Ticket 2 Ride

I stumbled onto this book late one night when searching the library online books.

Cinema Speculation (2022, HarperCollins) is a damn fine read. I greatly respect Quentin Tarantino as a filmmaker, although I hate most of his films. Hate is a strong term: I don’t enjoy many of his films, including the Kill Bill films, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. I have learned to like several of his films, the best being Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (which I’ve written about). It’s his style of displaying of violence that turns me off.

Tarantino is a smart storyteller. I found Cinema Speculation to be a great dig into 1970s American cinema. He writes about these films as he saw them as a kid: big, loud, in your face; and many of them as half of a double-feature. Anyone remember those? You can still catch those at the drive-in theater, if you can find one.

Films we see as kids generally leave a huge impression on us. We might not recall a film in great detail from way back then, but we remember enough about the experience and what about that movie made us laugh/scared/cry/cheer. The light from the movie projector enters our memory bank through our eyes, searing those characters and scenes to our brains. Those film moments are not dissected or analyzed, they are felt and embraced, making them the strongest kind of raw memory.

This book covers the period 1968 to 1980 when young Tarantino watched a lot of films at the Tiffany Theater in Los Angeles. He would visit other theaters as well. “By 1976, I would be venturing on my own to a mostly black theatre called the Carson Twin Cinema in Carson, California, which is where I would catch up on all the Blaxploitation and kung fu film classics I’d missed in the earlier part of the decade.”

Tarantino saw a lot of films that were unsuitable for someone his age. The violence, sex and deep-dive into adult themes did not seem to ruin him, rather, it fueled his love for the film medium and appreciation for the art of filmmaking. I can relate to wanting to see those films that pushed boundaries, were the talk of the critics, and were creating a cultural shift.

Most of the book’s chapters center on a particular film, but that’s only the starting point for a discussing other films, actors and directors who somehow Tarantino associates with that film. He asks the question: what if so and so had directed the film instead, or why this actor was chosen over someone else. Actually, the digging Tarantino does in his vast knowledge of films connects dots I would never had thought about.

These were the years that Hollywood changed the kind of films being made, in response to a changing America. The group of filmmakers making the most exciting films were the group that included Spielberg, Lucas, Bogdanovich, Scorsese, Coppola, etc. A new wave of filmmakers: those young punks associated with film schools.

Films of the early 1970s more than challenged morals and attitudes – the film experience changed. Moviegoers would leave the theater shaking their heads, confused, shaken, and often disappointed. It was the era of unhappy or tragic ending.

“In a Hollywood that had forsaken the Old Hollywood happy ending as bullshit propaganda from ‘the Man’. When the senseless death of your hero at the climax was the vogue (Easy Rider, The New Centurions, Electra Glide in Blue, Hustle). When even popular audience movies like Three Days of the Condor counted on a certain amount of cynicism and paranoia from the popcorn eaters. The closest thing to a feel-good movie in the early seventies was revenge films.”

Apparently, the most influential Hollywood film seems to be The Searchers. Tarantino repeatedly returns to this film when discussing other filmmakers. “After Who’s That Knocking at My Door and Boxcar Bertha and Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, Scorsese finally got John Ford and The Searchers out of his system.” Then Tarantino goes on to talk about Paul Schrader’s Hardcore, staring George C. Scott, searchers for his runaway daughter in the cesspool of Los Angeles.

I’ve seen The Searchers and I had no idea the film was so influential. In The Searchers, Ford tells the story of John Wayne’s character searching for young Natalie Wood, who was stolen by Native Americans who raided her family’s farmstead. Many undercurrents thread through The Searchers, issues mined years later by filmmakers who feasted on such films as kids. In a nutshell, this is what Cinema Speculation is about- the films Tarantino feasted on.

Tarantino spent many afternoons and evenings at the Tiffany, sometimes with his single mother, other times in the company of her husband, boyfriend or just friend; a male figure providing some adult context to the experience. In fact, one such adult companion was Floyd, a friend of his mother. Tarantino explains that this vagabond character actually was a bigger influence than he imagined. “But even more influential than any one script was having a man trying to be a screenwriter living in my house. Him writing, him talking about his script, me reading it, made me consider for the first time writing movies. The reason I knew how to even format a screenplay was from reading Floyd’s screenplays. It would be a long road-from that year of 1978 to me completing my first feature length screenplay – True Romance – in September 1987.”

Tarantino and I part ways on some of his choices, but I can see the influences in certain films he later made. “In the sweltering hot Texas summer of ’73, on a threadbare budget in four weeks, with a crew of Texas locals, filmmaker Tobe Hooper fucked around and made one of the greatest movies of all time, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. To me, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the few perfect movies ever made. There are very few perfect movies. This is okay, since in the pursuit of cinematic art, perfection shouldn’t be the goal. Nevertheless, when it’s accomplished (even by accident), it’s an achievement.” I don’t care for this film or the whole evolution of Halloween, Freddy, chainsaw and other slasher-type films. I see no redeeming value in these films, not even quality filmmaking. Give me The Exorcist or Psycho instead.

I did enjoy Tarantino’s homage to such filmmakers as Don Siegel, known primarily for his association with Clint Eastwood, but who make many tough, crime films. Tarantino quotes from Siegel’s memoirs, which interested me enough to track down a copy to read. Directors like Siegel get lost in the discussion of influential films and filmmakers who cut the path for those who came later. Tarantino is doing the same for others to follow him.