Perhaps it is genius at work, an audible whir, evidence of synapses plying their magic in a West Hollywood apartment complex. The junk mail in the front hallway suggests this scenario could be true: "Quentin Tarantino or Current Resident."
"I'm in the kitchen!"
FOR THE RECORD
Los Angeles Times Sunday October 2, 1994 Home Edition Calendar Page 91 Calendar Desk 3 inches; 81 words Type of Material: Correction
Palme d'Or--A Sept. 11 article about director Quentin Tarantino incorrectly reported the number of American films that have won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. As reader Steve Barr points out, 13 American films have won or shared the honor: "Marty" (1955), "Friendly Persuasion" (1957), "MASH" (1970), "Scarecrow" (1973), "The Conversation" (1974), "Taxi Driver" (1976), "All That Jazz" (1980), "Missing" (1982), "Paris, Texas" (1984), "sex, lies and videotape" (1989), "Wild at Heart" (1990), "Barton Fink" (1991) and Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" this year.
It is here that he lives, 31 years old and a legendary filmmaker with just a pair of movies--"Reservoir Dogs," his 1992 cult hit, and now "Pulp Fiction," the winner of this year's Palme d'Or at Cannes. Already he is the stuff of myth and currently at work--over a blender.
"I'm on this diet," Tarantino sings out over the whirring, slinging a fistful of ice. "I've already lost 12 pounds."
Even the diet, penance for a lifetime's devotion to Denny's, Tarantino imbues with his own zealous stamp. "It's the best because you make it with any kind of diet soda," he says, cracking a Mountain Dew, dumping its tell-tale luridness and a packet of mysterious pink powder into the icy slush. The blender glows like neon.
"God," he says, snapping off the machine, pouring himself a glass and holding it aloft to admire his creation. "I would never go on anything disgusting like Slim-Fast."
It is, to be sure, a fine distinction but indicative of the deep idiosyncratic taste that has propelled Tarantino into the proverbial forefront of a new generation of filmmakers. With his playwright's ear for dialogue and penchant for violent, structurally complex narratives, the self-taught director--a former video store clerk and high school dropout from the South Bay area--has parlayed a fan's fascination with pop culture into one of the most promising and controversial film careers going, a move that he describes almost disingenuously: "I'm a guy who makes movies you either like or you don't."
That divisiveness certainly attended his debut film, "Reservoir Dogs," a stylish, low-budget crime drama about a jewelry heist gone awry that both mocked and exploited the genre's conventions with its "Rashomon" narrative techniques. After sweeping through the Toronto, Sundance and Cannes festivals, the film earned Tarantino comparisons to Sam Peckinpah and Martin Scorsese. In the words of one producer, "It was the best film debut in 25 years." Like the other young, culturally diverse directors to whom he was initially compared--John Singleton, Gus Van Sant and Abel Ferrara--Tarantino had arrived with an agenda: to revive and personalize an art form he saw as more than due for generational overhaul. As a post-baby boomer raised on a cultural diet of videotape movies, MTV and "reality-based" tabloid news shows, the filmmaker brought a puckishly postmodernist sensibility as well as a \o7 cineaste's\f7 rigorous aesthetic evident not only in "Reservoir Dogs" but also in his scripts for last year's "True Romance," directed by Tony Scott, and "Natural Born Killers," Oliver Stone's controversial drama, which opened last month.
