Rebels on the Backlot (7 page)

Others felt Bender’s britches grew awfully fast as he shot from failed actor to rich producer and—like Tarantino—quickly forgot about people he’d left behind. Veteran Hollywood manager Lee Daniels told of optioning the script to
Monster’s Ball
, an independent film that eventually won Halle Berry an Oscar in 2002. Bender believed that he had the option and called Daniels with his lawyers in tow. “Do you know who I am?” he demanded. Daniels responded dryly, “Of course I know who you are. You’re the guy who used to come to me with nickels in your pockets and holes in your pants.”

B
UT SOMETHING INTANGIBLE CLICKED BETWEEN
T
ARANTINO
and Bender. Bender found what he was looking for in the budding director, a raw, irreverent attitude that came to define the early 1990s, the leitmotif of Tarantino’s films. At its most elemental, it was the anger of a poor, white kid taking aim at a society that denied him the things he wanted: money, women, fame, respect. At its most personal, it was a revenge of video geeks like Tarantino, Avary, Hamann, and anyone else who yearned for a little recognition. In Tarantino, Bender recognized an ambition parallel to his own and a flamboyant talent that a street fighter like him could leverage. Like Tarantino, Bender was a newcomer with a sense of the injured underdog about him. Like Tarantino, he wasn’t married; as success
arrived he was usually seen with a different bombshell on his arm at every party. Poor or rich, either way Bender didn’t smile much, and he revealed little about his inner self.

Once success started to arrive, Bender always made sure that his name was inextricably linked with Tarantino’s. At the Cannes Film Festival in 1992, he was furious when the
Hollywood Reporter
ran a story announcing that Tarantino would produce an upcoming movie,
Killing Zoe
, by Roger Avary; the headline neglected to mention Bender, who was also a coproducer. He stormed into the financier’s office and demanded to see the press release, counting the number of times his name appeared to be sure it was equal to Tarantino’s.

It was 1991, and Bender and Tarantino still took the bus everywhere. Connie had invited Quentin to move home, to her house in Glendale, and gave him the master bedroom. She recalled: “He needed a quasi-apartment, a place to trash, so I wouldn’t have it all over the house. There were days he didn’t come out of that room at all. He was writing
Reservoir Dogs
and working on
True Romance.
I picked up a tape one day and put it in the car. I heard Quentin’s voice making a speech about Madonna and about “Like a Virgin,” about it being about a penis. I freaked out—what was this? I didn’t realize it was dialogue.” Quentin showed
Natural Born Killers
to his new friend Bender, but that script was going nowhere, and Tarantino mentioned a story he had been thinking about: A group of strangers team up to pull off a jewelry heist.

Tarantino wrote the script for
Reservoir Dogs
feverishly, in three weeks. This was one film that Avary never claimed to have coauthored. On the other hand, Tarantino later got tangled in accusations that the film closely paralleled a 1987 Ringo Lam film called
City on Fire
, starring Chow Yun-Fat. One erstwhile fan went so far as to make an underground documentary showing the parallels between the two films called,
Who Do You Think You’re Fooling?
, which made the rounds at short-film festivals. As to the intriguing title, it came from Tarantino’s mangled pronunciation of Louis Malle’s French classic,
Au Revoir les Enfants.
Whenever Tarantino attempted to refer to the film it came out more like “Aresvoir lezenf …” Avary
says he joked to his friends, “That sounds like ‘reservoir dogs.’ In fact, you should name your movie that.” And Tarantino did.

E
LSEWHERE IN
T
ARANTINO’S LIFE THERE WAS FINALLY SOME
good news on the horizon. His scripts were getting some buzz around town and Jaymes began fielding calls from agents interested in representing Tarantino. John Lesher, an ambitious, young, Harvard-educated agent at the newly created United Talent Agency, was one of those vying for the chance to represent him. He remembered Tarantino’s telling him that if he hired Lesher to represent him, he couldn’t allow low-level employees to read his scripts, since the coverage was always terrible. Michael Ovitz’s Creative Artists Agency was hot on the trail. Tarantino was interested in signing with Bill Block at InterTalent (who later left the agency business to become a studio executive). But Jaymes liked the pitch of Lee Stollman, a junior agent at the William Morris Agency. At the time the William Morris Agency was going through a crisis; one of its key agents, Stan Kamen, had died; others had left, taking their clients with them. At Creative Artists Agency Ovitz had begun his rapid ascent to ruling Hollywood with the art of packaging stars, directors, and screenplays. But two new agents at William Morris, John Burnham and Mike Simpson, looked to counter CAA by beginning to court young directors working with independent producers, like John Woo and Gus Van Sant.

