Quentin Tarantino - The Man, The Myths and the Movies. Wensley Clarkson
school, the most memorable of which featured them being locked in solitary confinement during a biological war and then stumbling out into a world where everyone else appeared to have died. Quentin, Hamann and Rick Squery wore punk-type army uniforms for their roles. Hamann later described the video as ‘a piece of shit’, saying, ‘It didn’t work.’
‘We find out there is an antidote,’ he explained, ‘but supposedly there is only enough for two people and three of us are infected. The whole thing was a waste of time.’
Back in Torrance, Quentin was finding his job at the Pussycat porno theatre more and more unsavoury. He seemed to be manhandling perverts out of the auditorium almost every day. Sometimes they would still have their flies open when he kicked them into the gutter outside the deco-style theatre. He was starting to resent the entire place. It wasn’t made any easier by the fact that he was living a virtual Jekyll and Hyde existence: porno theatre usher by day and serious actor by night.
One evening at the school, Quentin found himself broke and without his usual ride home from Rich Turner. He was filled with dread at the prospect of the two-hour bus trip back to Torrance. Then teacher Jack Lucarelli offered to let Quentin sleep the night at the school and join in some of the earlier classes next day. Quentin knew he was risking losing his job, but he was far more interested in getting some free acting classes.
The teenager climbed into a sleeping bag loaned by one of the other students and decided that anything was preferable to going back to Torrance and working another day in the Pussycat. Perhaps not surprisingly he was sacked by the theatre the following week, but Quentin looked on his dismissal as a blessing in disguise.
Eventually he got a dead-end job earning a few bucks a week plus commission doing market research at a shopping mall near his home. Quentin rarely made more than $40 a week, but at least it didn’t matter if he failed to show up some days and he must have been relieved he would never have to watch seedy porn films again. Quentin now frequently slept over at the acting school and in many ways he became part of the furniture. Teachers and students looked on the awkward teenager as an eccentric, if somewhat erratic personality. All he ever talked about was the movies.
At 16, Quentin was the same age his mother was when she’d had him. He had quit school, virtually left home and seemed to be living a Walter Mitty life. It was all remarkably similar to what Connie had gone through, except that there was no baby on the way.
Quentin’s shyness with women was noticed by some individuals at the James Best School, although he did become good friends with a number of the female students on a brother/sister level. One of his best pals was Brenda Hillhouse, who went on to get a role in Pulp Fiction as Butch’s mother. There was also Brenda Peters and Jack Lucarelli’s wife Jena. But once class ended, Quentin tended to hang out only with Craig Hamann, Rick Squery and, when he wanted a quieter evening, Rich Turner.
Hamann took Quentin on all sorts of eye-opening adventures. One time they decided to visit the so-called Boy’s Town gay district on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, where many of the bars served very cheap drinks and featured big-screen TVs. Quentin had just had both ears pierced and tended to alternate the ear he wore a ring in. At that time, it was believed by many that gay men wore a ring in the right ear as a low-key signal. (Current fashion has since completely overtaken this.) Quentin made a point of wearing his earring in the heterosexual left ear.
Quentin was terrified when he first got to the edge of Boy’s Town. Craig had one or two gay friends and they had taken him to the bars before, so he talked him through what it would be like.
Both Hamann and Quentin are devout heterosexuals, but at such establishments they could sip cut-price booze and watch continuous MTV music videos, featuring innovative camera techniques that fascinated both would-be film makers.
The two friends wandered into one hostelry called Revolver, settled down with a beer each and started watching the big screen TV hanging from the ceiling. Inevitably, a group of men began bothering them and Quentin ‘got a bit freaked out’.
Hamann and Quentin then headed out towards Rage, on the corner of San Vincente and Santa Monica. Rage was an even more sexually heated establishment where another group of guys came on so strongly that the two friends abandoned their plans to have a beer and headed east on Santa Monica Boulevard for one of the straighter hostelries. But Quentin was never angry about having been taken to Boy’s Town. He simply stored a vivid picture of it in his memory, knowing that one day he might use the experience as the basis for a scene in a movie. Everything that happened to him could one day be used in his movies.
Some nights, Quentin and Hamann would go to the tatty World Movie Theatre on the gritty, eastern end of Hollywood Boulevard, near where it crossed Gower. There the two friends saw Jack Nicholson in the Tony Richardson-directed movie, The Border, an interesting film about an LA cop who joins the border patrol in El Paso and gets caught up in squalor, violence and double-dealing. Quentin was particularly impressed by one of the supporting cast, Harvey Keitel. Less than ten years later, the actor would play a very significant role in getting Quentin’s career on the road.
The World Movie Theatre was a bit like a home from home for Quentin because many of the patrons were either drunk or high on drugs, just as they had been at the Pussycat. In the back three rows, at least a dozen noisy black pimps would be discussing the previous evening’s takings.
On one occasion, Quentin – by now infected with Hamann’s short temper – boldly turned around to tell one of the noisier clientele, ‘Would you please keep it down?’
The reply was somewhat predictable. ‘Fuck you, asshole.’
Quentin exploded and leapt over the rickety seat and was about to take a swing at the man when a voice backed down.
‘Sorry, man. No problem.’
All that training at the Pussycat porno theatre was at last coming in useful.
Meanwhile Hamann and Quentin were continuing to build up reputations as troublemaking know-alls at the James Best Acting School. They both felt they knew more than their teachers, but it was Hamann who regularly got up and told people like Jack Lucarelli exactly what he thought of them. Quentin, more than 11 years younger, would smile and nod his head in agreement. But he was too bright to stand up and be counted.
Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night’
Bette Davis in All About Eve, 1950
ELDERGLEN LANE, HARBOR CITY, LOS ANGELES, SUMMER 1981
As Quentin’s eyes panned around the tiny, one-bedroom apartment, a vast jumbo jet thundered just a few hundred feet overhead. He turned to the sweaty, smelly, fat, balding landlord and said, ‘It’s perfect. I’ll take it.’ At last, he had broken the umbilical cord. All those stop-and-search operations in his bedroom in Torrance had taken their toll.
Quentin had assured Connie he would not move a long way. He had settled for the rougher, tougher area of Harbor City, just a few miles from her home and even closer to the main runway at LA Airport. Within days of moving in, Quentin installed his own telephone – the ultimate evidence of his coming of age. He was so proud of his newfound independence he even insisted on having his full name printed in the local phone directory.
‘Quint Tarantino. 1138, Elderglen Lane, Harbor City. 530 1063,’ read the 1981 South Bay phone book. At that time, everyone knew him as Quint and he was trying to drop Zastoupil as his last name, even though he never took any legal steps to revert to Tarantino.
After two years at the James Best Acting School Quentin grew bored and quit, although he made a point of keeping