After the critical acclaim and box-office success of his second film, 1994's "Pulp Fiction," director Quentin Tarantino was hailed as the patron saint of American cinema, a video-store-clerk-turned-filmmaker whose singular, edgy vision provided an alternative--if not an antidote--to Hollywood mediocrity.
Mixing comedic pop culture riffs with snappy dialogue and graphically stylized violence, the director created his own genre and was hoisted on a pedestal here and abroad. Shortly after "Pulp Fiction" was released, it overtook Dennis Potter's "The Singing Detective" to become the best-selling screenplay in British publishing history. When Tarantino submitted to an on-stage interview at London's National Film Theatre, 3,000 ticket applications arrived from members alone. "Pulp Fiction"--an $8-million film that took in $210 million worldwide--brought with it the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or and an Oscar for best original screenplay. With only two complete films to his credit, the director has been profiled in three full-length biographies.
Then, last year, things turned. Apart from directing an episode of TV's "ER" and a segment of the aimless 1995 film "Four Rooms," he was never behind the camera. Instead, there was the blaxploitation film retrospective he hosted in Nottingham, England; those critically panned performances in forgettable films such as "Destiny Turns On the Radio" and "Girl 6"; a co-starring stint as Margaret Cho's boyfriend on an episode of "All-American Girl"; and a poorly received guest host shot on "Saturday Night Live."
After watching that show, New York Times film writer Caryn James compared the director to the Man Who Came to Dinner, wondering when he planned to go home. "How did so talented a director go into overload so fast?" she wrote. "Paradoxically, by acting as if he really did only have 15 minutes of fame, he provoked a career backlash that didn't have to happen."
For those impatient for a major offering from the peripatetic Tarantino, there's news on the horizon: He's writing an adaptation of crime novelist Elmore Leonard's 1992 "Rum Punch"--the story of a Palm Beach gunrunner who hooks up with an ex-con in a money-laundering scheme--that Miramax Films co-chair Harvey Weinstein "is 90% sure" Tarantino will start directing in January. By following up a monster hit with a smaller-scale film ("Rum Punch" will be made for about $5 million), Tarantino is diffusing the pressure--consciously or not, heeding the advice of the venerable John Ford.