For the agents, independent film wasn’t a very lucrative slot of the entertainment niche at first, but that was to change dramatically over time. The Morris agents were energetic and insisted they were looking at their clients’ long-term careers. When Tarantino ultimately went with Lee Stollman, Jaymes insists it was because the agent was unfailingly polite to her, and she was able to talk Tarantino out of signing with Bill Block. Stollman “was always so courteous when he called me,” she recalled. “I’m old-fashioned that way.” For her efforts, the William Morris agents were probably very polite when they later called to fire her after
Pulp Fiction
came out.

Stollman was truly enthusiastic. Newly minted as an agent, he
brought scripts to staff meetings, endlessly pitching Tarantino. He went from one office to another at William Morris with Tarantino’s scripts under his arm, looking for support for the project and trying to get other William Morris clients in the movie.

G
IVEN THE EDGINESS OF
T
ARANTINO’S SCRIPTS
, B
ENDER HAD
no reason to think he could raise financing for
Reservoir Dogs
, but he decided to try. After some begging, Tarantino gave him a two-month option that was scrawled on a napkin. Bender took the script around to one would-be producer, who offered him $500,000 if his girlfriend could star in the film. Another financier offered $1.6 million, but he wanted the ending to be like
The Sting
, where everyone would be blown to smithereens but then get up and walk away, an elaborate hoax. Neither Tarantino nor Bender were interested in that. If all else failed, they planned to use the $50,000 Tarantino got from
True Romance
to make the film guerrilla style.

But Bender was strangely hopeful. “I had a feeling inside I didn’t dare let out, that we were about to do something really great. It’s not like I could know it from experience. But I felt it deep in my gut,” he said later.

For a moment Christopher Walken was attached to star in the film, though that evaporated when money failed to materialize. Tarantino originally wanted for himself the role that went to Steve Buscemi, Mr. Pink, but finally settled for a smaller part.

Bender gave it another shot, passing on a paid offer to join a tango dance tour to shop the script. He handed the script to his acting teacher, Lily Parker, who sent it to Harvey Keitel. It wasn’t the first time Keitel had heard of Tarantino. The actor had come close to starring in
True Romance
years before, when Cathryn Jaymes sent him a script. It hadn’t worked out, but Keitel was intrigued by Tarantino’s writing; so when
Reservoir Dogs
came his way, he jumped. Keitel’s involvement changed everything. Steven Sachs, a friend of Bender’s, recommended taking the script to Live Entertainment, previously known as a porn video company. Live stepped up as a financier, backing the budget at the not
insignificant sum of $1.3 million. It turned out to be the best decision the company ever made, giving it artistic credibility and a major financial windfall:
Reservoir Dogs
ultimately sold ten thousand video units, worth about $4 million at the time. Meanwhile, Bender had promised Sachs that he would cut him into the deal if something came of it, but never did. (Nobody ever remunerated poor, generous Scott Spiegel, either. After some prodding, Bender finally sent a $5,000 check as a thank-you gift to his acting teacher. She sent it back.)

T
ARANTINO HEADED TO
N
EW
Y
ORK TO CAST THE PICTURE, A
bright-lights-big-city experience bankrolled by Keitel (an unusual and generous gesture on his part), with the actor flying in first class and Tarantino and Bender in coach. Keitel took them to the Russian Tea Room to sip tea with the rich folks.

In casting sessions on Fifty-seventh Street, Bender spent hours tied up as the cop character in a key torture scene. About sixty actors showed up, and they took the auditions very seriously, some coming with guns as props; others brought knives. Finally they had to impose a “no weapons” rule for the audition because Bender was having a hard enough time being tipped over, strangled, and punched throughout the day. Back in Los Angeles, British actor Tim Roth wanted one of the parts but didn’t want to read for it. Tarantino took him to a bar on Sunset Boulevard, drank him under the table, and the two read through the script all night. Roth got the part.

