Cinema Speculation (Web Exclusive)
by Quentin Tarantino. New York: HarperCollins, 2022. 391 pp., illus. Hardcover: $28.00, E-book: $17.99 and Digital Audio: $27.99.

Reviewed by Charles Maland

Quentin Tarantino burst onto the movie scene for many viewers in 1994 with the release of Pulp Fiction, a blend of complex suspenseful narrative, witty pop-culture-saturated dialogue, and an alternating mix of comedy and violence. A hit at Sundance, it was released by Miramax and grossed over $100 million at the box office on a budget of under $9 million, and Tarantino’s status as a writer-director was secured. Some viewers had already seen Reservoir Dogs (1992), and since then Tarantino has directed seven more genre-inflected films—Jackie Brown (Blaxploitation, 1997). Kill Bill, Volumes 1 and 2 (martial arts, 2003 and 2004), Inglourious Basterds (war film, 2009), Django Unchained (a “Southern”—Tarantino’s term—2012), The Hateful Eight (Western, 2015), and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (comedy/drama rooted in TV Westerns and the Manson story, 2019). After publishing a novelization of the most recent film, Tarantino turned to a book on movies from the 1970s that shaped his tastes and his subsequent career as a writer-director, calling it Cinema Speculation.

The book is an eclectic, lively, and sometimes breathless blend of topics. The opening and closing sections offer a memoir of the youthful Tarantino’s moviegoing experiences in Los Angeles theaters in the Seventies and of Tarantino’s memories of Floyd Wilson, who lived for a year and a half during that decade with Tarantino, his mother, and two other women, and whose love of movies inspired the young Quentin.  

Between these essays lie fifteen more sections, each of which has a title, some simply the title of a film (like “The Getaway” or “Rolling Thunder”), some announcing a peripheral topic (“Second-String Samurai,” an appreciation of Los Angeles Times genre critic Kevin Thomas), and some on movie history topics (“The New Hollywood in the Seventies”). Almost every chapter, though, contains references to many films, highlighting Tarantino’s encyclopedic knowledge of movies and directors during the period, particularly of the film genres that he watched in LA movie theaters growing up (Tarantino was born in 1963) or caught up with later as video stores started making titles available.

There is no doubt that Tarantino’s movie passions and career have been shaped by an unusual childhood. We learn in the opening section, “Little Q Watching Big Movies,” that early on he attended what many parents would have considered age-inappropriate movies: an account of a 1970 double feature of Joe and Where’s Poppa? he saw at age seven reveals that, although Quentin was creeped out by the hippies’ apartment in Joe, he fell asleep before the final blood bath. Awoken after it ended, he engaged right away when George Segal, dressed in a gorilla costume, was punched in the groin in Where’s Poppa? We learn that his mother and stepfather (and, after her divorce, her boyfriends) took him to many movies as long as he followed two rules: do not be a pain in the ass and do not ask stupid questions during the movie. Reflecting on the effect of this unusual experience, Tarantino feels that seeing all these movies at such an early age gave him a chance to see how adults acted when kids were not around—what they found funny, what they liked to do, how they socialized.

As portrayed in the section, “Little Q” seems like a precocious child, even asking his mother why she allowed him to go violent films like The French Connection (1971), The Wild Bunch (1969), and The Godfather (1972), films his peers were forbidden to see. She replied, “Quentin, I worry more about you watching the news. A movie’s not going to hurt you.” Her son approved, and he said he could handle the violence of the films because he understood the story. Surprisingly, a sequence in Isadora (1968) that deeply disturbed him was when the Vanessa Redgrave character died when her scarf got tangled in the wheel of the car. (Amusingly, Tarantino recounts that his mother calmed his fears by saying she would never let him wear a scarf in a convertible.) The chapter ends with Tarantino’s memory of seeing Black Gunn (1972), starring Jim Brown, with his mother’s Black boyfriend Reggie. In a telling comment, Tarantino says he has “never been the same,” and has spent the rest of his life “trying to re-create the experience of watching a brand-new Jim Brown film, on a Saturday night, in a Black cinema in 1972.”

