ONCE UPON A TIME
IN HOLLYWOOD,
STARS WOULD FADE,FALL, AND BURN
OUT. BUT WITH HIS9TH FILM, AN EPIC
TALE OF CHANGINGTIMES IN AMERICA,
QUENTIN TARANTINO’SCREATIVE STAR STILL
SHINES BRIGHTBY MAX WEINSTEINHE FIRST TIME Quentin Tarantino
and I connect, he offers me an apology.
“I’m not trying to be flaky,” he insists,
in a tenor that’s instantly recognizable—
a disarming blend of politeness and pushi-
ness that he’s patented over the course of
his nearly three decades in the public eye.
He’s caught me on my homeward-bound drive from the
MovieMaker office during West L.A.’s golden hour, not
long after I’d asked his team for some reassurance that our
fourth scheduled attempt to share a conversation would at
last be successful. And reassurance I got: Here he was com-
mitting to a time to talk of my choosing, his vow via speak-
erphone hijacking my car stereo airwaves that had, just
a few fitting moments ago, been bumping the surf-inflected
jams of a Japanese psychedelic band that might’ve been cut
from one of his films’ signature soundtracks.
Twenty-seven years after unleashing Reservoir Dogs,
his audacious 1992 debut, Tarantino maintains a foothold
in an ever-shrinking class of auteurs who can still com-
fortably be called “marquee” in this modern moviemaking
era. While the so-called possessory credit—top billing of
a director’s authorship with those booming words, “A Film
By”—has fallen in and out of fashion over the years since
D.W. Griffith first used it to promote The Birth of a Nation
in 1915, studio heads understand that of those select
behind-the-camera stars’ names that warrant its usage,
Tarantino’s is an unquestionably bankable brand.
It’s a brand ubiquitous enough to spawn untold imitators,
polarizing enough to ignite opponents’ “love it or hate it”
debate du jour, and distinct enough that it inspires fierce
consumer commitment. His 1994 sophomore feature,
Pulp Fiction, is a masterclass in non-linear narrative, mad
dialogue, stylized violence and world-building whose influ-
ences on modern art are redundant when recited. His third
feature, 1997’s Jackie Brown, refined those aesthetic trade-
marks with a matured approach to characterization.
From there, a new branding exercise emerged: Starting with
Kill Bill, his action epic released in two parts in 2003 and
2004, Tarantino began numbering each new addition to his
canon: “The 4th Film By Quentin Tarantino,” followed by
“The 5th,” his manic, muscle car exploitation homage,
Death Proof, in 2007; “The 6th,” his historical revisionist
World War II tale, Inglourious Basterds, in 2009; “The 7th,”T
HOLLYWOOD^
ENDING
his slavery-set spaghetti western,
Django Unchained, in 2012; and “The 8th,”
his snowbound whodunit The Hateful Eight,
in 2015. Sure, the gimmick exposes his inner-
marketer, but it’s also a measure of how confi-
dent he is that fellow moviemakers, critics, and
audiences care enough to keep count with him.
And that is why, in the wake of Tarantino’s
break from The Weinstein Company in 2017,
Sony Pictures chairman Tom Rothman and co.
threw the farm at him, promising a $90 mil-
lion production budget and final cut to make
“The 9th Film From Quentin Tarantino”:
Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood. A source
from The Hollywood Reporter suggested it
may have to earn four times that budget
internationally to break even. But in this age58 SUMMER 2019 MOVIEMAKER.COM