As Quentin worked on
Reservoir Dogs
he stopped returning calls from his old friend Craig Hamann, as he had with others. Hamann didn’t know why. Perhaps Tarantino had gotten busy, but Hamann was deeply wounded. “I’d call him and not hear from him,” Hamann recalled. “In my view he turned around and walked away. Maybe I was embarrassing to him.”

When news of this rift and others hit the Internet in subsequent years, Tarantino’s most devoted fans—or perhaps his most fanatic devotees—used to harass those on the outs, like Hamann and Avary. Hamann would get random e-mails saying, “FUCK OFF.
Tarantino is God.” Even years later, when Hamann finally got financing to write and direct his own movie,
Boogie Boy
, bloggers sent him hate mail and deluged the review site imdb.com with negative comments about the film, which hadn’t even been in general release.

I
N 1991 THE
S
UNDANCE
I
NSTITUTE INVITED
T
ARANTINO
to work on
Reservoir Dogs
at its Filmmaker’s Lab with seasoned writers and actors. The program, founded in 1981, was run by the much-beloved Michelle Satter, who became a kind of godmother to many of the writers and directors who emerged in the 1990s, among them Paul Thomas Anderson, Allison Anders, Kim Peirce, Wes Anderson, and many others. All of them passed through the lab connected to Robert Redford’s film institute, where they were able to work through kinks in their screenplays and rehearse and shoot scenes with professional actors—a new experience for most of the participants. Seasoned directors come to the program to mentor the participants; in Tarantino’s case they were Jon Amiel, Ulu Grosbard, Terry Gilliam, and Volker Schlondorff. It was a useful prelude to shooting the film, which took thirty days.

Sundance was to be an auspicious place for Tarantino. The completed film, which ultimately starred Keitel, Roth, Buscemi, and Michael Madsen, debuted at the festival in early 1992, and though the first screening was a disaster—the projectionist at the Holiday Village Cinemas in Park City had the wrong lens, and a third of the movie bled off the screen and into the curtain—it didn’t matter much. A buzz had already been racing through the festival about
Reservoir Dogs
, and the independent distributors who showed up to the first screening were electrified. The movie’s violence was terrifying, capped by the moment in which Michael Madsen cuts the ear off of a captive cop, douses him with gasoline, and threatens to ignite him. The tone of the film was unmistakably new.

Trea Hoving and Mark Tusk, two Miramax distribution executives, were in the audience, and they called studio chief Harvey Weinstein in New York and shipped him a print the next day. Weinstein,
while disturbed by the violence and shocked by the ear scene, made a deal to distribute the film in North America. Hoving had brought him Tarantino’s work before, recommending that Miramax buy the script
True Romance.
Live’s Richard Gladstein and Ronna Wallace also showed the film to a scout from the Cannes Film Festival, who invited Tarantino to show the film in the south of France as an official out-of-competition selection. The combination of Cannes, Tarantino, and Miramax was to be particularly potent.

I
N 1992
M
IRAMAX WAS THE LARGEST OF A SMALL GROUP
of independent movie distributors that were quickly changing the landscape of the movie industry, carving out a new niche of independent films.

As the 1980s wound their way into the 1990s, Hollywood’s major studios had learned to perfect the high-concept production, a movie whose plot could be encapsulated in a single sentence—or better yet, a single phrase. This was the sort of film Hollywood made best and most often. Two blockbuster producers, Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson, came to epitomize this formula for success, and their canon defined the very notion of high-concept moviemaking:
Flashdance
(beautiful girl is welder by day, dancer by night),
Beverly Hills Cop
(scrappy black cop from Detroit chases criminal in Beverly Hills),
Top Gun
(cocky Navy pilot student falls in love with instructor).

Those were the hits; then there were the flops and the knockoffs and the sequels, high-concept pablum that all too frequently failed to entertain or enlighten. Those movies cost a lot, sold plenty of tickets, and turned the weekend box office revenues into a weekly sweepstakes. The heavyweights of the movie industry, the moguls who ran the studios, relied on a stable of stars such as Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Clint Eastwood, and Bruce Willis to make their hits. Often the plots and the characters of these star vehicles were secondary to the fact that one of the megastars was in them.