Between the bookend memoir accounts, Tarantino provides sections on Steve McQueen and Bullitt (1968), Dirty Harry (1971), Deliverance (1972), The Getaway (1972), The Outfit (1973), a tribute to critic Kevin Thomas, an overview of “the New Hollywood” in the Seventies, De Palma and Sisters (1973), Bogdanovich and Daisy Miller (1974), Scorsese and Taxi Driver (1976), a speculative section on how Taxi Driver would have been different had De Palma directed it, Rolling Thunder (1977), Stallone and Paradise Alley (1978), Don Siegel and Escape from Alcatraz (1979), Paul Schrader and Hardcore (1979), and Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse (1981). Many of the chapters are auteurist tributes, often placing the film in the context of the director’s career, although at times Tarantino is equally interested in performers he admires, such as Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, and Sylvester Stallone, as well as several of the character actors that populate these films. And given the subsequent evolution of Tarantino’s career as a screenwriter and director, it is not surprising that the films lean heavily toward the male action genre. (Daisy Miller is the exception that proves the rule.)

The list would seem quirky for a reader interested in getting an overview of Hollywood movies of the late 1960s and 1970s. That reader would be better off looking at books by Peter Biskind, Peter Lev, and Jonathan Kirshner, among others, to find that broader view. On the other hand, the films Tarantino chooses to focus on tell us a lot about how his early moviegoing experiences shaped his interests and tastes, and influenced the kinds of films he has made. And he writes about the films with the enthusiasm that we would expect from a self-confessed movie geek who in turn has become a Hollywood insider.

Many of the films Tarantino celebrates end with climactic violence, and we know how his own films have often drawn gorily from that well. It is evident from the book that Tarantino also admires films that intersperse a comic tone with the violence, and that blend has become a trademark in Tarantino’s own movies. As Jeremy Carr has put it so well, while “this complex balance of frequently off-color humor and shocking violence is a recurrent Tarantino motif that many find adroit, just as many find it inappropriate at best.” Now that I’ve read this book, when I think of the shootout and annihilation of the plantation at the end of Django Unchained or the gun fight and flamethrower scene at the end of Once Upon a Time In Hollywood—there are more examples—I’ll remember Tarantino’s comment that ever since he saw the ending of Black Gunn as a nine-year-old, he’s been trying to recreate what he felt in that initial screening.

Some parts of the book are stronger than others. The general account of New Hollywood had slippery categories and has been treated in more detail and with greater clarity by film historians. That chapter contained lists of films and filmmakers that did not always seem to go together. The Last Picture Show (1971), for example, is grouped with American Graffiti (1973), Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) as films that were “cut for maximum audience enjoyment.” The melancholy tone and isolated characters in Last Picture Show separate the film from the others, even if the editing aims at conventional coherence. Similarly, to name just two, the celebrations of The Outfit and Rolling Thunder encouraged me to look at each film again, but neither seemed to me as strong as Tarantino contends.

On the other hand, his discussions of the Don Siegel­–Clint Eastwood collaborations in Dirty Harry and Escape from Alcatraz are insightful, entertaining, and convincing. Tarantino especially prizes the meticulous escape plan in the latter film. As he writes, “the qualities involved in the escape—discipline, skill, intelligence, talent, daring—could equally apply to Siegel’s technique in depicting the escape.” (One wonders if Tarantino is also listing the qualities he aspires to in his own films.) I also liked his extended discussion of Taxi Driver. He not only explores the ways in which the film draws and comments on Ford’s The Searchers (1956), but he also places it in the cultural context of what he calls “revengeamatics” (vengeance movies emerging after the popularity of Charles Bronson’s Death Wish in 1974), examines the changes to the original screenplay, and speculates on how the film might have been different had it been directed by De Palma.

Cinema Speculation is an entertaining journey through Tarantino’s youthful moviegoing experiences. It has a Hollywood insider’s feel, as when he reports that after seeing Reservoir Dogs (1992), Brian De Palma told him, “Quentin, don’t get too esoteric with your subject matter. If you want to be allowed to keep making movies, you’ve got to give them a Carrie every once in a while.” De Palma encouraged him to make films rooted in popular genres, and time has shown that Tarantino heeded that advice as his career has evolved. And thirty years later, he is still making films. As time passes, I think this book’s importance as a commentary on 1970s American movies will fade, but it will become an even more important self-portrait of the director as a young man.

Charles Maland is Professor Emeritus of the University of Tennessee, author of books on Frank Capra and Charlie Chaplin and editor of James Agee’s Movie Reviews and Criticism.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVIII, No. 4