Quentin Tarantino - The Man, The Myths and the Movies. Wensley Clarkson
to interfere with his long-term acting ambitions. He needed something with a decent rate of pay, especially since
Connie was nagging him to get a good job and ‘start living in the real world’. Somehow Quentin landed himself a $1,200-a-month job as a headhunter for a company that had numerous clients in the aerospace industry. When Connie heard the news she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
‘He knew nothing whatsoever about the aerospace industry, yet he had got this job picking prospective employees. It was ridiculous,’ she recalls.
In fairness to Quentin, he was equally bemused to find himself having to go to work every day in a suit and tie. He even managed to adopt a corporate air that he maintained impressively at his office each morning.
‘What d’you know about the aerospace industry, Quint?’ Connie asked him when he told her about his new, serious job.
‘Not a lot, Mom. But it’s cool. I thought you’d be pleased.’
Quentin’s slick new job did nothing to water down his enthusiasm for movies. Indeed, he could now afford to buy himself a VCR machine, something he considered more important than anything else in his apartment besides the phone. With a VCR Quentin could greatly increase his consumption of movies. Instead of seeing five or six films a week at local movie theatres, he could easily watch double that amount. It would have been difficult for girlfriends to enter the equation at this time.
This new obsession with videos led him to investigate the local video stores with great interest. The video boom had been slow in coming to the United States and in the early 1980s the number of outlets was still very limited. While Britain already had the highest per capita proportion of VCR-users in the world, Americans somehow managed to resist the temptation to watch big-screen epics in the comfort of their own homes. Going to the local drive-in or movie theatre had been a part of the American way of life for more than 40 years and there was a certain reluctance to embrace the new technology.
However, self-confessed movie addicts like Quentin Tarantino were not interested in tradition. His only priority was to see as many movies as possible and the VCR was a godsend in that respect. But Quentin faced a problem when it came to finding a well-stocked video store in Harbor City, a community made up of small mini-suburbs on the edge of the Los Angeles port area (which consisted of vast warehouses and expanses of wasteland).
Eventually he heard about a specialist store called Video Archives, on Sepulveda Boulevard in the nearby community of Hermosa Beach. By this time the proud owner of a battered Honda hatchback, Quentin was more than happy to make the twenty-minute drive from his apartment to Video Archives if they really stocked a good selection of videos. He was not disappointed.
When Quentin walked into the store, located in a 1960s mini-shopping mall close to a busy intersection, he found the place stacked high with obscure movies from all over the world. Quentin knew the only way he was going to learn about film-making was through watching movies. The good, the bad, the ugly – it didn’t matter what movies he watched. Each one would be a learning experience. This store was like a dream come true.
Over the next few months, Quentin became one of Video Archives’ most regular customers. He got to know the owners and the clerks. They were all such cool people. They didn’t hassle you if you were a day or two late returning a video and they actually seemed to know something about the films they were renting out. Some nights Quentin would hang out at the store for two or three hours, caught up in discussions about movies. He started burying himself in so many videos that he rarely left the apartment apart from going to work.
It was at Video Archives that Quentin became particularly friendly with an equally knowledgeable clerk called Roger Avary, although they seemed to be approaching the art of film-making from entirely different directions. By now dressed entirely in black, driving his clapped-out Honda Civic and dining mainly at such fast-food emporiums as Pollo Loco and Jack in the Box, Quentin fitted the role of movie geek to perfection.
In fact, Avary and Quentin did not hit it off that well to start with, because they were constantly trying to compete with each other in the movie knowledge stakes. However, Avary eventually conceded that Quentin’s encyclopaedic memory had him beat, after which they became very good friends. Avary was a friendly, sincere person who had spent a bit of time in Europe and seemed very worldly to Quentin, who found that arguing with Avary about certain movies was in many ways more enjoyable than actually watching them.
Over the following few months they built up a strong rapport and Quentin would often stay in the store to watch whatever movie they were showing on the big-screen monitor hanging from the ceiling. Eventually, when one of the clerks left, Avary persuaded owners Lance Lawson and Dennis Humbert to offer Quentin a job at Archives. Quentin was delighted, even though he was taking a vast cut in wages, as he knew it would provide him with endless free movie rentals.
His only concern was Connie. He knew she would be bitterly disappointed that he had quit his safe, responsible position as a headhunter.
‘But, Mom, that job wasn’t me and you know it,’ he later told Connie when trying to break the news gently that he had swapped a $1,200-a-month job for one worth $4 an hour, plus unlimited free video rentals.
Connie was naturally concerned. She couldn’t really understand why Quentin was leaving his job. But then she had always encouraged him to be a free spirit, and now she was paying t he price.
Quentin saw the job at Video Archives as a golden opportunity. Most people would have gone into it half-heartedly, planning to work there for a few months and then quit. But to Quentin this was a chance to work as an unofficial movie critic, to get to see as many movies as was humanly possible and to be paid in the process. What more could he ask?
He had always kept his outgoings low because he had been nursing a secret ambition to try and make his own movie some day. Now that very attitude was going to enable him to take a job at Video Archives, a job he would relish and use to further his own knowledge and understanding of films. Other richer, more academic kids might be heading for film school, but Quentin had found his own version on his doorstep.
Quentin soon got into his stride at Video Archives. He and the other clerks, including Roger Avary, started running thematic selections of certain films each week in the store.
The first collaboration between Quentin and Avary was a package called ‘Feed Your Head’, a homage to drug pictures. Another week it would be a Sam Fuller season, swashbucklers the next, then screwball comedies and so on. The movies of Hong Kong director John Woo began to spark more interest than the latest Disney or Bond adventure, and work by New Wave masters like Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer were heavily promoted by Quentin and Avary. At one point Quentin mistakenly thought film-maker Akira Kurosawa had died and offered a package of his movies for a week. His favourite selection, however, was ‘Women in Prison’.
When the Archives clerks ran a ‘Heist’ week, one of the movies was The Killing, directed by Stanley Kubrick. Quentin loved it. He saw it as a young man’s movie and was impressed by the way it broke all the usual rules. The fractured story-line took one of the criminal’s roles in a race-track heist up to a certain stage of the raid, then turned the clock back and hooked the audience into the fortunes and misfortunes of another hoodlum. The memory of that movie would one day inspire him to write Reservoir Dogs, the film that launched his career.
The atmosphere in the store, according to customers and staff alike, was unique. Instead of a place where people quietly browsed through the shelves looking for something that took their fancy, there would be constant yells of ‘Got any Italian exploitation movies?’ or ‘Can you recommend a pre-1950 horror flick with a lot of sex in it?’ or ‘What’s the name of that movie where Kirk Douglas plays a submarine commander?’.
Gradually, owners Lawson and Humbert spent less and less time in the store. Instead they would appoint one of the clerks as manager-of-the-week and make them responsible for opening and closing the premises each day.
Although he enjoyed discussing the finer points of French New Wave, Quentin still occasionally found himself having