Quentin Tarantino - The Man, The Myths and the Movies. Wensley Clarkson
Quentin had the same attitude towards movies. He loved to see them at least four or five times if possible. When Curt took him to see It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World they arrived 15 minutes after the film had started, so they stayed to see the first 15 minutes of the next showing. Quentin was amazed to discover that for the same admission price, he could sit and watch a movie over and over again. ‘When I’m an adult and I go to the movies, I’m gonna watch it four times,’ he promised himself.
One bizarre result of this self-education was that in 1972, when he was still just nine, he wrote a moving story dedicated to his mother to celebrate Mother’s Day. Connie was understandably touched as she began to read the two-page essay which featured an adult Quentin reminiscing about his childhood; how strict his mother had been; how much she had nagged him and run the house with a rod of iron. Connie was concerned but understood that it was good for her son to get his feelings off his chest and it was all so well constructed. Connie proudly read on, even though the piece was littered with spelling mistakes.
Then she got to the last section of the story. Quentin revealed that his mother had died. He wrote that he felt very bad about her death but…
Connie was stunned. She sat and read the final passage over and over again just to make sure she had read it correctly. But there was no doubting it. She looked up at her nine-year-old son who was looking sideways at her, almost as if he wanted a reaction.
‘You don’t really mean it, do you, Quentin?’
Quentin shrugged. ‘Of course not, Mom. I feel real bad about it, but that’s just the way the story turned out. You’re still the greatest mom, even if you had to die.’
The following year, on Mother’s Day, Quentin wrote an even more superbly constructed essay, and guess who had to die in the final sentence…
Throughout his childhood, Quentin had an aversion to being in school photos. He would somehow go missing on the day that such pictures were scheduled and Connie does not have a single school photo of her son.
By all accounts he did not enjoy most aspects of his education. However, life at home in those early years was very different and Quentin was delighted to have his picture taken with grown-ups. When posing with other children, he seemed only mildly interested in them, but when posing in a shot with adults, he came alive.
Quentin developed an obsession with passport photo booths and was forever nagging Connie to let him have his picture taken with Roger or Curt. A whole series of photos taken over a period of a couple of years show a happy, confident Quentin – very different from the diffident, solitary child he was at school.
These photo booth pictures show Quentin relaxed and clearly hamming it up for the camera. He was intrigued by the fact that a machine, rather than his own mother, was taking the photos.
Connie didn’t like the pictures because her son’s hair looked so terrible. Quentin actually cut his own hair from the age of five. On the first few occasions, Connie tried to convince her son to go to a barber’s shop. But in the end she gave up. She just wasn’t prepared to stifle a free spirit.
‘I want to be alone’
Greta Garbo, in Grand Hotel, 1932
TARZANA 6 MOVIE THEATRE, HARBOR CITY, SUMMER 1971
Quentin’s movie consumption as a small child continued to be rather unusual. By the age of eight he had developed a liking for grisly horror flicks. He adored Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, which was shown regularly at the one-dollar Saturday morning matinees and starred Lon Chaney Junior and Bela Lugosi (as the monster).
Quentin liked it even better when his horror heroes appeared with madcap comics in mixed-genre movies. Years later, he reflected on his early taste in typically Tarantino terms. ‘My first understanding of genre distinction in films came when I got real attached to Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. I loved that movie. It’s not like the way they do comedy films now. The fact is that the monster in that movie actually killed people.’
One particular scene, when the monster picked up an innocent nurse and killed her by throwing her out of the window, has stayed with Quentin his entire life. Seconds earlier he had been laughing helplessly at the antics of Abbott and Costello, then suddenly a murder was committed.
‘I remember thinking wow, because the scary parts are scary and the funny parts are really funny,’ he recalls.
Meanwhile Connie’s appetite for superhero comics was still outstripping her young son’s. She had grown particularly fond of the X-Men and, as Quentin grew up, their love of comics formed a useful bond between mother and son. They would spend hours discussing the relative virtues of the superheroes.
Connie also often found herself playing with Quentin’s toys rather than clearing them up in the evenings. Her son was contributing to her life in every way. She was still very much the child mother.
When Quentin was seven or eight years old, Connie regularly took him to nearby Disneyland and Knotts Berry Farm for days out. But the solitary child would wander amongst the crowds, not particularly interested in any of the rides, apart from Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean and Captain Nemo’s Submarines. These fantasy rides appealed more to the young Quentin than roller-coasters or river rapids.
The first time Connie took her young son on the Pirates, he seemed mesmerised from the moment they got into the tiny boat and it skimmed over the first steep waterfall down into the murky depths. Throughout the ten-minute ride in pitch blackness, Quentin did not utter a word, but when they emerged back into the glaring sunlight at the end Connie noticed that the little boy had wet himself with fear. ‘But he loved it and pleaded with me to take him back on it almost immediately,’ recalls Connie.
However, after a few more trips to the theme parks, Quentin abruptly asked Connie to stop taking him. He told her he was more interested in seeing the latest movies and eating fast food at the nearest McDonald’s or, if Connie felt like splashing out, at Denny’s.
This was a little odd but Connie was more concerned by Quentin’s performance at school. He showed little or no enthusiasm in the classroom, and he was extremely hyperactive. He was always rushing around waving his arms and shouting in class. Some of his teachers recognised this as a sign of superior intelligence, while others just found him tedious to deal with. These teachers tended to give up on him very quickly because he did not conform to the normal standards of behaviour. Today, Connie explains this hyperactivity by saying, ‘We are both pacers who tangle up the cords when we are on the phone. I was very hyper as a child and so was Quentin.’
But there were some very worrying reactions to Quentin’s hyperactivity at school. At first, his teachers questioned Connie closely about her son’s home life because they were convinced that something was happening there to make him behave so strangely. Once they were satisfied that this was not the case, Connie was advised at that time to get a doctor to put her son on a course of tranquillisers to ‘calm him down’, as some believed he was about to reach some kind of mental boiling point.
‘I refused point blank. How dare they suggest doping Quentin just because he was too damn intelligent for them to handle?’ is how Connie remembers her response.
At around this time, Quentin even took an IQ test and scored an exceptionally high mark of 160. The school examiners insisted that he take the test again because they could not believe the result. He scored another 160.
Quentin had major problems at school as he would not put any effort into anything he wasn’t totally interested in. His spelling was appalling