couldn’t spell (still can’t) to save his life, and he could barely write full sentences. Instead he jotted down bits of dialogue in fractured syntax and flashes of insights for scenes in barely legible scrawls on napkins and notebook paper, ideas that Hamann would spend hours editing and typing. Hamann recalled typing
True Romance
for Quentin on his Swintec electric typewriter.

In 1984 Hamann wrote a screenplay for a short film called
My Best Friend’s Birthday
, which Tarantino directed. It was an homage to their friendship, made with about five thousand dollars scraped together from various sources, including Quentin’s mother, Connie,
and her third husband, Jan Bohusch. The film was a ragtag effort, shot in bits and pieces over a couple of years, whenever someone came up with a bit of cash.

The story is about a Torrance rockabilly disc jockey named Clarence and his best friend, Mickey. Clarence is the Quentin character—impetuous, off-the-cuff, a well-intentioned guy who is entirely unconscious of his tendency to trample on people. Mickey, the Craig Hamann character, is his best friend and a befuddled guy with a permanent stunned expression usually on his face. In the story, Clarence has a very bad day: he tries to surprise Mickey by planning him a birthday party, but everything goes wrong. First the hooker he hires for Mickey falls for Clarence instead, and then her pimp shows up and beats Mickey to a pulp. (The hooker character ultimately reappeared in
True Romance.)
In the end, however, their friendship survives.

In the movie, that is. They shot the film in 16 mm, trashing Connie’s house in the process. She recalled: “He damaged all the light fixtures in the house. There was more to making a film than I realized.” Connie’s girlfriend loaned her restaurant-bar, where Quentin turned off the electricity and ruined all the meat. The film was never finished, and a lot of footage was lost in a lab accident, but about twenty minutes of it survives. When Tarantino became a media star, he claimed he wrote and directed the movie himself, which, as usual, wasn’t the whole story. Hamann says it was his original work, with Quentin’s inimitable overlay, and they shared the rights.

Later in the mid-nineties producer Don Murphy bought an option on Hamann’s half of the movie. Angry, Tarantino called Hamann and asked why he hadn’t offered him the rights first. (Tarantino and Murphy famously fought over a later movie,
Natural Born Killers
, which Murphy coproduced. Murphy sued Tarantino over an incident in which Tarantino boasted in a television interview of having “bitch-slapped” the producer.) Hamann said he had tried, but Tarantino hadn’t replied. Tarantino’s lawyers then sent Hamann—who was penniless at the time—a letter threatening to sue because he had sold the rights. More than anything, it pained
Hamann that his old friend, who had fame, fortune, and power, was taking aim at someone who was at the opposite end of the social and professional spectrum. He gave up on the friendship for good after that, but noted, “still see all his movies.” Tarantino says he would have helped Hamann, but that his old friend was trying to do the project with Murphy, Tarantino’s archenemy.

The complaint that Tarantino was selfish and disloyal in his friendships is a common theme with his former friends, even those who admire him. When Scott McGill, a sensitive young member of the Video Archive gang, committed suicide, leaving a letter and tape behind about his aspirations as a director, Tarantino did not attend the funeral. Stevo Polyi, another denizen of Video Archives, roomed with Tarantino in a ramshackle house behind the store for two years. Like many who worked at Video Archives, he looked up to Tarantino—five years his junior—and craved his company. Tarantino once gave Polyi a “favor card” for his birthday (he was broke), good for any favor, anytime; years later Polyi, still trying to break into Hollywood, tried to redeem the card; but Tarantino didn’t return his calls.

And then there was Rand Vossler, another early friend who segued into a working relationship with Tarantino. He produced
My Best Friend’s Birthday;
several years later, in 1989, Vossler quit a job in feature development for a producer at MGM to help Tarantino produce
Natural Born Killers.
The script, about a pair of married serial killers, had a fractured narrative, intense, grisly violence, and Tarantino’s dark humor, and it was too extreme for most people in Hollywood. While that languished, Tarantino was inspired to write
Reservoir Dogs
, and abandoned
Natural Born Killers
, leaving Vossler out of a job.

As a sop to his friend, Tarantino told Vossler he could direct
Natural Born Killers
guerrilla style, like they’d done
My Best Friend’s Birthday.
Around the same time, Don Murphy and Jane Hamsher, then two, young, eager producers, put down some money to option the script. The short version is that Vossler was fired from the movie. He filed a lawsuit, a settlement was reached, and Oliver Stone, whose style Tarantino hated, ended up making the movie
over Tarantino’s objections. Tarantino, who gave Vossler written leave to direct the movie, never took a clear stand on this matter. He complained bitterly about Oliver Stone, and he just stopped answering Vossler’s calls. But he believed he did nothing wrong. “It’s like I had a baby, and I killed it for him,” Tarantino said, of Vossler. “At the end of the day I can feel good in my own heart that, you know, when it came down to the test I was there for him. I now know that I would do that for a friend. But the friendship can’t be the same anymore. You can’t help but have a little bit of resentment, having killed your baby.”